LMP

Roma spox calls on minority candidates to distance from the united opposition

Félix Farkas Roma Spokesperson

The spokesman of the ethnic Roma minority in parliament has called on Leftist Roma candidates to distance themselves from the united opposition, which has put Jobbik vice-president Dániel Z. Kárpát at 10th place on its joint list.

“A leopard won’t change its spots,” Félix Farkas said in a statement to MTI.

Referring to opposition candidates Lajos Lőcsei, Sándor Berki and Ferenc Varga, Farkas said a place on the opposition list meant the candidates shared Z. Kárpát’s “views on Jews and Romas”.

Z. Kárpát “smiles as he uses the Hitler salute”, Farkas said.

As long as politicians with anti-Semitic views receive places on the joint list of the Democratic Coalition, Jobbik, Momentum, Socialists, LMP and Párbeszéd, right-wing extremism will always be present in the opposition, he said.

Hungarian Defence Forces Fighter Jet Military Aircraft Gripen
Read alsoOpposition confronts Orbán about drone in Hungarian airspace

Opposition lawmaker fined for abuse of office

Márta Demeter LMP

A Budapest court on Friday fined opposition LMP lawmaker Márta Demeter 1.8 million forints (EUR 4,800) on charges of abusing her office.

According to the charges, Demeter had acquired information concerning the movements of the Hungarian military back in 2018, and suggested that a military aircraft had carried one of the daughters of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán from Cyprus to Hungary. An investigation, at the time, however, found that a Hungarian soldier, also named Orbán, and his family had been among passengers of that flight.

Apart from falsely claiming that the aircarft had carried a family member of the prime minister unlawfully, Demeter also “disclosed data that could not be published out of the public interest”, the prosecutor said when pressing charges against the deputy.

President Vladimir Putin
Read alsoOpposition: Hungary “being Putinised”!

Opposition: Orbán “Putin’s minion, the last vassal of the aggressor”

Opposition Extraordinary Parliament Session

An extraordinary session of parliament convened by the opposition parties to condemn Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine lacked a quorum on Thursday night, with representatives of the ruling parties staying away.

The session was initiated by representatives of the Democratic Coalition, Jobbik, the Socialist Party, LMP, and Párbeszéd

Bence Tordai of the Párbeszéd party said Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was “still trying to serve Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interests and slow down joint and effective European action”.

“The prime minister loses his real wars as a rule: he lost against the state debt, budget deficit, inflation, a drastic weakening of the forint, and poverty,” he said, adding that Orbán, who normally opted for a fight, was now uncharacteristically promoting “peace and strategic calm” when it came to condemning Putin.

LMP lawmaker Antal Csárdi said the peoples of central and eastern Europe must “speak clearly” when an independent state suffers military aggression. “That obligation especially applies to Hungarians” in view of the crushing of the anti-Soviet revolution of 1956, he said.

László Varju, a deputy of the Democratic Coalition, said that the government had “led the country into a total moral and financial disaster”. The prime minister “is Putin’s minion, the last vassal of the aggressor”, who “has made the EU and NATO distrustful of Hungary”, he said, adding that

Orbán’s policies had led to “record-high public debt and inflation” as well as a fuel shortage at filling stations. “This isn’t strategic calm but the scrabbling about of a headless chicken,” he said.

Ágnes Kunhalmi of the Socialist Party said the parliamentary resolution adopted earlier in the day made it obvious that “Fidesz has so far lied” about the united opposition’s position. “Anyone can see that no political force in Hungary wants to send weapons to Ukraine,” she said. “Hungary’s security depends on NATO rather than on Orbán,” Kunhalmi added.

Jobbik MP Dániel Z. Kárpát said that the absence of government lawmakers at the debate “equals treason” while “Ukrainians and Hungarians or anyone are trying to escape war”. He accused the government of “faffing around” and “idly watching the first signs of an impending global crisis”.

