Will the Orbán cabinet close Hungary’s busiest Budapest-Vienna motorway due to disease?

The opposition Tisza Party expects the government to “enact immediate and real measures” to contain an outbreak of food-and-mouth disease in Hungary, Peter Magyar, the party’s leader, said in a statement on Wednesday, calling on the government to resolve the problems related to combating infections.

The deadly disease continues to spread

Magyar said the steps taken so far to contain the outbreak “raise several questions”, given the measures taken by Austria after outbreaks reported near its border.

He said the party wanted to know why the armed forces had not been deployed to secure farms affected by the outbreak as high-risk epidemiological locations. He also asked the government why disinfection gates had not been installed at border crossings and around observation zones and why there was no comprehensive information campaign on the infectiousness of the disease and the economic risks associated with it. Magyar said his party also wanted to know why there have not been measures implemented to address the market disruptions affecting farmers in the observation zones.

He said the most important task was to make the decisions necessary to contain the spread of the disease, adding that professional organisations and livestock farms in Gyor-Moson-Sopron County in the north-west had put forward multiple proposals on which “no progress has been made on the part of the agriculture ministry”.