The last time we spoke, we were almost at the elections in Hungary and it was hoped that the Democratic Coalition might work better than it turned out to be. What went wrong? Will it be the system? It was the choice of Platform, what went wrong?
Probably many things. It is something multifactorial, because we are in politics. It is not like a medicine where you can experiment many times. In politics, you can only experience it once. So we’re never going to know what the main element was, but if I go back in time to the last election, after the one we had in 2018, after that, the opposition drew conclusions. So we said ‘okay, we made a mistake, we didn’t run in every district, so there wasn’t always a candidate against Fidesz’. This time we had one candidate in each constituency against Fidesz. Last time, we also came to the conclusion that we did not have a common candidate for prime minister. This time we had a common candidate for prime minister, including an innovation that we had never had before, which was the primary elections in Hungary. It was an open process, anyone in Hungary could join this act of electing the common candidate for prime minister. So this was an innovation, something that had never been done before.
And last time we said: ‘Okay, we didn’t have a common program.’ This time all these opposition parties worked together, they came up with a program on how to restore democracy in Hungary, we had a detailed program for each field: health, education, energy. Last time we said ‘well, we didn’t form a government because we didn’t have people to control the polling stations’. We now had 20,000 people, volunteers, who counted the votes in every small town, in every city to ensure that the elections were free and transparent.
And at the end of it all, we got the same bad result. And then of course you can think about what went wrong. Probably a lot of things went wrong…
People want Fidesz…
Yes, but why do people want Fidesz? So of course it’s always speculation. But we saw that there was a very, very abrupt change after the war started. I mean, after Russia invaded Ukraine. And the government, with all the opportunities to own and own most of the media in Hungary, to control the public media, to control and own the local newspapers, the local radios, we have all the local newspapers with the same front page appearing…
Is it true that the prime ministerial candidate only got five minutes of airtime on public television on Tuesday 830am or something?
That’s true. He only had five minutes alone, but he had hours every day when the public media was against him. So yes, she could talk for five minutes, but every day she was getting hours of public media reports against her.
But how did the war change sentiment? What Viktor Orban began to communicate to the Hungarians in all the channels that the government can use – it was not Fidesz, it was the government communicating – that… if you want peace, if you don’t want our children to die in a war, then vote for Viktor Orban. If you vote for the opposition candidate, Peter Marki-zay, then he will send his sons with guns to the Ukraine and they will die. So ‘if you want your children to be safe, if you want to stay out of the war, then vote for Viktor Orban, if you want to be in the war because the opposition wants Hungary to be in the war, then choose the opposition.’
And there was another promise, and I think that’s really exciting now, because Viktor Orban promised all Hungarians that if Fidesz stays in power, no one will have to pay more for electricity or gas. Because before there was a system of fixed prices in Hungary, which lasted 10 years. So consumers never felt anything about the price change.
So basically it will be a broken promise…
But this was his main promise. He had two main promises: that Hungary would be out of the war and that Hungarians would never pay more for gas and electricity. This was the main promise of him. And in the summer, in July, he broke his promise and now consumers pay seven times more for gas and twice as much for electricity. But for municipalities and public services, this price increase is between eight and 14 times greater for electricity, for gas, for the maintenance of the public service. So, at this moment, the city of Budapest – I am responsible for transport, public lighting, waste, water – has zero kilowatts of electricity for next year for public lighting, for the maintenance of public transport, for the maintenance of the water service in the dwellings.
As you do?
Right now we don’t know, because our budgets are cut by the government. Many of our budgets had been centralized. We were kicked out of the protected price range or the local utility companies were kicked out of this protective shield. Y now we have to pay the price for the bad contract that Hungary made with Gazprom last year, which is one of the worst gas contracts in all of Europe.
So it is not a price increase, from 18 to 14%. It’s eight to 14 times…
Yes, that means 10 or 11, 12 times, even 14 times more. I paid public electricity last year 4, now I would have to pay 55.
Is this reflected in the bill that individual consumers pay?
