Socialists: state land vote ‘on’

The Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) has collected the 200,000 required signatures in support of a referendum call preventing the sale of state land, MSZP leader József Tóbiás has said. The signature drive will not stop until the deadline of June 28 to ensure that a sufficient number is collected, he added. Commenting on President János Áder returning a law on land compensation to MPs earlier in the day, Tóbiás said Áder’s move shows support for the Socialists’ efforts to “stop Fidesz theft” by calling a referendum on the land sales. Benedek Sallai R., an MP of the opposition LMP party, who helped the MSZP campaign, said that while a simultaneous referendum called by Fidesz on the EU’s migrant quota scheme is only about Fidesz and its politics, the one being organised by MSZP is about the Hungarian people and the future of rural Hungary. Ruling Fidesz said the “pro-migration left” is doing “all their best” to thwart the government’s quota referendum. Fidesz repeated its position that “it is up to the Hungarian people to decide whom they wish to live together with, rather than up to Brussels”. Concerning the referendum initiative on state land, the ruling party said that “now the Socialists would seize the land Hungarian farmers have purchased just as the communists had done”.