ORBÁN: EUROPEAN PEOPLE’S PARTY WAS BORN

National petition to modify the budget; Wilfried Martens has criticized harshly the former Communists in power.

Fidesz started a campaign on Saturday for collecting one million signatures to support a national petition. The party’s alliance meeting has closed down an epoch of Fidesz when it became a European people’s party from a small party of young democrats. The governing parties find the national petition a campaign manoeuvre while the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) agrees with the goal but finds the method not appropriate.

More than ten thousand people heard Viktor Orbán, chairman of Fidesz on Saturday in the Budapest Sport Arena. The former Prime Minister claimed that in Hungary the change of regime had not taken place yet. In the meeting leaders of the allied parties and movements have also spoken like those of Fidelitas, Hungarian Christian Democratic Union, Smallholders’ Civic Association, and Lungo Drom. Mátyás Szűrös, chairman of the Social Democratic party also addressed the meeting while Wilfried Martens, chairman of the European People’s Party stressed that ’there are still in power in Hungary the men of the Communist dictatorship who should disappear in the dark shadows of the past from where they came’.

Translated by Péter Szentmihályi Szabó