In order to remain in power, the Hungarian prime minister lied to the people and the EU, prompting the eruption of massive protests that were brutally crushed at his command.

The Hungarian prime minister withheld information and lied for months

The leaking of the speech, in which the Hungarian prime minister admitted that he had consciously and continuously misled the public for eighteen months, sparked months of anti-government protests.

“I almost perished because I had to pretend for 18 months that we were governing. Instead, we lied morning, noon and night,”

the prime minister had said.

Leaked in September 2006, the monologue known as the „Oszod speech”, revealed that in a bid to retain his power, Ferenc Gyurcsany, socialist prime minister, had lied to voters for one and a half years prior to the parliamentary elections at the time.

In his address, not void of vulgar language, he said,

„We did what we could in the past month. We did whatever was possible to do in secret in the preceding months, making sure that papers on what we were preparing for would not surface in the last weeks of the election campaign. We kept the secret, while we knew and you did too, that if the election victory comes, we will have to seriously settle down to work and that we have never had such a problem.”

Brutal police terror

For several weeks after the speech was leaked, anti-government protests erupted in Budapest and other cities across the country. In October, a series of demonstrations began with hundreds of thousands of people taking part, but these were

brutally repressed by police on the orders of the prime minister.

Mounted police steered their galloping horses straight into crowds of demonstrators and peaceful commemorators who gathered on 23 October to mark the national holiday [honouring the then 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Soviet oppression], and police officers without visible identification numbers indiscriminately beat and tear-gassed celebrants. Police were also firing non-standard rubber bullets causing serious injuries and even permanent disability.

The quelling of the civil unrest left 167 people injured, 33 hospitalised, and two demonstrators permanently blind in one eye.

Hundreds of people filed complaints at the prosecutor’s office about mistreatment by police, but the officers dispersing the crowd were wearing helmets and masks but no identification numbers making their individual identification impossible, therefore, only six were charged.

It was not until years later, in March 2009, that then Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany finally resigned as premier. It later emerged that he had not only lied to the Hungarian people, but also concealed the actual state of the Hungarian economy from the European Union. V4NA will report on this aspect in a forthcoming article.