The following is the English translation of a press release kindly provided to us by the Center for Fundamental Rights.
‘Every time the left has come to power in Hungary, it has ended in austerity,’ Chief of the Prime Minister of Hungary’s Office Gergely Gulyás said at the Center for Fundamental Rights’ event titled Hungary 2025–2026. According to Minister Gulyás, the Tisza Party’s proposals would require several trillion forints from the national government’s budget.
At the Center’s year-end forum, Gulyás said the Tisza Party’s ‘harsh, austerity-driven’ programme is not only motivated by financing the war in Ukraine and supporting Ukraine’s EU accession by 2029. In his view, another reason is that the current Hungarian government is placing heavy burdens on multinational corporations and international banks—something ‘Brussels does not like’. He also argued that the Tisza Party would scrap these taxes and make ‘Hungarian citizens foot the bill’ for the resulting budget gap. Minister Gulyás spoke in a special episode of the #Free Hungarians podcast with Miklós Szánthó, Director General of the Center for Fundamental Rights, and István Kovács, its strategic director.
Szánthó noted: ‘If the Tisza Party insists it doesn’t have a left-wing platform, why are its own members relying on the work of old left-wing experts?’ He was referring to figures such as László Kéri, Mária Zita Petschnig, and Péter Felcsuti. In response, Gulyás said that in his view, ‘there is only one left-wing elite, and the Tisza Party isn’t even trying to separate itself from it.’
Kovács then asked the Minister about the upcoming elections, saying: ‘Opinion polls again show the strengthening of the governing parties. What needs to happen over the next four months to prevent the Tisza Party from coming to power and implementing austerity worth thousands of billions?’ In reply, Gulyás emphasized that if everyone involved performs their tasks as they did in 2022 and the period leading up to it, then a confident civic victory is still realistic—because, as he put it, ‘people understand what it would mean if a Tisza–DK coalition were to lead the country.’
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