Among the first steps of the Tisza party, which won a constitutional majority after the April elections in the National Assembly, is the dismantling of political privileges. Prime Minister Péter Magyar said this in the opening speech of the first regular session of the Parliament on Tuesday, the TASR correspondent in Budapest reports, referring to the nepszava.hu server.
“We will reduce the salaries of the prime minister, ministers and managers of state-owned companies, eliminate unjustified luxury expenses, unnecessary extravagant car rides, political pay stations and we will check more than a thousand diplomatic passports issued without any legal basis,” Magyar emphasized. He added that Tisza will also propose a reduction in salaries and reimbursement of expenses for members of parliament.
The Prime Minister emphasized that the leadership of the country is a service to the public. “Fidesz gradually controlled the key institutions of the state, occupied leading positions in the public media, the prosecutor’s office, state enterprises, the Supreme Court, the media office and the entire economy with its own people, while there was an unprecedented concentration of wealth,” noted Magyar, according to which, for these reasons, Tisza submitted an amendment to the constitution regarding the limitation of the prime minister’s term of office to eight years.
The prime minister addressed the call to the deputies Fidesz, to “respect their constituents by not using them as human shields to cover up their corruption cases and crimes”.
During the question hour at the first regular session of the legislature, which, according to several media outlets, took place in a tense atmosphere, opposition MPs interrogated members of the government on, among other things, the prime minister’s calls for the resignation of several constitutional officials, the migration pact and in connection with physical education in schools.
Fidesz MP and former Minister of Justice Bence Tuzson asked whether putting pressure on constitutional officials is in line with the principles of the rule of law. Tuzson recalled that Magyar, as chairman of the Tisza party and later as prime minister, publicly called on several legally elected constitutional officials to resign. He openly threatened them that if necessary, he would remove them through a constitutional amendment. The Fidesz MP emphasized the threats addressed to the President of the Republic, Tamás Sulyok.
The State Secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Péter Bódis, responded by saying that the fact that some public officials are being called upon by parliamentarians to resign does not constitute a threat, neither in the language of law nor in linguistic culture in the ordinary sense of the word. According to him, criticism, and in some cases even harsh criticism, is an inseparable part of political debates. Part of the healthy functioning of a democratic system is that society has the opportunity to express criticism regarding the exercise of power, Bódis added.
The program of the regular meeting includes, among other things, the establishment of five investigative parliamentary committees, the approval of which does not require a debate in terms of the Act on Parliament.
Two committees are supposed to deal with the systemic crisis in the field of child protection and the responsibility of persons involved in the granting of a controversial presidential pardon in the pedophile case. Other committees are to check non-transparent privatization of state assets and suspicions of abuse of powers in connection with the functioning of the Hungarian Central Bank (MNB). The fifth initiative focuses on investigation of the abuse of the right of execution.
Tisza, led by Magyar, won 141 of the 199 seats in the legislature in the elections, which is eight more than the constitutional two-thirds majority. The Fidesz-KDNP bloc of the previous Prime Minister Viktor Orbán occupied 52 parliamentary seats, and six mandates were won by the far-right Movement Our Homeland (Mi Hazánk Mozgalom). After 16 years, the era of continuous rule by Prime Minister Orbán’s Fidesz party came to an end in Hungary.
