On Saturday, some 1,000 Hungarians marched against Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, the latest in a series of smaller protests this week after his right-wing Fidesz party enacted legislation dramatically hiking taxes on small businesses.
Nationalist Orban is facing his most difficult challenge yet since sweeping to power in a landslide in 2010, with inflation at its highest in two decades, the forint at record lows, and European Union subsidies frozen due to a dispute over democratic principles.
Despite complaints from certain business groups and opposition parties, a bridge blockade in Budapest on Tuesday failed to derail the acceptance of a government resolution to raise the tax rate for hundreds of thousands of small businesses.
On Wednesday, Orban’s administration also reduced a restriction on utility bills for higher-usage households, reversing one of the 59-year-old premier’s defining policies in previous years as energy and gas prices rose owing to the Ukraine conflict.
‘I have a friend who just uses electricity to heat his home. His monthly power cost has been 30,000 forints ($75), which is not much, but he will now be paying 153,000,’ Miklos Nyiri, a 70-year-old pensioner at the demonstration, agreed.
‘He’s a retiree, so his pension will be eaten up by the power bill, and they’ll be left grazing in the field,’ he said, adding that the small-scale protest was unlikely to persuade Orban to reconsider his mind.
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