Ferenc Gyurcsány

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Ferenc Gyurcsány at the World Economic Forum in Davos 2007

Ferenc Gyurcsány [ ˈfɛrɛnʦ ˈɟurʧaːɲ ], listen ? / i (born June 4, 1961 in Pápa ) is a Hungarian businessman and politician . He was Prime Minister of Hungary from September 2004 to April 2009 and Chairman of the MSZP from 2007 to April 2009 . Since 2011 he has chaired the Democratic Party Koalíció . Audio file / audio sample

Life

Youth and education

Gyurcsány studied pedagogy and economics at the University of Pécs (Fünfkirchen). From 1983 to 1988 he was the secretary of the youth organization of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (Communist Youth Association, Kommunista Ifjúsági Szövetség - KISZ ) in Pécs. 1988-89 he was President of the University Council of the KISZ. In 1989 he was the secretary of the Central Council of the KISZ for a short time.

Private sector

Before the turnaround in Hungary, Gyurcsány was a loyal member of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, which ruled the country as a dictator until 1989. As KISZ secretary in 1988, he criticized his own father as a “ gentroid element” for calling the Hungarian people's uprising of 1956 a revolution. (" My father is a gentroid element who calls 1956 a revolution until today "). Nevertheless, after reunification, especially during his tenure as prime minister, he became one of the most uncompromising representatives of the free market economy in Hungary.

Immediately after 1989 he switched to the private sector and initially worked as an employee of various investment companies. In 1992 he founded Altus AG , which developed into one of the largest investment companies in Hungary, with a market value of 3.5 billion forints (approx. € 14.5 million). Gyurcsány managed the company himself until 2002, after which he was head of the supervisory board until 2003. He also operates a bauxite processing plant and is the owner of several properties, including the Budapest Club of Members of Parliament and the former holiday resort of the Hungarian government in Balatonőszöd on Lake Balaton . The acquisition of this originally state-owned real estate is highly controversial because of the relatively low purchase prices, some of which are paid in long-term installments.

Political advancement and first term as prime minister

Ferenc Gyurcsány (2006)

Gyurcsány was a member of the Hungarian Socialist Party (Magyar Szocialista Párt - MSZP) . In 2003 he was elected to the party's committee. In 2004 he was elected president of the party organization in Győr-Moson-Sopron County .

He was considered to be one of the closest collaborators to Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy , who had been in office since 2002 (non-party, but elected with the votes of the Socialists and Liberals) and became his main strategic advisor. After Medgyessy's first government reshuffle in 2003, he became Minister for Children, Youth and Sport. In September 2004, Medgyessy withdrew his trust in him. He then announced his resignation as minister. At the end of August 2004, the Medgyessy government disintegrated - possibly under pressure from the cabinet. The MSZP now had the opportunity to choose between two successor candidates for the office of Prime Minister: Gyurcsány and Péter Kiss , Medgyessy's deputy. Gyurcsány was voted by a large majority, which led to rumors that he himself had originally stood in the background and helped to overthrow Medgyessy in order to come to power.

Gyurcsány was sworn in as Prime Minister on September 28th, and the members of his first government took their oath of office on October 4th. As a result, he gave up the office of party leader of Győr-Moson-Sopron.

Second term: nationwide protests and decline in public opinion

After the elections of April 2006, the Gyurcsány government was the first Hungarian government to be re-elected after the fall of the Wall. Together with its coalition partner, the liberal SZDSZ , the MSZP achieved a share of almost 53% of the votes cast.