Katalin Novák and PM Orbán
Read also Opposition: new president was “candidate of the corrupt pro-Putin” Orbán

Opposition: new president was “candidate of the corrupt pro-Putin” Orbán

Katalin Novák and PM Orbán

The only way out of Hungary’s “historical dead-end” is via a change of government, the united opposition said after the election of Fidesz’s Katalin Novák as Hungary’s next president by MPs on Thursday, adding that: “Novák will never be the president of all Hungarians.”

Parliament elected the former youth and family affairs minister for a five-year-term with 137 votes out of 188 valid ballots.

The vote’s outcome was a foregone conclusion once Fidesz nominated Novák to replace János Áder, the Democratic Coalition, Jobbik, LMP, Mindenki Magyarországa Mozgalom, Momentum, Socialist and Párbeszéd parties said in a joint statement. Novák, it added, was the

“candidate of the corrupt pro-Putin rule” of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In his address to parliament, Péter Róna, the opposition’s presidential candidate, said Hungarians wanted to belong to the West, to the EU and NATO “rather than to Putin’s Russia”, it said.

“In the April 3 ballot, two worlds will compete, and it will be United for Hungary that stands for the EU, NATO and for peace,” the statement said.

President Katalin Novák
Read alsoParliament elected the first female president of Hungary! – UPDATED

Opposition: Hungary “being Putinised”!

President Vladimir Putin

The opposition LMP party has accused Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of importing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policies to Hungary along with Russian gas.

If Orbán won the April 3 general election, then every government innovation would be stamped with “made in Russia” on it, LMP co-leader Máté Kanász-Nagy told an online press briefing on Wednesday.

He insisted that one example of this was that the ruling Fidesz party had subjected foreign-funded NGOs to the same kind of restrictive regulations that apply in Russia. Yet some of the same NGOs are helping government by supporting refugees from Ukraine, he added.

Also, Russia has outlawed the promotion of homosexuality since 2013, while the Fidesz government did the same in Hungary last summer, the LMP politician said.

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Read alsoHungary on Russia’s list of ‘unfriendly’ countries

Green party launches petition against Hungary’s nuclear plant

Paks Nuclear Plant Hungary

Opposition LMP is launching a petition against the expansion of the Paks nuclear power plant, the party’s co-leader said on Sunday.

Speaking at an online press conference, Máté Kanász-Nagy said the attack on Ukraine had made it clear that the less dependent Hungary was on Russia, the safer it was.

“President Putin himself said that his ultimate goal is to make post-Socialist countries, including Hungary, leave NATO,” Kanász-Nagy said.

Yet, the government insists on the “crazy idea to build new blocks in Paks with thousands of billions of forints of Russian credit and Russian technology,” he said, “thereby making even our grandchildren dependent on Russia.”

Kanász-Nagy said the Paks expansion must be prevented, and this could be done now, if as many people demanded it as loudly as possible.

Hungary's gas reserves consumption energy
Read alsoWhat is the state of gas supply in Hungary during the Russian-Ukrainian war?

Joint opposition: PM “continues to make statements serving Russian interests”

Opposition PM Candidate Péter Márki-Zay

The united opposition wants peace, and considers stopping Russian President Vladimir Putin, strengthening the European defence alliance and “freeing Hungary from Russia’s sphere of interest” as key to that mission, the alliance said on Friday.

Rejecting Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s statement that the opposition was “on the side of war”, the Together for Hungary (Együtt Magyarországért) alliance has called on Orbán to “try to mitigate the fallout of war rather than lying, slandering and inciting hatred.”

Read also: PM candidate Márki-Zay: PM Orbán a mercenary and servant of Putin

Orbán’s see-saw politics constitute the greatest risk for Hungary’s security, the statement said. “The prime minister … continues to make statements serving Russian interests, and incites [Hungarians] against NATO and EU which guarantee the country’s security, and against the opposition.”

The statement issued by the Democratic Coalition, LMP, Momentum, the Everyone’s Hungary Movement, the Socialists, Jobbik and Párbeszéd accused Orbán of “trying to live up to the vileness of his role model … Putin.”

