Opposition Hold Anti-government Rally In Hungary

Last updated on: January 2, 2012 at 5:23 pm by

Opposition Hold Anti-government Rally In Hungary 2012-01-02T17:23:00-07:00

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BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Activists were gathering in Budapest on Monday to protest the way their center-right government has used the law and the country’s new constitution to exert its control over issues as varied as the economy, religious freedom and age discrimination.

The opposition parties and civic groups were holding the anti-government demonstration near the State Opera, where Hungary’s top leaders will be attending a gala celebrating the constitution on Monday night.

The activists say Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his center-right Fidesz party, which has a two-thirds parliamentary majority, have passed laws eroding the democratic system of checks and balances by, among other measures, increasing political control over the judiciary, the central bank, religious groups and the media.

The European Union, the United States and international watchdogs have criticized many of the government’s recent moves.

Hungary is facing a possible recession in 2012 and has turned to the International Monetary Fund and the European Union for financial aid. But preliminary talks ended prematurely in December after the government went ahead with a new central bank law, despite criticism from the EU that it will diminish the independence of the National Bank of Hungary.

Hungary’s new constitution, approved in April by Fidesz during an opposition boycott, went into effect on New Year’s Day. While the government said the new basic law completes the transition from communism to democracy which began in 1989, opponents say it entrenches the current government’s power and forces a conservative view of the world on the whole country.

Human rights groups have expressed concerns about lifetime prison sentences without the possibility for parole for violent crimes and a ban on discrimination does not specifically mention age or sexual orientation.

The law’s protection of the life of a fetus from the moment of conception was also seen as clearing the way for a possible future ban or restrictions on abortions.

A group of former anti-communist dissidents said the country’s constitutional system is in a “critical situation.”

“Never since the regime change of 1989, when the communist dictatorship was crushed, has there been such an intense concentration of power in the region as in present-day Hungary,” said a statement signed by, among others, writer Gyorgy Konrad, former Budapest Mayor Gabor Demszky and Miklos Haraszti, a former media freedom representative at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

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