Staggering poll results: only 3% between Orbán’s Fidesz and the Tisza Party of Péter Magyar

Péter Magyar, the leader of the opposition Tisza Party, has rejected the accusation that his party was pro-war, arguing that Tisza was working to achieve peace in Ukraine and opposed weapons deliveries to the country.

In a statement on Friday, Magyar said his party had delivered humanitarian aid to a children’s hospital in Kyiv that had been bombed, while Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “did not even condemn the attack”. Meanwhile, he said, ruling Fidesz was sending Hungarian troops to civil war-torn Chad and building weapons, ammunition and tank factories “which would really be profitable in the event of a war”.

Magyar said recent polls had forced the prime minister “to say the name of the Tisza Party and its leader out loud for the first time” in his Friday morning radio interview. Based on Závecz, the difference between the Fidesz and the Tisza is only 3%, 300,000 votes. He accused Orbán of “lying” and “rambling” about an alliance between Tisza and the leftist Democratic Coalition, “when we have been working on closing the book on the Orbán -[DK leader Ferenc] Gyurcsány era from the beginning”.

Orbán lied

Magyar said Orbán had “lied” about a plan to topple the government from the outside, adding that his party had always stressed its rejection of any outside influence. “We will replace the Orbán government here, at home, with the unity of millions of Hungarians,” he said.

“Orbán also falsely claimed that Tisza would let in illegal migrants, when it was in the European Parliament that I last told him that we support a strict and consistent migration policy and keeping the southern border fence,” Magyar said.

The Tisza Party leader accused the government of having released 2,000 people smugglers from prisons, conducting dealings in residency bonds, “secretly building” a migrant camp near the western border, and bringing 60,000 “economic migrants” a year to Hungary.

“Orbán also claimed that they are the only ones protecting families,” he said. “But the reality is that while Fidesz pretends to be family-friendly, they have not raised the family allowance since 2008, they have abandoned families to the European record inflation rate they helped generate, introduced brutal energy price increases, are closing maternity wards outside the capital, are not doing anything to resolve the crisis of the health-care sector, and have gutted education.”

Birth rate at all-time-low

Magyar said this had forced almost a million Hungarians to try to make a living abroad, and the birth rate was at an all-time low. He insisted that Fidesz was “going downhill” and had “nothing left but a tsunami of lies, hate-mongering and appalling smear campaigns”. Magyar said the Tisza Party “will not stoop to Fidesz’s level”, vowing that they would continue to talk about the problems affecting Hungarians.

Magyar’s speech at demo ‘scandalous, false, unsavoury’, says Fidesz MEP

Csaba Dömötör, an MEP of ruling Fidesz, said on Friday that citing Hitler and calling employees of the public service media “Hitler’s students” at a recent demonstration was “scandalous, false and unsavoury” of Peter Magyar, an MEP and the leader of the opposition Tisza Party.

This kind of a behaviour is going against the EP’s rules and is a gross violation of office, he said on Facebook and urged calling back Magyar from the position of vice-president of the Constitutional Committee. Dömötör said that he had sent a letter to Roberta Metsola calling on the EP president “to take the necessary steps”.

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