Zoltán Kovács government
Read alsoGovernment: ‘Left’s irresponsibility knows no bounds’

Opposition wants Hungary out of Russian International Investment Bank

IIB Russia

Opposition LMP has called on the Hungarian government to immediately withdraw from the International Investment Bank (IIB) and expel the formerly Moscow-based institution from the country, alleging that the bank was conducting spy operations in Budapest.

“There’s no reason why we should be maintaining a spy network practically operating with KGB tools that poses as a bank,” Antal Csárdi, LMP’s deputy parliamentary group leader, told a press conference in front of the IIB’s Budapest headquarters on Monday.

He said the government

“should make clear what intelligence reports have already confirmed, namely that the Russian majority-financed Budapest-based investment bank is conducting spy operations”.

Csárdi noted that the Czech Republic and Romania had recently announced their decisions to quit the bank. He said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban also had a duty to guarantee his country’s security and “demonstrate Hungary’s condemnation of Russian aggression through actual steps”.

Concerning Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Csárdi said:

“We mustn’t allow Russia to take our eastern neighbour’s independence away.”

He said LMP condemned Russia’s aggression in the strongest possible terms, adding it was also causing serious damage to Europe and specifically Hungary. “Russia isn’t aiding but rather threatening our country’s independence,” he said.

The group leader said a demonstration would be held against the IIB’s operations in Budapest on Tuesday.

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Read alsoThe first Hungarian soldier, father of two died in Ukraine!

Orbán: House of Terror key to representing ppl oppressed by Communist regime

Victims of Communism memorial day

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Friday marked the 20th anniversary of the House of Terror Museum, which he said represented the oppressed. “Its establishment meant that truth and lies were no longer defined by Communists but by those who were trampled by the regime,” he said.

The museum “manifests a simple narrative based on the similarities between Communism and Nazism,” he said in a video message. “It gives something important to young and old, eastern, western and Hungarian [visitors] that they cannot get elsewhere,” he said.

The museum also separates the “faces and names” of victims and perpetrators, “which communists meshed together so cleverly until the moment the museum was founded,” he said.

“Communists no longer determine what is good and bad, what is true and untrue — that is now in the hands of those who were trampled, who lost everything. Some lost their lives and their families, others their wealth or career. Finally, they are the winners, and history is on their side,” he said.

Meanwhile, the leader of LMP’s parliamentary group vowed that the united opposition would reveal politicians’ links to the state security agency if it came to power.

Speaking at a commemoration held in Pécs, in southern Hungary, László Lóránt Keresztes said: “We cannot build democracy on the foundations of the secrets of a dictatorship.”

Keresztes noted that ruling Fidesz had promised to make the “agent files” of the Communist regime public. They shirked that task, despite the fact that LMP submitted 24 proposals to parliament to that end between 2011 and 2021, he said.

He vowed that the united opposition would “show how the parties active in the regime change were drawn in by agents of the Communist secret services, and which public figures of post-Communist Hungary were involved,” he said.

Regarding the conflict in Ukraine, Keresztes said the opposition rejected the aggression of Russia and President Vladimir Putin, and stood by the sovereignty of Ukraine, by the Hungarians living in the country, as well as all other citizens.

“We also have to declare that [Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán has long disavowed: there is no business, no negotiation with an aggressor,” he said. He called for the upgrade of the Paks nuclear power plant “based on Russian technology and Russian loans which expose Hungary to Russia” to be scrapped.

Victims of Communism memorial day
Read alsoHungarian President János Áder marks Victims of Communism memorial day

Joint opposition held demonstration at Russian embassy in Budapest

Budapest Ukraine Russia demonstration

The united opposition held a demonstration in front of the Russian embassy in Budapest under the motto “Against Putin, for Ukraine” late on Thursday. Péter Márki-Zay, the prime ministerial candidate of the united opposition, called on Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to drop his “see-saw policy”.

