150 injured in Budapest riots
Pastor Dale Morgan
150 injured as Hungarians riot over PM's 'lies'*
Daniel McLaughlin in Budapest
Tuesday September 19, 2006
The Guardian
Gutted cars, shattered glass and smashed paving stones littered
Budapest's Freedom Square today after protesters stormed the
headquarters of Hungarian state television to demand the resignation of
the prime minister.
Hundreds of people, most of them young men, burst though police lines to
attack the station, having broken away from a much larger, peaceful
demonstration against the country's Socialist leader Ferenc Gyurcsany,
who admitted to lying to the nation about the state of the economy to
retain power.
The rightwing Fidesz opposition party said it would boycott parliament
today and added its voice to demands for Mr Gyurcsany to resign, while
analysts said they believed the media-savvy prime minister may have
sanctioned the leaking of the tape himself in order to demonstrate his
determination to push through unpalatable reforms.
About 150 people were injured in Hungary's worst violence since the fall
of communism as police used teargas and water cannon to disperse the
demonstrators but failed to prevent dozens of them breaking into the
television station.
Broadcasting officials said offices and studios were ransacked before
police finally broke the crowd up, leaving emergency workers to douse
several blazing cars and clear up the square.
Mr Gyurcsany, who emerged from the communist youth movement to become
one of Hungary's richest men during the privatisations of the 1990s,
denounced the violence.
"The street is not a solution, but instead causes conflict and crisis,"
he said today. "Our job is to resolve the conflict and prevent a crisis."
Hungary's rightwing Fidesz opposition party demanded Mr Gyurcsany, 44,
resign after he was caught on tape telling party colleagues that the
government had lied to the public and made countless mistakes during its
first term in office.
On a leaked recording of a party meeting in May, a month after his
government won a second term in office, Mr Gyurcsany said only "divine
providence, an abundance of cash in the world economy and hundreds of
tricks" had kept Hungary's economy afloat as it laboured under the
largest per-capita deficit in the European Union.
"We lied in the morning, and we lied in the evening," he told the
meeting in a 25-minute speech that was peppered with obscenities and in
which he said the government's failure to overhaul the economy had made
painful reforms inevitable.
"There is not much choice, because we screwed up. Not a little, a lot.
No European country has done something as boneheaded as we have," he
said. "Evidently, we lied throughout the last year-and-a-half, two years.
"You can't show me any significant government measure that we can be
proud of, other than, in the end, we managed to drag the government back
from the brink."
Mr Gyurcsany took control of the Socialists in 2004, when polls showed
them trailing far behind Fidesz. He reversed the slide in popularity to
make his government the first to win re-election since the end of
communism in 1989, but then admitted that to secure a second term he
obscured the real size of the budget deficit and backed imprudent tax cuts.
The government now hopes to limit the 2006 budget deficit to 10.1% of
GDP rather than its pre-election target of 4.7%, and has announced major
spending and employment cuts - as well as higher taxes and direct fees
for health services and university tuition - that are deeply unpopular.
Such is Mr Gyurcsany's reputation as a slick media operator that many
analysts believe he may have sanctioned the leaking of the tape in order
to demonstrate his determination to push through unpalatable reforms and
clean up politics.
"The real issue in Hungarian politics today is not who lied and when,
but who is able to put an end to this, who can face up to the lies and
half-truths of the past 16 years," Mr Gyurcsany wrote on his blog,
alongside a transcript of his May party address.
"The lies are the sins of the whole Hungarian political elite," he
added, insisting that he was proud of his "passionate speech".
But Fidesz and other opposition parties are adamant he should step down.
"This is an unprecedented crisis in the history of Hungarian democracy
and Ferenc Gyurcsany is not part of the solution but the problem," said
senior Fidesz member Tibor Navracsics. "He is now persona non-grata in
Hungarian politics."
Fidesz has vowed to boycott parliament today and looks set to prosper in
next month's local elections, to be held just before the 50th
anniversary of Hungary's October 1956 uprising against communist rule
which was brutally crushed by Soviet tanks.
Last night's protests carried an echo of the 1956 revolt, during which
students besieged the main radio station in Budapest to demand their
grievances be read out on air.
Some of the protesters last night chanted nationalist slogans and waved
flags with red and white "Arpad stripes", a centuries-old Hungarian
symbol named after the founder of the country's first royal dynasty.
Rioters also vandalised a large obelisk commemorating Soviet soldiers
who were killed driving Nazi forces from Hungary at the end of the
second world war.