1956, state commemoration – Orbán: October 23 a ‘day to be proud’

Budapest, October 23 (MTI) – October 23 is a day on which Hungarians should be proud, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said at the state commemoration of Hungary’s anti-Soviet uprising of 1956 at Budapest’s Kossuth Square in front of Parliament on Sunday.

Even after 60 years, October 23 is still a day that “lifts up and cleanses us”, the prime minister said, calling the national holiday a “shared heritage” of the Hungarian people.

He said Hungarians can be thankful to the heroes of 1956 that Hungarians had much to be proud of even in “the darkest years of Hungary’s history”.

At the beginning of his speech, Orbán greeted Polish President Andrzej Duda, the guest of honour at this year’s celebrations. Orbán described Hungarian-Polish relations as a one thousand-year-old friendship of two “courageous” nations.

Hungarians will always fight for freedom and will achieve it “even in the most hopeless of situations,” Orbán insisted. “We, Hungarians, have a talent for freedom, we have always known how to use it. He warned that freedom is “not a final state but a way of existence; just like swimming: you stop doing it and you will sink”. The question is always this simple: whether we decide on our own fate or other people,” he added.

Concerning the European Union, Orbán said that “freedom-loving peoples of Europe must save Brussels from Sovietisation”. He argued that the EU must not be turned into a “modern-age empire”; the community must not be replaced by a “United States of Europe”. “We, Hungarians, want to remain a European nation, rather than become an ethnic minority in Europe,” Orban insisted. “It is only our national independence that can save us from being devoured by an empire,” Orbán said, and argued that it was that very “national idea” that had saved Hungary from being integrated into the Soviet Union.