PM candidate Márki-Zay: PM Orbán a mercenary and servant of Putin
Hungary’s April general election will usher in a “government of humanity in place of inhumanity”, Péter Márki-Zay, the opposition’s joint candidate for prime minister, said at a demonstration in front of the headquarters of the International Investment Bank in Budapest on Tuesday evening.
“For 12 years Hungary has had a government that has always been at war with someone and has consistently lost those wars,” Márki-Zay said, pointing to “the government’s struggles against public debt . liberalism, migration, inflation” and its response to the pandemic as examples.
Marki-Zay called Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “a mercenary and servant” of Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he shared part of the blame for the situation in Ukraine.
He added, at the same time, that the government had fulfilled most of the opposition’s demands by backing the European Union’s sanctions against Russia. Now, he said, all they wanted was for Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó to return an award recently received “for serving Russian interests” and for public and commercial media to “stop pushing Orbán’s Putin propaganda”.
Emphasising Hungary’s commitment to the West, Márki-Zay said it was not Orbán but rather Hungary’s EU and NATO memberships that kept the country safe.
Bence Tordai, deputy group leader of Párbeszéd, said the war in Ukraine was a culmination of “a two decades-long offensive by the Russian president in which he was knowingly joined by Viktor Orbán, his business partner, friend and ally”.
Tordai insisted that
Orbán was still working to slow down joint European action and weaken the response by NATO, “because that’s what he’s been doing since 2010”.
Many in the crowd carried EU, Hungarian and Ukrainian flags.
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