Márki-Zay said Hungary should fully support the European Union’s sanctions against Russia. He also demanded that the government should suspend the licencing procedure of the project to expand the Paks nuclear power plant and expel the International Investment Bank, which he called a “Russian spy bank”.

In addition, the politician called on Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó to return an award recently received “for serving Russian interests”.

“Hungary’s place has been in western Europe, with Christian roots, since King Saint Stephen; the West is our ally, and we are members of NATO and the European Union,”

Márki-Zay said.

Ágnes Vadai, deputy leader of the Democratic Coalition, said that the government “should bear in mind that Hungarians stand for peace and Europe”. LMP co-leader Máté Kanász-Nagy said it was “shameful” that, although the prime minister had condemned the Russian attack, he also voiced support for “continuing business with Putin”. The Paks nuclear power plant upgrade project “should not be revised but dropped”, he insisted.

Socialist co-leader Ágnes Kunhalmi said

both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Orbán were “unreliable”,

and insisted that a government change in Hungary would “benefit the whole of the EU”.

Jobbik deputy leader László Lukács said “Hungarians, Europe, and the sane half of the world support peace and will continue to do so”. Momentum head Anna Donáth slammed Orbán for

“making friends and doing business with eastern dictatorships for 12 years”.

“There will be no unity in Europe as long as Orban is in government,” she added.

Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony, co-leader of Párbeszéd, said “we are not protesting against the Russian people but Russia’s dictator”. He accused the Hungarian prime minister of “contributing to the oiling of the power machinery now occupying Ukraine for the past 12 years”. “The Orbán government is not a tool for peace in Europe but an obstacle,” Karacsony said.

Budapest Ukraine Russia demonstration
Read also Joint opposition held demonstration at Russian embassy in Budapest

LMP: Paks nuclear plant investment ‘will not go ahead in current form’ if opposition wins

paks-nuclear-hungary

If the united opposition wins the April 3 general election, the project to expand the Paks nuclear power plant “will not be implemented in its current form”, Máté Kanász-Nagy, LMP’s co-leader, said on Wednesday.

The Russian-Ukrainian situation “makes it abundantly clear” that as long as Europe and Hungary depend on Russia for energy supplies, these “cannot be secure”, he told an online press briefing.

The LMP politician welcomed the German government’s decision withhold approval of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

He added that

energy security depended on Hungary producing its own energy, and this meant investing in renewables.

He insisted that the government’s energy policy over the past ten years had gone in the wrong direction.

“LMP believes that expansion contracts and agreements should be terminated as soon as possible,”

he said. “The investment cannot be an option while Russia invades one of our neighbours.”

Paks nuclear plant
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Opposition party: Hungary’s government “pretends to be green”

Opposition Politician Máté Kanász-Nagy

Hungary’s government pretends to be “green” but it is far from that, Máté Kanász-Nagy, co-leader of the opposition LMP party, said on Friday.

Commenting on the Brazilian president’s Thursday visit to Hungary, he said that “in political terms, Jair Bolsonaro can rightly be called the world’s biggest climate criminal who personifies everything a green party should oppose.”   

Bolsonaro met Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and President János Áder but neither of them criticised him for his environmental record, Kanász-Nagy told an online press conference.

Facing real conflicts, the Hungarian government’s actions do not substantially differ from the Brazilian president’s steps, the LMP co-leader said.

Kanász-Nagy accused Orbán of circumventing environmental regulations, appropriating free beaches and building luxury hotels around big lakes.

Further, he criticised the government of supporting multinational companies whose carbon emissions greatly contribute to climate change.

Kanász-Nagy also blamed the government for its “failure to accomplish the EU’s strict climate protection goals”.

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Green opposition party slams govt for “failed” inflation policy

Opposition Politician Máté Kanász-Nagy

The government’s policy aimed at reducing inflation through capping the price of some food products “has failed”, the co-leader of opposition LMP said on Friday.

Máté Kanász-Nagy noted that prices in January had been 7.9 percent higher than in the same month a year earlier, adding that the country had not seen such high inflation since 2007.

