Gergely Gulyás, the head of the prime minister’s office, said on Thursday that Hungarians fulfilled the goals of the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising three decades later: to live in freedom and peace and to grow in safety in an independent state.
Gulyás told an event commemorating the uprising at the Hungarian embassy in Vienna that 1956 was a milestone in Hungary’s national development which strongly determined what people thought about important values. “October 1956 is the story of courageous Hungarian men and women, young and old, poor and rich; when a nation said enough is enough when the residents of a country went into armed rebellion against Soviet suppression to regain control of their future,” he said. Gulyás said a conflict currently flaring up again in the Middle East was threatening another global crisis, and Europe had every reason to fear that masses of illegal migrants may again turn up. “Events of the past decade clearly showed that the European Union’s solutions were not always good in a crisis situation, and instead there may be good solutions at a national level,” he said, adding that instead of being federal and centrally regulated, Europe needed effective cooperation between the elected leaders of European states. “Common values must be preserved, and when it comes to matters we disagree on, we must exercise tolerance,” he added. Gulyás said Hungarian-Austrian relations had deep historical roots and the two nations shared a past going back a thousand years, which had seen “great heights and great depths”. The outbreak of the 1956 revolution in Budapest caused a unique wave of sympathy and solidarity in Austria, and support and help from the Austrian people had a profound effect on Hungarians who still remember it today, he said. He thanked Austria for helping Hungarians flee the country after the 1956 uprising was crushed.