Hungarians have always thought of the United States as the homeland of freedom, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said at the inauguration of the statue of the late US President George H. W. Bush on Freedom Square in Budapest on Tuesday.
“Every Hungarian knows that America is the land of freedom, which welcomed Lajos Kossuth [the exiled leader of the 1848 revolution] with sincere love, and the building of the US Embassy in Budapest’s Freedom square provided refuge for Cardinal József Mindszenty for 15 years [after the failed 1956 anti-Soviet uprising],” Orbán said.
“We will never forget that the gate of the embassy — thanks to the personal commitment of Mark Palmer, the American ambassador to Budapest from 1986 to 1990 — was always open to the regime-changing youth,” said Orbán, who at the time was one of those young politicians protesting the communist government.
He also reminded that Lajos Batthyány, prime minister during the 1848 revolution, was executed near Freedom Square on Oct. 6, 1849, in a barracks located nearby.
“The first prime minister of the Hungarians ended his life before the execution squad of the occupiers. This is a clear message to all his successors,” Orbán said.
He also pointed out that on one side of the square stands a monument to the German and on the other to the Soviet occupation, conveying a clear message: “if you are Hungarian, you can only choose between two options, or you are either in favor of the occupiers or freedom”.
“Today we pay homage to our friend George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States, with a statue,” Orbán said. Referring to the fact that the square also has a statue of Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, Orbán said, “Here are two men from America who have jointly fought against world communism”.
The prime minister recalled George H. W. Bush’s visit to Budapest in 1989, saying that when the president arrived to parliament, Hungarians asked him to “save us from Yalta”. He was referring to the 1945 Yalta conference, during which US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin agreed on the division of Europe, which stood in place until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Bush “understood that whatever was deaf to him by his comrades in there, we Hungarians do not want to make a better deal with the Soviet Union, but to break with it. We don’t want to make communism more comfortable with American money, we want to decide. We do not want to get closer to the free world, but we want to be a part of it,” Orbán said, recalling Hungarians’ demands at that time.
Title image: U.S. ambassador to Budapest David B. Cornstein (L) and Hungarian Prime MInister Viktor Orbán (R) unveil the statue of former U.S. President George W. Bush in Budapest on October 27. (MTI/Zoltán Máthé)
