Police and demonstrators clash in Hungary
Hundreds of police fired water cannon and tear gas on demonstrators in Budapest seeking to force Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany out of office.
But Gyurcsany was standing his ground today, saying his government intended to carry out his reform plans.
Protesters raged in a second night of unrest following Gyurcsany’s leaked admission that his government repeatedly lied to the public about the economy, setting police cars on fire and hurling plaster from nearby buildings at officers.
As many as 50 people were injured, including one policeman who was seriously hurt before the clashes broke up a few hours before daybreak, reports said. Some 1,000 police officers had been mobilised to quell the protests, the state news agency MTI said.
The most violent clashes involved splinter groups that had broken off from a larger demonstration of about 10,000 people, MTI said.
The confrontations demonstrated the continued high potential for violence amid radical opponents of Gyurcsany, whose taped comments set off the country’s worst violence since its failed anti-Soviet revolution 50 years ago after being leaked on the weekend.
But Gyurcsany – whose taped comments admitting his government had “lied morning, evening and night” about the economy provoked the fury – remained unbowed today.
Warning against new violence, he told reporters at the start of a Cabinet meeting: “We’ll have no patience for them. The policy of raw emotions and radicalism are in no way a viable path,” he said.
He added: “The government doesn’t want to change its policy.”
The latest violence came just a day after hundreds of demonstrators stormed and vandalised part of the state television building in clashes that left more than 100 people hurt.
Police tried to scatter the protesters early today, pushing them back from Socialist party headquarters and scuffling with small groups on side streets.
The protesters regrouped, blocking a main thoroughfare with rubbish containers and park benches. A bus, its windshield broken, was caught in the swirling mass of police and demonstrators. As the confrontation neared its third hour, police divided the crowd into three groups and deployed water cannons to force them in different directions in a new attempt to disperse them.
About 50 people had been detained by the time the clashes ended, MTI said, quoting police. As morning dawned, municipal clean-up crews converged on the scene, working around the burned-out hulk of the police vehicle.
The violent group had split away from the estimated 10,000 people gathered on Kossuth Square, the vast plaza abutting the neo-Gothic parliament building.
Only about 60 remained by daybreak today. But some insisted they would remain until Gyurcsany’s resignation.
“I hope we can accomplish our goal,” said Tamas Szep, 48, a paint supplies wholesaler. “Not only the prime minister but all of his sidekicks also have to go.”
A 22-year-old student who identified herself only as Mariann compared Gyurcsany to a child caught telling lies and suggested that the Socialist Party leader, who is friendly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, be banished to Siberia.
“My mother used to stand me in the corner for lying,” she said. “Gyurcsany should stand in the corner of Siberia for lying to the whole country.”
The outpouring of rage was additionally fuelled by austerity measures implemented by Gyurcsany’s Socialist-led coalition, seeking to rein in a government budget deficit expected to surpass 10% of Hungary’s gross domestic product this year – the largest in the European Union.
The government has raised taxes and announced plans to lay off dozens of employees and to introduce direct fees in the health sector and tuition for most university students.
Opposition leader Viktor Orban, whose centre-right FIDESZ party lost in the elections, also demanded the prime minister’s resignation, calling him a “sick, lying dilettante.”
The violence shook a country that for much of the last two decades had been held up as a model of progress following the collapse of communism in eastern Europe.
The public was stunned by the blunt admissions of government ineptitude during its first term and the cynicism contained in a 25-minute tape widely aired and published by news media.
“We did nothing for four years. Nothing,” Gyurcsany says on the tape, made during a private talk with Socialist parliament members peppered with crude expressions. Later, he says: “We screwed up. Not a little, a lot.
“No European country has done something as boneheaded as we have,” he says on the tape. “... Plainly, we lied throughout the last year and a half, two years.”
