At a retrospective conference jointly organised by Veritas Research Institute and the Office of the National Assembly, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that the task and the crucial issue of the coming three years will be the consolidation of a civic Hungary which was dreamt of 25 years ago.
At the conference, held on the 25th anniversary of the formation of the first freely-elected National Assembly, the Prime Minister said that achieving this will be a task of no less magnitude – although different – than the shift from communism or guiding through the constitutional revolution of 2010.
According to Mr. Orbán, there is sufficient mandate and strength to implement the programme of a civic Hungary. Twenty years of struggle, a victorious constitutional revolution, five years of determined fighting, the clearing of rubble and the laying of foundations have been necessary, he said.
Talking about the 1989–90 period, he said that attitudes to those events are nowadays far less direct than they were back then. Looking through the eyes of those times at today’s Hungary “we would probably not even believe that, surmounting so many obstacles, we have come so far in such a short time”. With today’s eyes, however, “we tend to see the negative things and the mistakes”: for example, the one million jobs eliminated with the fall of communism, the loss of eastern markets, or “spontaneous privatization”.
According to the Prime Minister, by 2010 the majority of Hungarians felt that they were losers as a result of the fall of communism: “the momentum, the energy and the enthusiasm defining the early nineteen-nineties was broken and lost”. And, he added, the 2008 financial crisis had decimated the trust which, after forty years of communism, Hungarians had placed in an unregulated market economy and liberal democracy.
Mr. Orbán summed up his view by saying that there are fewer and fewer people who are able to see the benefits of the fall of communism, with more and more who can only see the negative side.
At the same time he said that József Antall – the first prime minister of a free Hungary – must be remembered with the greatest respect. The audience enthusiastically applauded this statement. Mr. Orbán said that Fate gave Mr. Antall the demanding task of “leading our country past the Scylla and Charybdis of domestic and foreign policy from a messy dictatorship to representative democracy, from planned economy to market economy”.
He pointed out, however, that the market economy system made many things visible that had long been hidden from people’s eyes by socialism: unemployment, inflation, realistic market prices and the crisis situation of large industrial companies. There were some who would have “fled back”, and “promises playing on nostalgia for the Kádár regime essentially derailed the process of shifting from communism”, he said, noting that those who went into the 1994 election campaign only promising what was within the capacities of the country had no chance of winning.
The obvious breakpoint, however, was the autumn of 2006, when former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s “Balatonőszöd speech” was made public. The reason that the period starting with the formation of the first freely-elected National Assembly had to end in 2010 was – in addition to the 2008 economic crisis of – this crisis of confidence, Mr. Orbán said.
The Prime Minister said that in 2010 – even if with a “time lag” of two decades – the Hungarian nation “decided to conduct a revolution”, with which the voters gave the Government enough power “to do all that was demanded by our homeland”. He asked who would have thought in 1994 that “our political community” would establish a two-thirds parliamentary majority, and that it would make the “cancelled” revolution a success. He emphasised that in 2014, with the second two-thirds mandate, Hungarians also put an end to a decades-long debate.
In conclusion the Prime Minister said that over the last five years it has been proven that through cooperation “we can achieve things that seem impossible”. As examples he mentioned galvanising the economy, freeing families and local governments from “debt slavery”, taxing international companies and banks and “sending home” the IMF. And Europe’s most up-to-date constitution has made possible the implementation of the most difficult and wide-ranging structural and economic transformations, he added; he contrasted the new Fundamental Law with the constitution of 1949, which did not oblige governments to serve the national interest.
“We are protecting families, giving work instead of benefits and standing up for Hungarian interests in Brussels – and we have also regained our national sovereignty. We have fought a good fight and relished it – this was men’s work. We thank our womenfolk for their assistance”, Mr. Orbán said.