However, on September 17, 2006, a secret internal party speech by Gyurcsánys on May 26, 2006 was made public, in which he not only reported to the members of his group about how he and his close confidants had consistently lied to the public for years in order to hold the recent parliamentary elections win, but also warned that the entire social-liberal government will now have great difficulty in keeping all this secret. After it became known, the speech aroused anger and indignation among large sections of the Hungarian population, the opposition parties demanded Gyurcsány's resignation, and the members of Fidesz and KDNP will in future leave the session before his appearances in parliament. As a result of this speech (in connection with the previous elections ) there were bitter mass demonstrations against Gyurcsány in October of the same year on the occasion of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the popular uprising , during which the brutal police operations ( rubber bullets were sometimes used to hit the crowd at face level fired, with one of the demonstrators having the eye shot out and the chin shot through another) caused further outrage nationwide - not least because Gyurcsány had already lost a lot of sympathy due to his openly ruthless social policy (for example, he himself had lost one Speech at the congress of the local community of the MSZP in 2004 explains his economic and financing methodology: “ How can this public income - which will soon be around 22-23 thousand billion forints - be distributed in this way, at least the portion that we have damn have lost to take away from people, not because they want it that way, but because we are the stronger, because the state power belongs to us and we can take that away, so that what we take away from them we at least distribute in such a way that the majority thinks that it is so, well, about okay ”, ung .: Hogyan lehet ezt a közös jövedelmet - ez olyan jövőre 22–23 ezer milliárd forint - ezt a közös jövedelmet úgy elosztani, annak legalább azt a részét, amiről úgy döntünk, hogy elvesszük az emberektől, nem azért mert akarják, hanem azért mert mi erősebbek vagyunk és miénk az államhatalom és ezt elvehetjük, hogy azt elvehetjük, hogy azty amit elveszünk aztond ozlük, hogy azty amit elveszünk, hogy ábé legal, hogy ássolja, hógóbs tólük, hógétja tólüb körülbelül rendben van .)

Nevertheless, Ferenc Gyurcsány was elected party chairman in the MSZP Congress on February 24, 2007 with 89% of the vote. After he was re-elected party chairman on March 21, 2009 with 85% of the vote, he announced his resignation just a week later. On March 21, 2009 Gyurcsány announced his resignation from the office of Prime Minister.

Resignation and allegations of corruption

On April 14, 2009, he resigned from the office of Hungarian Prime Minister following a constructive vote of no confidence initiated by himself and his own party. The MSZP then tried to save its badly damaged public image by electing the previous Minister for Development and Economics, Gordon Bajnai (former KISZ colleague Gyurcsánys and his close economic confidante) to the post of Prime Minister. A start has now been made to limit economic damage and national debt through drastic austerity measures, but this did not help: in the parliamentary elections that followed in 2010 , the bourgeois-conservative electoral alliance of Fidesz under Viktor Orbán and the Christian Democratic People's Party ( KDNP) a landslide victory.

After his MSZP had become an opposition party, Gyurcsány moved to fourth place on the list, initially as a normal member of the newly elected Hungarian parliament, until it withdrew his immunity on September 12, 2011. The background was the events surrounding the Sukoro affair . Gyurcsány is said to have influenced a property swap between an American-German-Israeli investor group led by Joav Blum and the Hungarian state, in which, based on incorrect estimates, Hungary suffered a loss of 1.3 billion forints.

Among other things, the corruption allegations, his general handling of the rule of law and political responsibility (anti-social politics, the Őszöder speech, the police operations at the 2006 demonstrations, involvement in embezzlement, which has brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy, see above), but also his On the one hand, public statements perceived as inhuman (in a TV interview in 2004 he described the striving for prosperity and quality of life as follows: “ Anyone who has a two-room apartment would normally have earned one with three, whoever has three, four, whoever has four , a single-family house; if you have an old, aging, aging wife, you would have deserved a younger one, and if you have a messy child, a tidier one ... but of course you would have deserved it ! ”, whereby he especially opposes women's rights organizations upset) have made a significant contribution to the fact that, according to official opinion studies, he is considered to be the umstri in Hungary The deadliest and most unpopular prime ministers of the post-reunification era are considered.

