Opposition pledges to curb public debt, inflation, corruption

The joint opposition alliance has pledged to curb public debt, inflation and corruption if it comes to power after the April 3 election. Addressing a joint press conference on Thursday, Jobbik vice-president Dániel Kárpát Z said “not only corruption is brutal”, public debt and its interests had also doubled since 2010. “Every single Hungarian spends 140,000 forints [EUR 396] a year on interests alone,” he said.

“The government’s hapless economic policy, bad debt management and the brutal corruption rate are suffocating the national economy,” he said.

Jácint Horváth of the Democratic Coalition called for steps “regarding the fortunes obviously gained by corruption over the past 12 years.” Property that has been clearly acquired through corruption should be seized, he said.

Zoltán Vajda of the Socialists said the central bank’s “totally discredited monetary policy had cost it the market’s trust”.

Inflation has skyrocketed, despite the bank’s efforts to fight it by raising interest,

he said. Meanwhile, the central bank should finance its losses “from the monies it had outsourced to foundations”, he said.

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Ruling Fidesz said in reaction that while the public debt had grown under the previous left-wing government, the current cabinet had set it on a downward trajectory.

“This is the same left that nearly doubled the public debt and sent it on a steep rise when it was in power,” the party said in a statement. Under Ferenc Gyurcsány’s premiership, the left crippled the country, pushed it to the brink of bankruptcy and they would not even have been able to pay out pensions, family subsidies or wages without a loan from the IMF and other expensive foreign currency-denominated loans, Fidesz said.

The alliance of Fidesz and the Christian Democrats, on the other hand, stabilised the country’s finances, set the economy on an upward and the public debt on a downward trajectory and paid back the loans taken up by the left, it added.

“The ones who now want to come back into power on the left are the same people who already led the country into ruin once,”

Fidesz said. “Hungary must move forward, not backwards.”

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Source: MTI