Opposition Democratic Coalition (DK) announced on Sunday that Klára Dobrev will be the party’s prime ministerial candidate for the opposition primary planned to take place in the autumn.
The official announcement was made at an online event. Dobrev said she had accepted the party board’s invitation and was ready to run. She said she was ready to unite the diverse opposition against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and was also ready to defeat the prime minister and “his utterly corrupt regime” next spring. The next government, she insisted, “must take Hungary back to the main street of history, which we call Europe”.
Dobrev said the government, which had “pretended to be strong and able” turned out to be “weak and unable” during the pandemic when “the Hungarian state gradually fell to pieces”. The government’s policies have led to a “national tragedy with nearly 30,000 families mourning and tens of thousands bankrupt or unemployed”, Dobrev said. During the past ten years “those on government systematically tore the country apart, step by step, into the many and the few,” she insisted. “The few”, she said, were top officials amassing assets of “hundreds and thousands of billions of forints “as against the many Hungarians earning wages and paying taxes, but still living worse and worse”. Dobrev voiced hope that the cooperating opposition would “expel the few” at the general election next year, and referred to the primary as an “exercise” in which they could “demonstrate the difference between democrats and autocrats” and added that the candidates would be selected by voters of the opposition parties while “(ruling) Fidesz will have candidates selected by (PM) Viktor Orbán”.
Concerning her priorities, Dobrev said that the new government should declare a “state of emergency over graft” and set up an anti-corruption organisation to work with an anti-corruption unit of the police. Each politician’s assets should be screened and “Fidesz’s oligarchs, who got rich from public funds, must be prevented from rescuing their fortune”. Dobrev said that the government was working to remove a significant part of public assets from state control, and amass debts for the country and for the next government. ”
The candidate said the earlier system of indexing pensions should be restored and seniors compensated for “the pensions they partially lost during the past 10 years”. She also suggested that a minimum consumption of public utilities should be defined, under which gas, electricity, and water would be provided free of charge. Family benefits should be doubled in general, while single parents or parents of children with special needs should receive three times the current amount, she said.
Concerning health care, Dobrev said that health developments should “not only target hospital buildings, surgeries and equipment”. The system needs 3,000 new doctors, at least 9,000 nurses and 500 general practitioners, she added.
hungarymatters.hu
pixabay
