“Putin nyet! Europe yes!”

Around three thousand protesters demonstrated their opposition to Vladimir Putin on the eve of the Russian President’s arrival in Budapest for meetings with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and President János Áder.  They did so by marching from Budapest’s “Eastern” (Keleti) train station to the “Western” (Nyugati) train station, thereby symbolically demonstrating their commitment to the West.   “Putin nyet. Europe yes!” demonstrators heard as organizers Márton Gulyás and Károly Füzessy delivered speeches, as did Energy Club president Adá Ámon, former LMP MP Gábor Vágó and a young Ukrainian woman from the Crimea.

Leading the crowd was a small truck on which speakers had been mounted.  The demonstrators started their procession to the strains of the Beatles’ “Back in the USSR.”  A group of 10-15 Ukrainian youths joined the head of the procession waving blue and yellow flags.  A number of Hungarian and EU flags could also be seen.

“No to V. Putin, V. Orban, War, Hatred, Paks 2, and Corruption”

A large number of police accompanied the marchers, mostly for their safety as the route of the procession crossed a number of busy thoroughfares and tram tracks.  Before proceeding to Nyugati station, protesters stopped at the top of Bajcsy-Zsilinszky street to hear speeches from Füzessy and Vágó.

Füzessy gave a long, detailed description of Putin’s policies, drawing many parallels with those of Orbán.  He said the Russian president had destroyed the free press, built an oligarchic system and persecuted civil organizations.  Vágó’s speech essentially reiterated the main points of Füzessy’s speech.

There were no counter-demonstrators.  One elderly couple shouted “go to work” at the crowd from their window overlooking the Rákóczi street.

Upon arriving at the Western station the crowd gathered in front of a stage.  There Füzessy introduced Energy Club president Adá Ámon, who immediately told the crowd “Ten days ago Lajos Simicska said something with which I completely agree”, referring to the businessman’s criticism of Hungary’s Russian-friendly energy policy.  Ámon said that if the Hungarians were given an opportunity to choose, then they would choose the West.  She pointed out that the Russian atomic reactors planned for the Paks atomic energy plant are “eastern.”  “By contrast the wind coming from the west would drive wind turbines if the government had not obstructed this” she said, adding that “western energy policies are straightforward, small in size, human and modern.”  Ámon told the crowd that nuclear power plants were a “political question” and that Paks II was one of the symbols of the Orbán system which “sought to centralize everything and expected people to pay for it without knowing anything.  Secretly but expensively,” she said.

“We will not be a Russian colony!”

Ámon said clear-thinking people cannot possibly want to be dominated and dependent, pointing out that Paks II carries with it the risk of “huge corruption” and of consuming “huge amounts of public money.”  The Energy Club president reminded the protestors that the government didn’t ask anybody before deciding about Paks, not even experts in the field of nuclear energy.  If they had asked anybody, then they would have realized that nobody needs this power plant, which Ámon  said will not even be built if enough people object.  The crowd chanted “We won’t allow it!”   She concluded her speech by telling the crowd that “all contracts can be broken, and there is every reason for breaking this one.”

Margaryta Rymarenko, a Ukranian citizen from the Crimea, then took the stage.  With Füzessy interpreting, she told the crowd in Russian how she could no longer call the Crimea her home because there was no longer any law, no freedom and only one law prevailed: the law of force.

The crowd interrupted her with cries of “Dirty Putin”.  The woman continued by telling the crowd that anybody could become the target, and that they know what it is for the future to depend on the grace and the mood of a certain individual, and what it is the people of Ukraine are fighting against.

Rymarenko reminded the crowd that people were paying with their lives in order to free themselves from dictatorship.  “The price we pay for this is inconceivable to a European state:  more than five thousand dead and more than one million driven from their homes.”   She said such consequences await those who allow a person to abuse power without any kind of civil control.  “It’s a great shame that we only started understanding our rights when they were being taken away from us.”  She said it was necessary to stand up for our rights, “because if we lose them the cost of getting them back is not less than our lives.”

Human Platform activist Márton Gulyás then took the stage to deliver a greeting from the Lithuanians who, he said, declared their independence from the Russian empire 96 years ago that day.

Gulyás called Orbán an unprincipled cheat, and said it was a fact that we no longer live in a democracy and that a minority is stealing the country blind, even as nearly 4 million people live in conditions of privation.  However, he reminded the people that they weren’t there to protest these “facts,” but rather because the following day Orbán will “shame himself” by “shaking the hand of the bloody-handed warmonger who has done more than anyone else to oppress Russia.”

“Viktor, are you not ashamed of yourself?  With tomorrow’s handshake you are going to become one with those who exhumed Imre Nagy’s corpse in 1961 and buried it face down and tied up in an unmarked grave.” (Nagy, prime minister at the time of the 1956 Uprising in Hungary, was subsequently executed by the Russians-ed.)

Gulyás closed by saying it was not easy to remain optimistic, and that we have a right to be frustrated and disappointed, but that our mutual home has to be regarded as our mutual home.  For this it is necessary to change the current system, not just Orbán’s but every oligarchical, despotic system that limits the will of the people, and which does not ameloriate but exacerbates social inequality.  At such time we get rid of Orbán, then we can ask forgiveness from our Ukrainian, Romanian, Polish, Czech, Estonian and Lithuanian brothers, and we can tell them that it wasn’t us who turned our backs on them but Viktor Orbán.

The event was concluded with a singing of the Hungarian National Anthem, after which the organizers played the European Union’s anthem, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”