BUDAPEST — Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar has accused his predecessor, Viktor Orbán, of plotting a state coup over a remark about handing out “appropriate tools,” and has warned him of criminal prosecution. TASS reported the accusation on Sunday.
Orbán, who was re-elected Fidesz leader in June after his party’s April election defeat, was meeting party activists in the city of Lakitelek. Asked about the “national resistance” he had announced earlier, he said the country is not yet ready for that, but that Fidesz already could “hand appropriate tools.” He then added, in a tone TASS called ironic, that “whether people get something blunter or sharper isn’t really the point.”
In his Facebook post, as TASS rendered it, Magyar said Orbán “spoke with a laugh about an armed uprising and a forcible change of the constitutional order,” which he called “one of the most serious crimes against the state.” He added that the Criminal Code punishes such actions with up to life in prison. He attached a video of the meeting.
The dispute turns on how one sentence is read: as an ironic aside, which is how TASS described Orbán’s closing words, or as the talk of an armed uprising that Magyar says he heard. A sitting prime minister invoking the Criminal Code against his predecessor turns that difference into a legal question, not only a rhetorical one.
The remark landed in a long-running standoff. TASS reported that Orbán has repeatedly said Fidesz will not cooperate with the Magyar government because the party considers the government’s actions unlawful and anti-democratic.
On September 13, according to that account, Orbán declared that the period of tolerance toward the policies of the ruling Tisza had come to an end and that the opposition was launching active resistance. He also called the new government “neo-communists,” claiming it had established a political dictatorship.
Much of this rests on one report. TASS’s account carries no reply from Fidesz, and The Eastern Herald has not reviewed the video Magyar posted, so the exact words and tone depend on TASS’s rendering of a Facebook post and a recording. Nor does the report say whether any complaint has been filed, or who would decide whether the remark amounts to the offence Magyar describes.
