BUDAPEST, Sept 19: Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany rejected opposition calls to quit on Tuesday after anti-government riots he called the country’s ‘longest and darkest night’ since the end of communism.
The riots, in which over 150 people were hurt, followed the leak of a tape on Sunday in which Gyurcsany said he and his Socialist party had lied for four years about Hungary’s budget in order to win a general election in April.
Thousands of people took to the streets of Budapest late on Monday, occupying and setting fire to the state television building and fighting with riot police in the first such violence since communism collapsed at the end of the 1980s.
Higher taxes and fees for healthcare and university tuition had prompted protests before the release of the tape sparked a violent backlash that weakened the Hungarian forint and other currencies across central Europe.
“The longest and darkest night of the third Hungarian republic is behind us,” Gyurcsany said on television.
“This is not a revolution, this is not 1956, this is the betrayal of our great national history,” he added later at a news conference referring to the Hungarian uprising against Soviet occupation 50 years ago.—Reuters
