The Tisza Party does not intend to distance itself from the people after its election victory and will hit the road again, travelling across the country, the prime minister said in a speech before the start of Monday’s parliamentary session.
Citing recent survey figures, Magyar said his party now has some 4.5 million active supporters, adding that no party had enjoyed such a broad base of support since the change of system 36 years ago. He added that people had placed enormous trust in Tisza, but this also entailed enormous responsibility to ensure the party did not distance itself from the people and listened to them after Tisza’s election victory.
The prime minister said the nationwide tour will take them back to the smallest settlements, markets, railway stations, squares, and streets, where they will report on their work, listen to complaints about where the state is failing, and work with the people to define the tasks ahead.
Magyar urged Tisza Island members to prepare for joint work. Referring to the party’s grassroots organisations, he said: “We started with the Tisza Islands, we won together on April 12, and building a functional and humane Hungary can only succeed with them, with those millions of Hungarian people,” he said.
Interim President Forsthoffer: Sándor Palace to reopen for visits
The presidential Sandor Palace will reopen to visitors from 1 to 8 August, the speaker of parliament, exercising the powers of the president, announced on Monday on her Facebook page. Agnes Forsthoffer wrote that the building has “not only a romantic past but also a present rooted in its historical significance”, and encouraged visitors to explore the palace’s representative rooms with a guided tour. Visitors will also hear special chapters from the palace’s 220-year history, she added.
She noted that registration for the Open Doors programme series is available on the Sándor Palace website.
Registered visitors can tour the building’s representative rooms in early classicist style and get acquainted with its history, including the mysterious Roman sarcophagus, the enigmatic death of Prime Minister Pál Teleki, the behind-the-scenes secrets of the salons, and the mystical additional meanings of the furniture and statues, according to the website.
The programme is open to individual visitors or groups of up to 20 people (or 30 on August 8). If a registered group is smaller, it may be combined with other groups or individual visitors for the same tour, it added.
Goal to build ‘truly functional, humane’ country
The government is working to complete the ruling Tisza Party’s commitments to building “a truly functional and humane Hungary” in which “the everyday security, livelihood, and dignity” of citizens are ensured, PM Magyar said ahead of the agenda in parliament on Monday.
Concerning the government’s measures, the prime minister said VAT on prescription medications will be eliminated from Sept 1, adding that “there is no household in Hungary that the move will not affect.” Some 4 million people in Hungary regularly take prescription drugs “and many have been in a situation in which they had no money to buy the prescribed product.”
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Meanwhile, he said the government had launched a programme to assist some 400,000 children with a school-start aid of 100,000 forint (EUR 277) each. The government will also reduce VAT on firewood from 27 percent to 5 percent, because families heating their homes with wood were “left out of the previous government’s household utility price cap scheme“, the prime minister said.
“These measures are aimed at eliminating the injustice of oligarchs in the middle of Europe getting rich on the money snatched away from millions of Hungarians,” Magyar said.
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