Fidesz held an election rally today. As expected, a huge crowd walked from the Parliament to Hősök Tere to listen to the speeches held by Joseph Daul, the president of the centre-of-right European Peoples’ Party Fidesz belongs to in the European Parliament, István Pásztor, the president of VMSZ and, of course and most importantly, Viktor Orbán, Fidesz-president and prime minister of Hungary who enjoys a kind of a rock-star status in Hungary. 🙂
Here is a panoramic picture from Magyar Nemzet, the daily I read. I myself couldn’t make a picture which would do justice to the size of the crowd.
However from now I’m going to post my own pictures.
First I drove to the P+R car park of Kelenföld terminal of the new Fourth Metro line which opened yesterday and tried to find a parking lot in the P+R car park… It was very busy because others may have similarly chosen not to drive in the city in order to avoid traffic jams and parking problems. BTW, you can ride this particular underground line for free till tomorrow evening. 🙂 There was a lot of people in the underground, the Budapest folks themselves are also curious to see the new underground line.
The underground trains are fully automated, that is there are no human drivers! The long and sad story of this underground construction would merit a separate post in fact, as an epitome of insane left-liberal (MSZP-SZDSZ) corruptness and inaptitude…
Anyway, here are some pics I took:
I caught up with Peace March on Andrássy út, the large long boulevard leading to Hősök tere.
I would say perhaps most people in the crowd were middle-aged like myself or they were elderly. However there were a lot of young people as well and many families with small children, too. Apparently mostly ordinary Hungarian middle-class, or perhaps working-class, people attended the rally but I also saw some who couldn’t fit the bill: a group of “Goths” or a bunch of English lads. Based on their accents, which I was familiar with, they could have been a stag party straight from Bristol (West Country of England). I tried to eavesdrop a bit to find out what on Earth they were doing there… All right, I know eavesdropping isn’t nice but I was damned curious! 😀 In the end I didn’t get a clue and, of course, I didn’t want to butt in by telling them I understood their banters.
The crowd was estimated (by the Ministry of Interior Affairs) to consist of 440,000-460,000 people which sounds a bit exaggerated to me but there you go… I saw such drones were used to make aerial pictures so perhaps I’m wrong and there were so many people there indeed. As always, the news agency AFP put this like “more than 100,000 people”, and some other Western news portals wrote about “tens of thousands”, of course… No surprise there.
As it’s customary on political rallies in Hungary, especially on the ones held in Budapest, people carried signs with the names of the towns and villages they came from. Besides the political message, this also has a practical purpose: it helps groups to keep together.What I can say for a fact is that people came from all over the Carpathian Basin… This sign, also reciting the first line of our “second anthem” Szózat, says the group came from Felvidék (officially known as “Slovakia”)
I really liked this flag with Saint Mary, the patron saint of Hungary:
Out of politeness, and also to comply with Hungary’s law bashed by the Left, see for example this Guardian article, I asked permission from this elderly lady to make a picture of her and her lovely hat with the national colours ribbon. She was moved and happy to grant me permission and then we had a little chat, together with her husband.
You may ask what the speeches were about… well, I’m afraid there’s not much to say. The gist of it was that “Fidesz is onto a winner in the elections on the 6th of April but we, supporters still must do our best to mobilize and convince people to give Fidesz another four years in government”. I myself didn’t feel disappointed because of the lack of sophisticated and lofty thoughts and I doubt other people would have either: it was simply a great get-together in fabulous spring weather!
Hajrá Magyarország, hajrá magyarok! 🙂