He also added that inflation in the food sector had been even higher, 10.1 percent.

“The government has been unable to handle soaring prices. Its policy of capping prices, reminiscent of communist times, has failed,” he insisted.

The government’s measure of freezing the price of seven kinds of basic foods at the level of last October helps families save a mere 1,000 forints (€ 2.8) a month, Kanász-Nagy said, and insisted that

reducing the VAT on basic foods to 5 percent would leave a monthly 7,000 forints in each household.

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If the opposition wins, Hungary will have euro by 2027 – UPDATED

Opposition roundtable

Parties of the united opposition presented their ideas concerning a possible introduction of the euro, taxes, inflation, job creation and budget management at a roundtable organised by the Civitas Institute on Thursday.

Párbeszéd MP Tamás Mellár said the opposition’s plans to introduce the European common currency were “very good”, but added that the programme would take at least five years to complete. Hungary could not at present meet the Maastricht criteria for the introduction of the euro, but aspirants are expected to present a “credible programme” outlining a schedule, he said. Mellar insisted that the current policy of currency devaluation could not be maintained and suggested that the exchange rate of the forint should be kept within “a very narrow” band.

Democratic Coalition MP László Varjú added that “there has been no political will” to join the euro zone in the past ten years despite “there being opportunities”.

LMP’s Antal Csárdi called for a graded personal income tax to replace the single bracket system, adding that minimum wages should be exempt from tax.

Participants in the roundtable also agreed that the VAT system should be changed, and said it was “not without precedent” in Europe to have multiple VAT brackets. Dániel Z. Kárpát of Jobbik said Hungary had the highest VAT rate in Europe on products for children.

Zoltán Vajda, representing the Socialist Party and the Everybody’s Hungary Movement, said the central bank’s policies were “irresponsible”, and criticised the bank’s purchases of government securities and its foundations. He insisted that the central bank’s continual base rate hikes were ineffective and failed to strengthen the national currency.

Márton Ilyés of the Momentum party said that a labour shortage in the country was the result of increasing emigration, with special regard to the health, construction, and farming sectors. He criticised the government for “wasting exorbitant funds” on “attracting companies to Hungary offering similar types of jobs” rather than making efforts to create increasingly higher quality jobs.

In another development Varjú called the 2022 budget “impracticable” and called for a new one. He insisted that transparency of the budget was a pillar of the rule of law. He also called for health services to be made free of charge.

UPDATE – Fidesz’s reaction

Ruling Fidesz said in response that former prime ministers Ferenc Gyurcsány and Gordon Bajnai,

“the same people who already destroyed the country once and ran it according to the financial interests of foreign speculators”,

were still in charge of Hungarian left-wing economic policy.

“Under successive left-wing governments, Hungary gave up its economic and financial sovereignty, allowed multinationals and speculators to make out-sized profits at the expense of the Hungarian people and Hungarian businesses, created mass unemployment, and heavily taxed the economy and wages.”

Fidesz added the left wing and its prime ministerial candidate were planning to impose on Hungary the same ill-fated economic policy it had already pursued while winding up the current tax regime “which ensures Hungarian businesses the lowest tax in Europe and Hungarian workers the third lowest”, it added.

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LMP calls for law on central bank to be amended

national bank of Hungary -mnb nbh

LMP wants the law on the central bank to be amended to ensure that any profits the bank generates are transferred to the state treasury, the party co-leader’s, Erzsébet Schmuck, said on Tuesday.

Schmuck told an online press briefing that the central bank governor’s recent revelation that the bank was likely to continue stacking up losses in the hundreds of billions of forints in the coming years was “shocking”.

In the past two years of the pandemic, the National Bank of Hungary transferred its profits to the state treasury, she noted. But this was not the case previously, she added, citing as an example data showing that the bank accumulated profits of more than 500 billion forints (EUR 1.4bn) in 2014.

