By Anita Komuves
BUDAPEST (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in downtown Budapest on Saturday against Viktor Orban’s government, led by a former lawyer close to the administration who recently launched a political movement aimed at challenging the Prime minister.
Protesters marched to Parliament in unusually warm spring weather, some of them shouting “we are not afraid” and “Orban resign!”.
Many wore the red-white-green national colors or flew the national flag, symbols that Orban’s party has used as its own over the past two decades.
“These are the national colors of Hungary, not the government,” said Lejla, 24, who traveled to Budapest from Sopron, a town on the country’s western border.
The march was led by Peter Magyar, 43, who was married to Orban’s former justice minister, Judit Varga, and who plans to eventually launch his own party.
Three protesters interviewed by Reuters said Magyar had appealed to them because he was close to the Orban government and knew how it worked.
“We knew there was corruption, but he said it as an insider and confirmed it to us,” said Zsuzsanna Szigeti, a 46-year-old caregiver carrying a Hungarian flag that covered her entire body.
She expressed concern about the education and health systems, as well as corruption. “I hope there will be a change,” she said.
Magyar rose to prominence in February when he made incendiary remarks about the inner workings of government. He accused Antal Rogan, the minister who heads Orban’s office, of running a centralized propaganda machine.
He also released a recording of a conversation with his ex-wife in which Varga detailed an attempt by a senior aide to Orban’s chief of staff to interfere in a corruption case. Prosecutors are currently investigating the statements.
The investigation comes at a politically sensitive time for Orban, ahead of June’s European parliamentary elections, and follows a sex abuse scandal that brought down two of his main political allies – the former president and Varga – in February.
According to data from the Median survey institute, published by the weekly HVG in mid-March, 68% of voters have heard of Magyar’s entry into the political sphere and 13% of them declared that they would be likely to support his party.
(Reporting by Anita Komuves; editing by Giles Elgood)
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