Following the shocking events that unfolded as Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol building in Washington DC on Wednesday, many leading Hungarian politicians have shared their thoughts on the chaos that claimed the lives of four people.
Family minister Katalin Novák, the vice-president of governing Fidesz, expressed her shock of the Wednesday events at the Capitol.
Shocking pictures from #CapitolHill #Democracy should be safeguarded before, during and after the elections all over the world.
— Katalin Novák (@KatalinNovakMP) January 6, 2021
“Shocking pictures from Capitol Hill. Democracy should be safeguarded before, during, and after the elections all over the world”, she said on Twitter.
Lawmaker Lőrinc Nacsa, the spokesman of the smaller governing party’s parliamentary group KDNP(Christian-democrats), was also stunned by the incident. “Violence can never be the answer”, he tweeted.
Opposition politicians also condemned the events in Washington, and most of them drew a parallel between Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“The world is witness to dramatic moments,” said former PM Ferenc Gyurcsány, the leader of leftist opposition party Democratic Coalition.
“We tend to consider America the strongest democracy on earth. Yesterday, a few thousand citizens attacked this democracy with anger and violence”, he said, adding that the presidency of Donald Trump leaves an important legacy behind in understanding what nationalist, narcissistic populism brings to people.
Ágnes Kunhalmi called the action of protesters who broke into the building of the US Congress unacceptable. According to the co-leader of the Socialist party (MSZP), this is the disregard of values of democracy.
“There is no means of changing the will of the people expressed in their elections. Such an act is committed only by those who want to introduce a dictatorship or at least an authoritarian system. We, Hungarian Democrats, are in full solidarity with those who defend the historical values of American democracy”, she said on social media.
Liberal Momentum MEP Katalin Cseh wrote that, we “saw shocking and heartbreaking images in the US, one of the homelands of democracy”.
“We witnessed what happens when someone uses their power to turn people against each other, demolish democratic institutions and disregard the rules, refusing to accept when they are defeated in a free and fair election,” she wrote on Facebook.
Katalin Cseh finds how rude public discourse around the world has become and the damages populist leaders can do is saddening, adding that Joe Biden needs to bring peace and reassurance, restoring public confidence in democratic institutions.
According to Márton Gyöngyösi, Jobbik’s Member of the EP, the riots and the deaths are the result of the politics of Orbán’s role model, the outgoing US President Donald Trump, who questioned whether the election was clean in advance and then refused to acknowledge his defeat. The Jobbik politician concluded that some of the Orbán government’s comments showed “interesting similarities” with the US.
Independent MP Ákos Hadházy wrote on social media that “when we try to get to know the near future of our country, we need to pay close attention to what is happening in Russia and Turkey.”
According to Hadházy, Viktor Orbán mainly copies Putin’s and Erdogan’s systems and methods, even if in a more restrained way but “for a few years, however, he also had a role model in America”, which he finds particularly unsettling in light of yesterday’s events.
“It is worth bearing in mind with what, whom we are dealing with: someone who sees no expense in accumulating power and who has constructed a parallel reality in which he can never lose, Hadházy concluded in his post on Facebook.
Featured photo by Julio Cortez/AP/MTI