Both. In other words, two things happened. Viktor Orban broke his promise because he promised all Hungarians that they would never have to pay a higher price. And then in July he said that because of the bad EU sanctions, we would have to pay more. There is a quantity of protected energy that can be used at a cheaper price. But everyone who gets over it – and that’s the majority of the population – have to pay seven times more for gas and twice as much for electricity. So not 2%, not 20%, double the electricity, and a seven-fold increase in the price of gas after using a certain amount of gas. For the municipalities, the situation is out of control, He threw all the municipalities into the desert to look for electricity and buy it if they can, at whatever price, after 10 years of a fixed price system.
So, all these problems that national politics are bringing to consumers, do they somehow get people out on the streets or… I mean, is civil society still alive?
Civil society has long been strangled in Hungary. People are not on the streets because there is a very unique Hungarian communication about why this is happening.
Because of the EU and the sanctions against Russia…
Exactly, because of the stupid EU sanctions. That is the only reason: not because of Hungary’s bad contract with Gazprom, not because Viktor Orban or Foreign Minister Peter Siarto came back last year from Russia saying that Hungary has the best long-term gas contract with Gazprom. “We are paying the lowest price. This will guarantee low gasoline prices for all Hungarians for a long time,” he said. But it’s a secret contract, they can’t say exactly what’s in the contract. For now, we see that this is probably the worst contract ever signed. What we see about the prices and what is happening, is a price that nobody else has so bad. So if I look here in the EU in other cities, what is happening, they all have price increases, but not 10 and 13 times more. So what I see now in Hungary is that all municipalities are facing the same situation. Therefore, It’s not just Budapest, it’s not just the opposition cities. All municipalities were removed, in a few weeks, from all protected systems. And most of them don’t have the budget because their budget has been centralized and cut in the last two years. And now, many municipalities are thinking of cutting many public services such as cutting public lighting, closing institutions, closing daycare centers, thinking about reducing public transport. I also see this in other cities in other countries, but there is still a solution. So what I think is that in the shadow of the current energy price crisis, the Hungarian government will finish its job of killing the local authorities in Hungary, because you can’t talk about the local authority if it doesn’t have a budget, if it does not have…
If public electricity cannot be guaranteed…
If you can not even guarantee public lighting. I’m sure there will be lights on the street, but you know, the local authority is not only about public lighting and other public services, but about the freedom of the local community to decide at least a small proportion of their taxes paid, what to spend, how to spend, how to develop how to change the city. Now, we have reached the threshold where we cannot even provide basic public services because our tax revenues are centralized. But all our costs are much higher, and not because of the EU sanctions, but because of the very bad decisions made by the government.
We have an upcoming anniversary of October 23, the date of the Soviet invasion in 1956. And compared to what he said some 15 years ago, Viktor Orban’s public discourse on Russia has changed a lot. How do you see these changes?
I don’t know what he’s going to talk about this year. But yes, absolutely. She’s been in politics since… since 1988. She’s been on the stage for a long time. He was a very anti-Russian politician, anti-Soviet at first. And now what we see is something I would never have thought about because I was born in the Soviet era. Since then, I felt that Hungary’s way could never again be to look to the East. We were all Europeans, we always knew that we belonged to the European Union and to the European family. Seeing that Viktor Orban says that his friend is Vladimir Putin, that he is attacking another country, not the European family that we all wanted to belong to and he wanted to belong to and all Hungarians wanted to belong to this family, but now he is protecting an illegal war. It is very difficult to really understand what is going on.
But people don’t protest much in the streets…
What I see in the protests are the teachers that we finally have on the streets, because I think their salaries are now the lowest among the lowest in the Hungarian public service. And with this energy crisis, and inflation that I’ve never seen before – my parents or grandparents probably have seen it, but I’ve never seen inflation like this – the price of food has gone up 30, 40, 50, 60%. If we look at the price of bread, it has risen 60% in a year. 60! So we’ve never seen anything like this before. What does that mean? It means that those salaries, which a year ago were very low, now you can’t even buy food with those salaries that teachers earn in our schools. And now they are openly protesting, because the government was punishing the teachers who said there had to be a change. They were punished. So now more and more teachers, parents and children are speaking for teachers, for education, for the future of Hungary, for a change in this and for better salaries.
Source: TSF