The law governing the central bank mandates it keep any profits while any losses must be paid out of the central budget, she said, even when the budget closed 2021 5,500 billion forints in the red.

Renewing its proposal submitted in 2016, LMP called for the central bank law to stipulate that the bank should transfer most of its profits to the treasury and to wind up the charitable foundations it established. The capital held by these foundations should also be transferred to the budget as this could be used to develop higher education, she said.

Hungary opposition
Read alsoOpposition pledges central bank reform

Opposition pledges central bank reform

Hungary opposition
Politicians of the joint opposition on Thursday pledged to renew fiscal and monetary policy and to reform the National Bank of Hungary (NBH), should the opposition win the general election on April 3.
 
Ágota Jánosi-Lesik, a candidate of the Democratic Coalition (DK), said the NBH “has become one of the most shamelessly profiteering institutions over the past 12 years.” She added that the NBH had failed to pay “profits from a weakening forint” into the budget in 2014. Instead, it ploughed 270 billion forints (EUR 750.5m) into foundations immediately before the ruling Fidesz party initiated legislation that made the foundations’ spending confidential information, “as they were no longer considered public funds”, she said.
 
“The NBH has become an uncontrolled state within a state, spending billions of public funding on luxury and disbursing public monies to friends and relatives as it sees fit,”
 
Jánosi-Lesik said.
 
Should the opposition win the upcoming election, the NBH will return to operating as a “strictly regulated institute of a democratic country, working in the interests of the Hungarian people,” she said.
 
 
Zoltán Vajda, a Socialist MP candidate, called for new fiscal and monetary policy “so that Hungary regains the trust of foreign markets, and so inflation will be curbed and the forint strengthened.” One method to achieve that would be to set a date for introducing the euro, he said.
 
LMP lawmaker Antal Csárdi said that the 54 billion forint reconstruction of the central bank building had been undertaken by a company connected to a friend of NBH governor György Matolcsy’s family. “György Matolcsy’s job should be to
 
fight inflation rather than operating the central bank as a private ATM;
 
we can see no sign of that,” he said.
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Hungarian opposition promises greater help for domestic violence victims

The opposition will provide greater help for victims of domestic violence if it wins the April 3 general election, representatives of LMP, the Democratic Coalition and the Socialist Party said on Tuesday.

The new government will strengthen the domestic abuse alert system, increase the number of victims’ shelters and increase funding for helping victims, they told an online press conference.

LMP lawmaker Krisztina Hohn said ruling Fidesz had not done enough to help domestic violence victims over the past decade.

She said more needed to be done to prevent domestic violence.

A government led by the current opposition parties will introduce mandatory violence management training and mental diversion programmes, help victims recover from their trauma and work to eliminate victim blaming, Hohn said.

Anett Bősz, deputy group leader of the Democratic Coalition and the head of the Liberal Party, decried the ruling parties’ referendum initiative as “deceitful”, saying the government had done “nothing” to combat domestic violence. She promised that a new government would restore the country’s domestic abuse alert systems.

Socialist Party MP candidate Roland Márton said the new government would clear the way for more European Union funding for social justice projects, including the upkeep of domestic violence victims’ shelters.

Márki-Zay Péter plans to beat Orbán
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Green party pledges to reduce motor vehicle traffic in Budapest

Traffic Jam Cars City

Opposition LMP’s organisations in Budapest approved a political declaration at their congress on Saturday that aims to reduce motor vehicle traffic.

LMP said in a statement that if they enter government, their aim is to “go beyond words and take action that ensures Hungary’s move towards sustainability”.

The party wants to reduce traffic with proportional tolls on vehicle use and engine emissions. LMP would introduce a 30km/h speed limit in all residential areas with the exception of thoroughfares.

LMP also pledged to oppose the construction of “elite foreign universities” with taxpayer money, the expansion of Budapest’s international airport and the construction of new buildings in City Park.

The party said it would promote cycling and pedestrian traffic and increase green areas in cities.

Read alsoMost sustainable building in CEE built in Budapest- PHOTOS