Welcome to the surreal world of opposition-led local government. These people are trying to rewrite the rule book on what their duties and responsibilities are. In Budapest, in addition to the changes enforced as a result of the pandemic, there are other irritants to be borne. Some of the most annoying of those irritants come in the form of opposition local government members, politicians who have undermined the very idea of what it is they are meant to be doing, and who it is in fact, that they are accountable to.

Take that subject that, perhaps unfortunately, comes first and foremost, no matter what we do these days. Yes, the virus. The pandemic which stalks the globe knocking people down, killing some, and ruining, in the most horrific manner possible, the economies of every last country on the planet.

The answer, we presume and hope, is that we manufacture enough vaccines to render the coronavirus null and void. But, as all normal people think along these lines, the irritating fools who make up the Democratic Coalition, pop their heads up and spend what seems like an eternity tossing spanners into the life-engine of the country.

The man best known for lying to the country, commanding riot police to attack innocent civilians and bankrupting the country left the socialists to start his own party. That party forms a large chunk of the loony fringe of the Hungarian opposition. Were it not enough to have a failure like Gyurcsány as a leader, his wife, an MEP for DK, is the granddaughter of one of Hungary’s most despicable communist stains. An awkward leadership for a political party. Historical commemorations organised by DK are, accordingly, somewhat more low-key than those of parties which don’t employ a leadership with telling bloodstains on their hands.

The nincompoops that make up the political body of DK are, tellingly, not bothered by immorality. They knew full well what they were getting into when they joined the party. You can’t join a party which boasts ‘Fletó the fibber’ and the granddaughter of an ill-famed communist as heads without having a certain lackadaisical approach to ethics now, can you?

The mayors for DK who succeeded in gaining power in local government are, unfortunately, magnets for slow-wittedness. At the moment, their slow-wittedness is in full swing as they try to delay the return of normality to its throne. The vaccines that will enable us to return to normal have, rather distastefully, become a battleground as a result of the actions of the Hungarian opposition.

Determined to let nothing block their lust for power, the Hungarian opposition have gone out of their way to derail any plan formulated by the government to end the pressure of the coronavirus on Hungary.

To this end, the DK mayors of Budapest and one of the municipality’s deputy mayors (DK’s Erzsébet Gy. Németh) have come up with an fundamentally deeply disturbing plan. The group have written a letter to the Minister of Human Resources, Miklós Kásler.

At first glance this may seem to be a storm in a teacup; a bureaucratic spat regarding which rubber stamp is applied to which piece of paper, but the implications of this letter run far deeper than that. The EU’s attempts to secure vaccines for the bloc are a bad joke at best. Under the ‘leadership’ of the ever-disappointing von der Leyen, the EU has failed, and failed miserably at that. The EU has been unable to procure anything like the quantities of vaccine required to enable life and economies to return to normal. This has led to various reactions from the member states of the EU, the most recent being the decisions of the Austrians and the Danes to strike out on their own to try to buy vaccines that the EU is unable to deliver. This means that in addition to Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia, two more countries have realised the contemptible nature of the EU’s action plan, and have decided to take the care of their citizens’ health into their own hands. This is, after all, a matter of life or death. Having handed over the procurement procedure: ordering vaccines, authorising vaccines for use, distribution of authorised vaccines, in toto, to the EU, we can see that to depend solely on von der Leyen’s vastly overestimated abilities is to ensure death for many people across Europe. This is not an over-dramatic assessment of the situation. The number of deaths caused by health problems brought on by the coronavirus at the beginning of March 2021 stood at almost 900,000. This is no time for leaders of European member states to blindly place their faith in bureaucratic institutions run by failed politicians. That way lies utter failure.

But this is what the mayors of the Democratic Coalition (DK) are attempting. They are threatening to not, that is not, supply life-saving vaccines to the very people they were elected to serve.

This is surely unprecedented, isn’t it? When was the last time, if there has ever been a time, when elected representatives, in order to score points against the democratically elected central government, have stated that they are prepared to let people die? These fools, blinded by the chance of scoring points, have declared that they will play God with the lives of the residents of their districts. They are seeking to make a political point with someone else’s neck on the block.

Now, we all can rest assured that when push inevitably comes to shove, these mayors will not, indeed cannot impede anyone’s access to health. However, that’s not the point. The point is that they’ve made their position in general very clear. They have utterly rejected the premise upon which they were elected. In lieu of representation, they have now declared that their arrogance knows no bounds and that they are prepared to lay down the lives of others in order to further their own political goals.

That is wholly unacceptable. These people, even if they are elected mayors, remain public servants. They have been elected to do the best possible by the people they are meant to represent. For them to arrogantly and cynically reject the agreement which has always existed between these two parties is practically unheard of, and totally unacceptable. Irrespective of the fact that if their bluff were called, they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, this marks a new low for Hungarian politics.