Gergely Karácsony, the liberal Mayor of Budapest, ordered all public transport in the city to stop between 11.50am and 12.00pm on Friday, 6 June. Budapest residents leading up to the halt could hear Mayor Karácsony’s voice through the intercom of the transport system, explaining that it is in protest of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary supposedly taking away resources from the capital city government.
The municipal Budapest government is in dire financial strain, as even city officials admit.
Mayor Karácsony himself has been sounding the alarm in the media lately about an independent bankruptcy of his city’s government. He is blaming the so-called ‘solidarity contribution’ the national government is collecting from municipalities with high tax revenues to fund ones with lower revenues. The Mayor is claiming that the Hungarian State Treasury has removed 10.2 billion HUF ($28.85 million) from the Budapest government’s bank accounts, mostly in solidarity contribution payments. Budapest is currently challenging the garnishment in court.
The national Fidesz administration, however, is blaming the irresponsible fiscal policies of the liberal city leadership for their financial woes. Leader of the Fidesz faction in the City Council Alexandra Szentkirályi claims that Mayor Karácsony has accepted an annual budget for Budapest with 50 billion HUF ($141.5 million) in funding deficit.
What’s more, in February of this year, the liberal Budapest leadership committed additional tens of billions of Forints to acquiring the Rákosrendező area from the Hungarian state railway company MÁV, in order to stop a new investment project the Orbán administration had agreed to with the United Arab Emirates.
Amidst all that, buses, trams, metros, and trolley buses stopped for ten minutes in Budapest earlier today.
Mayor Karácsony warned that if the Fidesz government continues to ‘rip off’ Budapest, public transport may have to be stopped for ten weeks, not ten minutes. State Secretary for Fidesz Csaba Latorcai, however, argues that Mayor Karácsony does not have the authority to order the public transportation in Budapest to stop, thus the stunt was illegal.
Mayor Karácsony is walking on thin ice with the Budapest votes: last year, he only won re-election by an extremely narrow, 293-vote margin after multiple recounts.
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