Péter Magyar: ‘Fake national security review’ distracts as health and economy in ruins in Hungary

Péter Magyar, the leader of the Tisza party, on Monday lambasted the government’s “bogus national security review” which he said was an attempt to divert attention from growing grocery prices, failing heating systems in hospitals and “the railway system falling apart”.

Magyar: no heating in the hospitals, unbearable inflation

Magyar said in a statement that many hospitals were without heating, and children’s wards were no warmer than 15 C. Meanwhile, the price of flour has grown by 40 percent in a year, that of chocolate by 30 percent and the price of dairy products by 20 percent, he said. He said the rail line between Veszprém and Ajka, in western Hungary, renovated six years ago, had become life-threatening and had to be closed down for six months. In other places, trains cannot travel faster than 10kmh, he added.

“Public services are falling apart, and the state is not functional,”

he added. Meanwhile, “ridiculously, [Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán and others are trying to divert attention from all that by the well-worn method of panic-mongering.” “The government ranting about the threat of terrorism and launching a national security review has in past years directly interfered with the elections of other countries, let two thousand people smugglers go from prisons, invited the former president of Iran to Hungary in secret, allowed heads of state and government with outstanding arrest warrants to stay in the country, rejected the International Criminal Court’s ruling regarding the prime minister of Israel, set free an Azeri axe murderer, directly supported dictators, and sent Hungarian soldiers into zones of civil war,” Magyar said.

Government reacts

Péter Takács, the interior ministry’s state secretary for health care, said in response to the accusation that heating was failing at hospitals. “Magyar started another day with lies and fake news”. Tisza said that the heating had failed at the children’s traumatology ward at Szent János Hospital, but the heating is working there, Takács said on Facebook. The heating system of the entire hospital was revamped this year at a cost of 2.8 billion forints (EUR 6.8m), he said, and the post-reconstruction works would soon be over, “so not even that will inconvenience the sick children”. “Péter Magyar is lying constantly; about hospitals and anything else, without ever considering the consequences,” Takács said.

Magyar responded on Facebook that Takács “has no idea what’s going on in Hungarian hospitals”. The Szent László hospital in Budapest “has no heating, the waiting area for specialist treatments is 16 C, children are lying in their coats in bed on the immunology ward, and the situation is no better at the dialysis and wards.” The hospital’s central heating unit broke down a month ago, and staff were told that repair work would start in January, and “might work again by February”, Magyar said.