“By staying away, the government declared that they do not want to help foreign-currency loan-holders,” LMP co-leader Bernadett Szél said. Ákos Hadházy, the party’s other co-leader, accused the Fidesz parliamentary group of “laziness, insensitivity— and probably cowardice too”.

“The governing parties have admitted taking away a thousand billion forints of extra profits that banks made on foreign currency lending but they did not help the indebted,” he added.
Dániel Z Kárpát, deputy leader of the radical nationalist Jobbik party, said that negotiations must be launched with foreign-currency creditors with a view to converting loans into forints at the exchange rate at which they were taken out.

Only then should their damages be discussed, he added. The government, he said, had legalised a “billionaire’s rip-off machine” and taken people’s money and credited it to the accounts of the banks.

Jobbik and LMP have both called for eviction and non-payment procedures to be suspended. Earlier, an LMP spokesman said some 60,000 families faced being evicted and around 10,000 such procedures were already under way.

Bertalan Tóth of the Socialist Party noted that the so-called foreign-currency loan problem had not gone away and continued to blight the lives of many Hungarian families. The government has still not resolved the issue, the party’s parliamentary group leader said. He demanded that the central bank turn a portion of its profits made in connection with the conversion of FX loans into forints with a view to providing financial help for the troubled borrowers.

Republished with permission of Hungary Matters, MTI’s daily newsletter.