Socialists call for joint action against ‘authoritarian regime’

Speaking at her party’s commemoration of the outbreak of the 1956 anti-Soviet revolt in Kaposvar, in south-western Hungary late on Sunday, Kunhalmi said “those that seek to play domestic democracy in a fundamentally anti-democratic environment have failed to understand . the message of young people fighting for freedom, prosperity, and progress back then.”

The Socialist Party fights for “freedom for the country and its society, a democratic rule of law, prosperity for the general public, and social security”, the politician said.

The Socialists consider Imre Nagy, prime minister in 1956, the leader of the failed revolution, and reject the government’s endeavours to “suppress, question, or even deny his political role”, Kunhalmi said. The martyred prime minister “always stayed a leftist and his taking the responsibility and all risks clearly refute the government’s claims that 1956 was exclusively a Christian nationalist, right-wing revolution,” she insisted.

Istvan Hiller, the head of the party’s national board, said his party would support local governments that can “promote the interests of locals with assistance by the state”. “We don’t want just elected representatives, we want self governance, free cities, places for the people to meet freely, free deputies that will present their ideas to the electorate and then implement the will of the voters,” Hiller insisted.

“It is not acceptable that the gap between poor and rich is opening terribly and there is hardly any opportunity for social advancement, much less than we believed and wanted in 1989,” he said.

On the subject of the war in Ukraine, Hiller said “Russia has been the attacker, the agressor, and we cannot take sides with any other party than the one attacked … we want peace, but peace that will do justice to the attacked side,” he said.