Embattled Hungarian Prime Min-ister Ferenc Gyurcsany survived a parliamentary confidence vote on Friday, as analysts said a small rally demanding the premier's ouster showed the waning influence of the opposition.
Gyurcsany called the confidence vote to gauge the support he had to press on with unpopular austerity measures after losing local polls on Sunday to the conservative opposition.
Gyurcsany won the confidence vote as expected, with 207 in favor and 165 against, backed by his leftist coalition of Socialists and Liberals who enjoy a comfortable majority in parliament.
It was the first time a vote of confidence had been used since the country's transition from communism to democracy in 1989.
But the vote was also an attempt by Gyurcsany to put behind him a weeks-old political crisis, which was sparked by a leaked recording in which Gyurcsany said the government "lied morning, night and evening" about the economy ahead of his re-election in April.
two weeks of chaos
The revelation set off two weeks of demonstrations which degenerated into the worst riots Hungary has seen since it emerged from communism in 1989.
After the confidence vote, opposition leader Viktor Orban said Gyurcsany had created a "moral crisis" in Hungary and continued to demand his ouster at a rally of some 50,000 right-wing supporters outside parliament.
He called on supporters to protest in front of parliament between 5:00pm and 6:00pm daily until Gyurcsany resigned.
But in a surprise statement, Orban said that "in the interest of the country's stability" he would no longer demand early elections, in what analysts said was an admission of flagging support for his effort to oust the prime minister.
"Orban essentially retreated, and this opens the way for the government to go back to running the country," political analyst Krisztian Szabados told reporters.
"We were disappointed because [Orban] did not put strong pressure on the government," said 18-year old Katalin, a protester standing beside her mother who was draped in a Hungarian flag.
small showing
Analysts also noted that while tens of thousands of flag-waving supporters showed up at the protest, it was a far cry from past election rallies in which Orban managed to draw hundreds of thousands.
Friday's protest quickly broke up, with only some 3,000 demonstrators remaining in front of parliament by early evening.
The demonstration was staged after Orban gave an ultimatum this week for governing parties to oust Gyurcsany or else face protests.
Orban, who lost the past two parliamentary elections to the left, had wanted to use the result of Sunday's local ballot as a referendum on the government and its unpopular austerity package.
Gyurcsany and his coalition have rejected Orban's demand for resignation, and have called his ultimatum and his mobilization of street protests a "blackmailing" of democracy.
"The real question is: are we going to give in to an attack on the country's constitutional order, or are we going to protect it," Gyurcsany said ahead of the confidence vote.
Orban argued that voters rejected Gyurcsany's austerity package in the local elections. He says a recording leaked to the press last month was evidence the prime minister misled voters to win votes in April and was not fit for office.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS