Hungarian opposition parties commemorate 1956 uprising

Opposition leaders on Sunday addressed gatherings in Budapest on the occasion of the 66th anniversary of the outbreak of the 1956 revolution and freedom fight.

“Everyone belongs to the nation,” Ágnes Kunhalmi, co-leader of the opposition Socialist Party, said at the statue of Imre Nagy. “The streetfighters of the 1956 uprising, martyred prime minister Imre Nagy, as well as those who are now fighting for a better education, have been key to the nation’s future,” she said.

Kunhalmi insisted that in recent years Fidesz had tried to deny the role of Imre Nagy in the events, focusing solely on the young streetfighter heroes of the uprising. But the martyred prime minister “played just as an important role in 1956 as those who fought in the streets against an authoritarian regime”, and was a victim of it, she added.

Kunhalmi said the young people demonstrating today for a better education, a better country, and a shared national cause “are also victims of this authoritarian regime”, which Fidesz, she insisted, had built over the past 12 years.

Socialist co-leader Imre Komjáthi said that in October 1956 the Hungarian people had rejected dictatorship and embraced democracy. “Our task today is to lead Hungary back to the path of democracy,” he said.

Bence Tordai, co-leader of the opposition Párbeszéd party, said the hopes and objectives of 1956 had been fulfilled when Hungary became a free and sovereign country thirty years later.

• Read also: 23 October: Hungarians have never given up freedom

Tordai was speaking at his party’s commemoration of the 1956 uprising at the monument of Péter Mansfeld, the youngest victim of the reprisals, in Budapest’s 1st district. As the heroes of 1956 were the young streetfighters, Tordai said, “our hope is again invested in the young people who are out in the streets,” where they “must face an authoritarian regime … and protect their lives, their future, and the life and fate of their teachers.”

Recalling Péter Mansfeld and the other young heroes of 1956, Tordai said nobody should give up hope, and if they had lost hope, they should think of those who never gave up, since later on history confirmed the validity of their ideas and aspirations.