Budapest, July 28 (MTI) – The National Election Office (NVI) will not approve holding a national referendum on preventing the further sale of state-owned farmland because the opposition Socialist Party, which initiated the referendum, has failed to submit the required 200,000 valid supporting signatures, the deputy head of the office said late on Wednesday.

Krisztián Gáva told commercial television ATV that after reviewing 96 percent of the signatures submitted by the Socialists, 173,000 were ruled valid while 42,000 were found to be invalid. The NVI has about 10,000 more signatures to review, but even if all of them are found valid the party would still not have the required 200,000 signatures, he said.

The NVI will finish reviewing the signatures this week and will go back and check the ones that were deemed invalid during the first review, Gáva added.

He said that on Tuesday the NVI published all of its guidelines on reviewing the referendum signatures, as requested by the Socialists. He said the documents were never classified but because they are the NVI’s internal guidelines, the office could not reveal them to the Socialists immediately. Gáva said the reason why the NVI decided to publish the guidelines was because of recent statements in the press that questioned the office’s impartiality.

Socialist Party deputy leader Zoltán Gőgös reacted to Gáva’s remarks saying that the party disagrees with the election office’s methods for reviewing the signatures. He insisted that the party collected and submitted 200,000 valid signatures and said they will appeal the office’s decision.

Gőgös said the ruling Fidesz party “had already decided” that there will not be a national referendum on the sale of state-owned farmland. He accused the election office of counting the signatures “in a way that will thwart the referendum”.

He said it was “strange and suspicious” that almost a quarter of the signatures submitted were found to be invalid.

UPDATE:

The green opposition LMP said on Thursday that it was “genuinely shocked and saddened” to hear that there will not be enough valid signatures counted to hold the referendum. Lawmaker Benedek R Sallai said in a statement that the relatively high number of invalid signatures was “suspicious” and “raised questions”.

“The theft of state-owned land must be stopped by any means necessary,” he insisted.

R Sallai said his party would submit to parliament a bill aimed at protecting state assets. “Given that this government has crossed every moral boundary compared to its predecessors,” it seems timely to pass a law that will ban the sale of state-owned farmland, he said.

Budapest, June 28 (MTI) – A deputy leader of the opposition Socialists on Tuesday submitted over 200,000 signatures to the National Election Office (NVI) to initiate a national referendum on preventing the further sale of state-owned farmland.

The party has collected close to 240,000 signatures, well over the limit of 200,000 required by law for a nationwide referendum to be called by Hungary’s parliament, Zoltán Gőgös told a press conference at NVI’s headquarters in central Budapest. He thanked the opposition LMP, PM, Egyutt and Liberal parties, as well as independent lawmaker Zoltán Kész and trade unions for their help in collecting signatures.

The referendum will not only concern the issue of farmland sale but will be a vote “against ruling Fidesz and the government,” Gőgös said.

The referendum initiative was submitted by Gőgös at the beginning of this year with a view to asking the public if parliament should ban the sale of state-owned farmland by law.

Gőgös said that 10 percent, or 200,000 hectares, of Hungary’s 2 million hectares of state-owned farmland had already been auctioned off under the government’s privatisation programme.

The ruling Fidesz party responded by calling the Socialists’ referendum initiative “frivolous”. János Halász, spokesman for the party’s parliamentary group, told MTI that during the time it took the Socialists to collect “a little over 200,000 signatures” for their initiative, the Fidesz party managed to collect two million signatures in support of the referendum on the European Union’s migrant quota scheme. Halász said this made it clear that Hungarians consider migration and the quota plan the most important issues and that these are what they want to express their opinion on.

He said the election office would still have to review the signatures collected by the Socialists to validate them, noting that the leftist parties had failed to collect the required 200,000 signatures for a referendum on the introduction of a 2 million forint (EUR 6,310) cap on public officials’ salaries.

Budapest, March 29 (MTI) – The opposition Socialists have decided to support a referendum initiative aimed at thwarting the government’s state-owned land privatisation programme as well as to put a 2 million forint cap on public officials’ salaries.

Socialist MP Zoltán Gőgős told a press conference in front of Parliament on Tuesday that his party will help collect the required number of signatures to submit the referendum initiative proposed by independent MP Zoltán Kész.

Gőgős said the goal was to gather the 400,000 signatures to support the two referendum questions by June 3.

In the proposed referendum, voters would be asked if they agreed that the salaries of employees of companies managing national assets should not exceed a monthly gross 2 million forints.

In the same referendum, participants would also be asked if parliament should ban the sales of state-owned farmland by law.

Socialist leader József Tóbiás said that ruling Fidesz “dreads people giving an opinion on their government, therefore they will block referendums”.

The referendum, if given the go-ahead by election authorities, will be an opportunity for people to voice their dissatisfaction with the government’s “arrogance, ostentation and thieving”, Kész told the press conference.

Gőgős repeated his earlier position that the land auction programme was “the greatest crime” since the regime change in 1989-1990.