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.
The crowd on Hősök Tere (Heroes’ Square)
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.
Inside the crowd
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.
A drone is about to fly above the crowd on Hősök tere
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.
Elderly lady in the crowd
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! 🙂
Related articles
Politics in Hungary 
Angela Bogazcy
/ 02/04/2014This is really touching, Leto: heart-warming text, beautiful pics. Thank you.
One must sigh, though: What will happen now? I can almost hear the shuffling of paper and tactics as the swine prepare to take an international ‘go’ at Hungary after the elections. Bayer Zsolt has come up with a good article on this sort of thing: ‘they’ did in in 1920, when it was obvious that the nation won’t have a bar of them. Again, after 1968, when the government turfed out the Lukacs School of Philosophy (including the Heller Agnes witch), a massive Hungary-maligning press ran down Hungary in the ugliest of terms. (My parents have kept the cuttings. One of them is from my mother’s professor, a fervent Catholic apologist and USSR admirer, who opined that 1956 was a ‘fascist backlash’.) We all saw/go on seeing what the usual suspects (Paul Lendvai, Andra Schiff, Gati proxies like Kim Scheppele, the UK’s Guardian and FT, etc.) have been doing in the press ever since 2010. Then of course there is the EU. It was poised to take down our government, and put in its own ‘managers’, as you have remarked in an earlier article — despite the government’s 2/3 of parliamentary seats. Will we ever get rid of the scum who have crushed and exploited this country since 1945 — ‘rid of’ to the extent that their international friends will see no point in trying to rehabilitate them? (This is a pessimistic note, I know. Sorry.)
LikeLike
Leto مؤدّب
/ 02/04/2014That “international go” will be more and more difficult to do if the country would get stronger and stronger… Success is the best counter-argument. 🙂
LikeLike
Angela Bogazcy
/ 02/04/2014Adja az Isten. And bless you for this blog.
LikeLike
Voice of reason
/ 31/03/2014Saint Mary the patron saint of Hungary – I thought that was Saint Istvan.
LikeLike
Leto مؤدّب
/ 31/03/2014I’d say both of them can be considered patron saints.
“Stephen I, the first Hungarian king (997–1038), offered his country to Mary as the patroness of the Hungarians (Magyarok Nagyasszonya) at the end of his reign. As a consequence, the country was often referred to as Mary’s realm, the Regnum Marianum”
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1242593/Boldogasszony
We, Hungarians love to duplicate things. 😀 “Szózat” is a kind of a second anthem for us (like I wrote in the post). Before establishing a Christian kingdom, Hungarians had a dual leadership: a spiritual leader (“kende”) and a warrior CEO (“gyula”), kinda like the Japanese Emperor and the shogun.
LikeLike
Angela Bogazcy
/ 02/04/2014Where does Szent Gellért come in on the ‘patron saint’ count? 🙂
LikeLike
Leto مؤدّب
/ 02/04/2014He’s one of the Hungarian saints, like St. Elizabeth, St. Margaret, St. Ladislaus, etc. but he’s not a “patron saint”. :p
LikeLike
Hungarian Guest
/ 30/03/2014God Bless Hungary!
LikeLike
Angela Bogazcy
/ 02/04/2014Amen.
LikeLike
Hungarian
/ 30/03/2014Kool pics Leto.
Keep up the good job!
LikeLike
Angela Bogazcy
/ 02/04/2014Hear, hear!
LikeLike