There had already been protests in the past few days.
For the fifth day in a row, thousands of people took part in anti-government demonstrations in the Hungarian capital Budapest. They temporarily occupied the Margaret Bridge over the Danube and marched through several boulevards in the city.
The protests are directed against a tax reform planned by the cabinet of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The demonstrators fear that this would result in hundreds of thousands of small business owners having to pay higher taxes. The reform was passed by the Hungarian parliament on Tuesday.
Orban defends reforms
These are the first major demonstrations against Orban since his clear election victory in April against an alliance around opposition politician Peter Marki-Zay. At a rally in front of the demonstrators in Budapest, Marki-Zay said that Orban’s election promises were “demonstrably lies”. Orban himself had defended the tax reform as “good and necessary” in his regular radio speech on Friday.
Despite state price limits for essential goods, Hungary is struggling with high inflation and the collapse of the national currency, the forint. Observers blame the government in Budapest’s dispute with the EU Commission over the payment of funds from the EU’s Corona recovery fund and the resulting economic uncertainties for the weakness of the forint.
EU aid frozen
Brussels had frozen the billions in aid due to a lack of anti-corruption measures and constitutional problems in Hungary. The country, which is heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas, also declared a state of emergency on Wednesday because of the energy crisis resulting from the Ukraine war.
In order to deal with the crisis, the Hungarian government plans, among other things, to have households with above-average energy consumption pay the market price for gas in the future – instead of the lower, state-subsidized tariffs that have been customary for consumers up to now.
