Prime Minister Viktor Orban delivers address to mark the anniversary of 1956 in Veszprem on October 23, 2023    MTI photo by Szilard Koszticsak

“Every town and village … is part of our great common freedom fight … and it is not only unfair and condescending but also wrong” to regard the revolution as an event that happened solely in Budapest, he said, adding that it was right to “bow our heads” in memory of the 1956 freedom fighters in Veszprem.
The prime minister said that around 3,000 people died and 20,000 were wounded in gunfights, while the communist retaliation saw more than 200 people sent to their deaths and 13,000 imprisoned. Fully 200,000 Hungarians fled the country, he added.
The people who suffered and were executed in prison were from all walks of life, he said. “They executed a priest, a worker, a farmer, a teacher and a Communist Party leader, the old, the young, men and women, people from Budapest and the countryside,” proving that the uprising was truly a common freedom fight of the nation, he said. “An entire nation stood in bloodshed.

The 1956 uprising was “finally won in 1990”, the prime minister said. He said that those “who fought the political battles against the Soviet Union and the Communist Party leadership” in 1989 could not have won without the legacy of 1956.

The prime minister said “we only had to finish” in 1989 what had begun in 1956.