If you thought Kenyan legislators were crazy then welcome to Hungary where two Hungarian lawmakers have been thrown out of the state TV headquarters after they tried to broadcast a petition against new labour laws
Victor Orban’s rightwing government in Hungary has faced a rare and sustained bout of protest in the capital, Budapest, culminating in a group of opposition MPs spending Sunday night at the state television headquarters, demanding airtime to make a series of demands of the government.
In the early hours of Monday, the MP Ákos Hadházy was forcibly removed from the premises by a group of security guards, but other MPs and MEPs inside the building refused to leave, having spent the night in a makeup room.
They were joined by more MPs on Monday morning, who jumped a fence to get into the building after being turned away at the main entrance. István Ujhelyi, an MEP for the opposition socialist party, tweeted: “Will not back down until we can read the demands of protesters. Some pushing around with security.”
On Sunday, up to 15,000 people marched through Budapest, ignoring subzero temperatures to register their discontent with the government in the fourth such gathering since protests began on Wednesday.
Police have used pepper spray against demonstrators in a number of tense standoffs.
A new protest was called for Monday evening outside the television headquarters. “It’s clear that we will need to wait here until then,” said MP Bence Tordai by telephone from inside the building.
He said he had got in by climbing over a fence on Monday morning and that the next step would be for representatives of different opposition parties to meet and agree on a new strategy of resistance to Orbán’s government.
Protesters outside parliament on Sunday listened to speeches from opposition figures before a smaller group walked several miles to the state TV headquarters.
The trigger for the protests was a piece of legislation labelled “slave law”, passed last Wednesday in parliament, that allows employers to increase the amount of overtime they can ask employees to work, but the mood is fueled by a general malaise at the state of politics in Hungary.
The list of five demands MPs wanted to read out on television included a repeal of the “slave law”, an independent judiciary and independent public media.