Separation from the MSZP

On October 22, 2010, Gyurcsány founded an internal party platform called "Demokratikus Koalíció Platform" (Platform Democratic Coalition). As the goal of the group, he stated an internal renewal of the party and soon came into conflict with the party leadership under Attila Mesterházy . The conflicts that dragged on for months finally led to a rupture: On October 22, 2011, Gyurcsány and nine other mandataries announced they were leaving the party and the Socialist faction. Thereupon they founded the Demokratikus Koalíció (DK) as an independent party and ran for the parliamentary elections in 2014 in the left-wing electoral alliance " Összefogás 2014 ", among others together with the MSZP. Gyurcsány was re-elected to the Hungarian parliament as one of four DK members. He has been a non-attached MP there since 2011 .

Private

As a teenager, Gyurcsány received the joke name "Fleto Fletonowitsch Jemeljan" from his Russian teacher - this is where his nickname "Fletó", which is very well known in Hungary, comes from .

He has been married to Klára Dobrev , the granddaughter of the Central Committee secretary and parliamentary president in the Kádár era, Antal Apró, in his third marriage since 1994 . Gyurcsány has a total of five children from the second and third marriage.

During the refugee crisis in summer 2015 , Gyurcsány and his wife took refugees into their private home several times.

Gyurcsány has been included in the list of the 100 richest Hungarians of the daily Magyar Hírlap several times in the past . The latter estimated his fortune in 2003 at around 3.5 billion forints , which at the exchange rate at the time was equivalent to 13.5 million euros. Der Spiegel reported in 2006 that his private fortune was estimated at "over ten million euros".

Individual evidence

  1. https://ludasmatyi.wordpress.com/2006/page/52/
  2. http://mno.hu/velemeny/uj-moralistak-farizeusok-36-resz-631622
  3. https://web.archive.org/web/20180416000815/https://mno.hu/migr/konnygazt-vizagyut-es-gumilovedekeket-is-bevetettek-a-tuntetok-ellen-+-ujabb-friss-kepriportok -474636
  4. A szemkilövő rendőr arca! on YouTube
  5. Many people injured during demonstrations in Hungary. October 24, 2006, accessed December 31, 2015 .
  6. http://www.ma.hu/tart/rcikk/c/0/99732/1
  7. ^ Hungarian Prime Minister resigns. In: FAZ . March 21, 2009, accessed December 31, 2015 .
  8. Peter Steink: Hungary needs a Hercules. In: Frankfurter Rundschau. April 14, 2009, accessed December 31, 2015 .
  9. Parliament lifts immunity from ex-prime minister. In: ORF . September 12, 2011, accessed December 31, 2015 .
  10. http://pestisracok.hu/az-eu-csalas-elleni-hivatalanak-korozesi-listajan-gyurcsany-altus-os-uzlettarsai/
  11. Igor Janke: Napastnik: opowieść o Viktorze Orbánie, Warszawa: Demart, 2012
  12. Original video in Hungarian: Öregecskedő feleség, baki, feri, gyurcsány on YouTube
  13. http://index.hu/belfold/noi1014r/
  14. http://index.hu/kulfold/2009/03/22/egy_hir_ami_nem_rengette_meg_a_vilagot/
  15. ^ Socialists split. DerStandard.at, October 22, 2011. Accessed: October 25, 2011
  16. Megszületett Gyurcsány Ferenc kisfia. Origo, February 19, 2015. Retrieved May 20, 2015
  17. ^ Bernhard Odehnal: Hungary's ex-prime minister takes in refugees. In: The world. September 3, 2015, accessed December 31, 2015 .
  18. Átrendeződött az első 10 hely a leggazdagabb magyarok listáján. Origo, November 20, 2003. Retrieved October 8, 2016
  19. Marion Kraske, Walter Mayr: "An ugly story". Der Spiegel 39/2006. Retrieved October 8, 2016

literature

  • Ferenc Gyurcsány , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 31/2009 from July 28, 2009, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of the article freely available)
  • Christian Tenbrock: What moves ... Ferenc Gyurcsány? In: The time . No. 12 , March 17, 2005, p. 36 ( zeit.de [accessed December 31, 2015]).

Web links

Commons : Ferenc Gyurcsány  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files