A short side street in the Socialist-led 13th district of Budapest was named after Gyula Horn (1932-2013) last summe. Budapest Government Commissioner Botond Sára has now called on the Municipal Council to revise that decision as the law doesn’t allow streets to be named after personalities who ‘took part in establishing and/or maintaining totalitarian dictatorships.’

(Gyula Horn served in the ranks of the communist militia after the 1956 revolution was crushed by Soviet troops. He was Socialist Party chairman from 1990 to 1998 and Prime Minister from 1994 to 1998.)

In Magyar Nemzet, Ottó Gajdics finds it revolting that a member of the 1956 communist militia should be presented as a role model for the nation’s youth. He sarcastically suggests that Horn is a ‘political giant’ compared to the current left-wing leaders, but that doesn’t justify venerating him in democratic Hungary.

If today’s socialists want to celebrate him, Gajdics writes, let them do so among themselves but they should bear in mind the existence ‘of us, right-wingers whose points of view are not inferior to yours’.

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