Huge Demonstration in Budapest against PM Orban
A huge protest was called in Budapest by lawyer and former insider Peter Magyar against PM Orban’ s government. About 100,000 protestors gathered in Kossuth Square in front of the parliament, with many carrying national flags and holding up signs that read “Hungarians rise!”
“We will take back our country step by step, and brick by brick we will build a sovereign, modern Hungary,” Magyar told a cheering crowd. He said he would soon announce a new political party to run in European and local elections in June.
Magyar, 43, is the ex-husband of Orban’s former justice minister Judit Varga and was in the orbit of the ruling Fidesz party until he split, vowing to challenge Orban’s “power factory” by forming a new party.
Varga was forced to stand down from public life over her role in the pardoning of officials involved in a child abuse scandal and Magyar has since emerged as a fierce Orban critic.
Last month, Magyar released a recording allegedly implicating a top minister in a high-profile corruption case, and called for the chief prosecutor to resign.
According to a recent poll, Magyar’s party could get between 11 to 15 percent in the country of 9.7 million, where elections are due by 2026.
Orban is facing the biggest political crisis of his 14-year premiership since it emerged in February that a man convicted in a child sex abuse case had been granted a presidential pardon and was released from jail.
Since returning in 2010 to lead the EU member state, Orban has moved to curb press freedom and made other changes to tighten his grip on power, often clashing with Brussels over rule-of-law issues.
He has also clashed with other EU and NATO members over his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, maintained even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
He held up an EU aid package for Ukraine for months, before finally lifting his veto in February.
Aiming to bring together conservative and liberal Hungarians disenchanted with Orban’s leadership and the dispersed, ineffective political opposition, Magyar spoke to an assemblage of people crammed into the expansive square outside the parliament building in Budapest.
When Magyar became the government’s whistleblower in February and made controversial remarks regarding the inner workings of Orban’s administration, he gained widespread recognition.
He posted a recording of a January 2023 conversation with his ex-wife Varga on Facebook in March.
In the recording, she described how aides to Antal Rogan, Orban’s cabinet chief, attempted to tamper with the prosecution files in a corruption case involving Pal Volner, the former state secretary of the ministry of justice.
“They suggested to the prosecutors what should be removed,” Varga says in the recording, according to Al Jazeera. Orban’s political problems have gotten worse as a result of his surge ahead of the June European legislative elections.
