The history of the Third Republic had been free from political violence until recently, when the public spaces of Budapest were taken over, for varying lengths of time, by street fighters both uniformed and civilian. Equally unprecedented was the publication with impunity, in the October 17 issue of a daily closely linked to one of the political factions, of language purely insane on any level of textual interpretation, which incited racially motivated violence so extreme as to include murder. Such phenomena fill almost every Hungarian citizen with well-founded trepidation. without regard to political standpoint. This anxiety is only aggravated if the police responds to violence by violating laws in its turn. Irrespectively of where each of us hopes to glimpse the way out of the political crisis, everyone concerned about the fate of democracy in this country should concur that the solution must be a peaceful one and remain within parliamentary limits. And it is the shared responsibility of the incumbent government and the opposition to ensure that this is how it will be.
The original statement is available on our Hungarian page.
