In a speech assessing the state of the nation over the past year, Gyurcsany said the country was on the cusp of "a big-scale, historic battle". "We will have to face things, challenges and conflicts we are not accustomed to."

Gyurcsany said he saw Hungary as "a tired, basically declining country with a leader who has turned into a big-time villain of historic proportions." Prime Minister Viktor Orban "has no interest, plan or the strength to try to create a better life for multitudes of Hungarians."

Hungary, he said, lagged behind in Europe and the region when it came to incomes, "but it is a European champion when it comes to inflation".

Meanwhile, the number of children born "is the lowest in living memory", he said.

"There's no point in engaging with what Viktor Orban is saying, because his actions won't improve our lives; they will only bring insolvent battery factories," he said.

He said Orban was spending money "as if it came from a bottomless pit". "While announcing the biggest tax cuts in the world, Orban failed to mention that Hungary is a world champion in the types of taxes imposed on people and companies," he said.

"The real achievement of governance is having doctors in hospitals ... and English and maths teachers. Banning a march is not an achievement," Gyurcsany said.

The former Socialist prime minister said DK was against "the Orban regime" rather than Orban personally.

He said Orban had eliminated the republic and butted heads with Europe "with the backing of his increasingly radicalised party". Meanwhile, "he is flirting with unsavoury foreign heads of state and turning the country into an ideological re-education camp with primitive, aggressive methods," he said.

He also slammed US President Donald Trump, saying his actions since his inauguration "are the height of treason and irresponsibility".

"Abandoning Ukraine is actually the betrayal of Europe as well as Ukraine," he said.

Concerns about "the alliance between the troublemakers like Orban and Trump and the world of the super-rich" were entirely justified, Gyurcsany said.

Hungary's opposition parties, he said, were in agreement that "the regime" should be broken apart "but disagrees on the right means to that end", he said.

DK would ramp up the oversight of banks, "because there is no fair competition or market". Bank fees should be strictly regulated and unilateral changes to business regulations banned, he said.

Balazs Hidveghi, a state secretary of the Prime Minister's Cabinet Office, said in reaction that "Gyurcsany still fails to grasp the events of the world and the interests of Hungary in it."

He called it "absurd" that "the person whose disastrous government pushed Hungary into economic, political and moral bankruptcy, and led to Fidesz's two-thirds majority, is now talking of good governance." He said that DK's programme was based on that of Klara Dobrev's shadow government, "which later dissolved itself due to a lack of interest. They failed before they even came to power."

"Every opposition event proves that these people couldn't be trusted with a corner shop, let alone a country," Hidveghi said.
 

Source: 
MTI - The Hungarian News Agency, founded in 1881.

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