A MOOD of revolution was in the air in Budapest last night. Riot police with water cannon and teargas guns confronted angry crowds in front of the Hungarian parliament and the Socialist Party headquarters as public pressure grew on Ferenc Gyurcsany, the Prime Minister, to step down and apologise to the nation.
He remained defiant and said that he would use all possible legal means to stop the spread of riots that engulfed the centre of Budapest for two consecutive nights after the release of tapes in which he admitted lying to retain power in elections last April.
Last night about 10,000 protesters gathered outside parliament demanding the Prime Minister’s resignation. “Resign, resign!” they chanted. “You screwed up,” they said, using the language that the leader had used in his leaked address to his party. Some of the crowd later tried to attack the Socialist Party offices.
On Monday night protesters used jemmies to force their way into the state television headquarters, taking programmes off the air, and swarmed threateningly around parliament.
“The longest and darkest night of the third Hungarian Republic is behind us,” the Prime Minister said on state television. “The borderline between freedom of expression and serious disruption has been blurred.”
Almost exactly 50 years ago the Hungarians rose up against Soviet power and were brutally crushed. Standing in front of a ministry building scarred by bullets from 1956, Balint Poth, 58, waved at the swelling crowd calling for action. “We fought against lies half a century ago,” the retired car mechanic said, “and we will fight against them now.”
The immediate cause of the rioting was secretly recorded comments by the Prime Minister to a closed session of the Socialist Party. During the session — extracts of which were shown on television on Sunday night — he revealed a cynical side to his character. “We lied throughout the past one-and-a-half or two years,” he was quoted as saying. “We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening and we lied at night.” The broadcast comments shocked Hungary. But evidently Mr Gyurcsany, 45, did not feel embarrassed enough to step down.
“I spent three minutes on Sunday night thinking about whether I should resign or whether I had a reason to do so,” he said, “and I concluded that there was absolutely no reason to step down.”
The Opposition wants him to think again. A coffin — strategically placed under the statue of a leader of a peasant revolt — had been draped in black and carried the words “Here lies the body of the Gyurcsany Government”. Another focal point for the increasingly hostile crowd was a plaque on the parliamentary green commemorating the victims of 1956. “Look at those young men,” a pensioner who gave her name as Anna said. “Just like the boys from Pest.” She was referring to the teenagers who set Soviet tanks alight 50 years ago.
The protest rally organisers emphasised that Mr Gyurcsany was a former communist — albeit one who likes to present himself as a Central European version of Tony Blair. As night started to fall, the teenagers compared by Anna to the young heroes of 1956 pulled up their sweatshirt hoods and laid aside their Hungarian flags.
At midnight about 2,500 masked young men marched to the Socialist party headquarters on Republic Square, where dozens of communist functionaries were lynched during the 1956 uprising. A massive concentration of police authorised by the Government to use the toughest possible methods quickly dispersed the crowd.
The rioters retreated, setting fire to rubbish bins and overturning cars, but units of eight men systematically hunted down the ringleaders, wading into the crowd or cornering them in side streets.
The attack on state television on Monday night was spearheaded by toughs wearing paratroop boots and all the insignia of the far Right. Many were supporters of the ultranationalist Jobbik party. Up to 200 people were injured on Monday, including 100 police officers. Yesterday burnt-out cars could be seen on street corners. One prime target, a Soviet monument, was smeared with paint.
President Solyom said that the Prime Minister’s frank admission of deceit had caused a moral crisis in Hungary. The main Fidesz opposition party agreed and stepped up pressure on Mr Gyurcsany to resign.
The protests come a fortnight before local elections and after a slump in the ruling Socialist Party’s popularity. Discontent with its radical reforms has pushed support down from 40 per cent to 25 per cent.
'We screwed up' - the words that sparked a protest
“There aren’t many choices. There aren’t, because we screwed up. Not a little, a lot.
“Obviously we lied throughout the past one and a half, two years. It was completely obvious that what we said was not true. You cannot tell me of any significant government measure we could be proud of . . . If we need to give an account to the country of what we have done for four years, what will we say?
“In the short run there is no choice. Janos Veres [the Hungarian Finance Minister] is right. We can muck around a bit longer, but not much. The moment of truth has come swiftly . . . Reform or failure. There’s nothing else. And when I’m talking about failure, I’m talking about Hungary, the Left and, very honestly, about myself.
“I almost died of having to pretend for the past year that we were actually governing. Instead we lied day, night and evening. I don’t want to do this any more. Either we go ahead and then you have a leader or you have to pick somebody else.
“Reform means a willingness to re-evaluate all that we have thought and done so far on an array of points . . . There may be protests outside parliament. Sooner or later they will get bored of it and go home.
“The first few years will be horrific, of course. It is completely irrelevant that only 20 per cent of the population will vote for us . . . What would happen if, instead of losing our popularity because of bullshitting among ourselves, we lost it because we promoted great social causes? In that case it is not a problem if we lose the support of society for a while.”
