“Mr. Prime Minister was forced to talk about Budapest again after a long time, it showed the many omissions, his knowledge of the facts was worn out.” – began Gergely Karácsony’s Facebook post, in which Viktor Orbán responded to his interview with ATV on Tuesday.
In the interview, Orbán talked about the financial situation of the capital, that Budapest has been bankrupt for a long time, they just need to solve it smartly. According to him, it is not true that both the Constitutional Court and the Metropolitan Court said that money was unlawfully taken from the Karácsony family, and according to Orbán, there is no such judgment, instead a lot of money and investments came to the capital. According to him, the leaders of the city should not come to an agreement, but govern. “And if they can’t solve it, then the government will help.”
In response to Orbán’s statements, Karácsony wrote that it was not he who said that the government takes more from Budapest than it gives, but the State Audit Office. This was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court, and illegal by the Kúria, listed by the mayor. “Budapest is not only the richest city in the country, as the Prime Minister deigned to mention, but also the largest, which operates the most public services, well, what is missing is the government budget, which has increased twenty-fold in five years,” he wrote.
According to Karácsony, “it’s not the first time that Orbán talks about the state budget as if it were his private property” and about the support of localities as if it were “a favor from him”. However, according to Karácsony, this is an “obligation and responsibility”, and Budapest “doesn’t go bankrupt by itself, only if the government pushes it into bankruptcy”.
“However, whoever pushes Budapest into bankruptcy, Budapest drags him down.” he added. Karácsony called the government to a meeting, indicating that the trade unions’ 168-hour thinking time expires on Thursday: “Today, I too, Minister Gergely Gulyás, received the invitation to the meeting from the strike committee. I will be there.”
The expert examining the capital on behalf of the government and the State Audit Office (ÁSZ), which is also investigating, also found “technical bankruptcy” and “insolvency endangering the performance of public duties” in its reports. Meanwhile, the Gergely Karácsony have been looking for the government “by phone, SMS, fax and smoke signals” in vain to sit down and discuss Budapest’s increasingly worrisome financial situation and government deductions, but there is no answer. In this article, we wrote about how it seems more and more certain that the government will bankrupt Budapest this year.
