Imre Nagy statue to be removed to new site
July 24th, 2018A conservative critic of the government accuses the governing party of failing to find a place in its ideology for the remembrance of the martyred Prime Minister of the 1956 revolution.
Last Friday, Tamás Wachsler, the architect in charge of the Kossuth Square reconstruction project announced that Imre Nagy’s statue will be removed from its current location close to the Parliament to a nearby square. A memorial to the victims of the 1919 Communist dictatorship originally erected in 1934 will be replace it in Kossuth Square (close to the Hungarian Parliament building). The move has been explained as part of the reconstruction of the neighbourhood needed to restore the pre-1945 layout of the square.
In Magyar Hang (the online successor of Magyar Nemzet) Miklós Ugró wonders if a new chapter is beginning in the calvary of Imre Nagy, who was executed by his fellow Communists in 1958 and reburied in 1989. The conservative columnist suggests that Fidesz has always had an ambiguous relationship to the memory of Imre Nagy. PM Orbán made his first important public appearance at Nagy’s 1989 reburial, where he praised the 1956 revolution and demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. Fidesz, on the other hand, has always been harshly anti-Communist, Ugró adds. As Imre Nagy was a Communist himself, Fidesz cannot include him in its hagiography, he explains. Ugró fears that a a result, the memory of the martyred Premier might fade away.