A Hungarian politician who initially served in MSZP, the party that was born of the Hungarian communist party. Varju then followed an old crony’s lead, and jumped ship to serve under his new leader, Ferenc 'Fletó' Gyurcsány. Today he’s a DK backbencher. In 2014 he failed to be elected, but with the delegation of Molnár ‘Shout! Shout!” Csaba to the European Parliament, a place opened up for him once more.
Although at the time he irrefutably cemented his reputation as a clown, there’s more to this DK backbencher. Scrape off some of his pancake makeup, and you’ll find something more sinister lurking beneath.
Parliament had already voted to suspend Varju’s parliamentary privilege as part of a police investigation related to Varju’s promise to financially reward an independent candidate in the 2018 national elections if they stepped down.
That, however, was just ‘small potatoes’. Back in the day, he conspired with his present-day boss to move the assets of KISZ, the Hungarian Young Communist League out of the reach of the state when communism in Hungary was forced to give way to democracy.
This was not a case of ‘small potatoes’. Not a bit of it. What was at stake here, were the assets and property of KISZ, which exceeded even those of the MSZMP, the communist party from which KISZ sprang. One of the reasons for there being more value in the assets of KISZ was the fact that extremely valuable, freshly renovated holiday villas and holiday camps featured in its, not the parent organisation’s books. In 1989, although on paper KISZ’s assets were listed as amounting to 3 billion forints, their true value, according to the man who was one of the leaders of KISZ at the time, Gyurcsány Fletó, was more likely to be in the region of 28 to 30 billion forints. Quite a difference, quite a discrepancy.
That money, by rights, should have gone to the state, naturally, when the system changed. But with Varju’s assistance, the assets were taken off the table before the state had a chance to lay claim to them.
Now, obviously, responsibility for this 'removal of assets' can’t be laid only at Varju’s door.
When considering how these young communists spirited the assets of KISZ out of the picture, what really penetrates is, once again, the arrogance that lay at the bottom of everything. If we were looking at "monkey business" of a similar nature in a non-communist country, then I daresay that we’d expect to find complicated, looping, twisting, sly, interwoven, overlapping, hidden strands which, if laboriously unpicked, would reveal the misdeed. Not here. Here, accustomed as these men were to never having to fear anything, given that they and their mates were the ones in total control, the method of removing a huge chunk of cash from the nation’s coffers was simple, unsophisticated, primitive even.
On paper, the 77 prime pieces of real estate were swiftly moved out of the reach of the state. Surely not! People must have realised what was going on. Why didn’t the state assert its dominance? Well, it tried, but you have to remember that this was a state which was full to bursting point of the old guard of the communists, and they were determined to ensure that they and theirs benefitted. The state did sue for title to one of the young pioneers’ camps, the jewel in the crown, so to speak, but it was only after 15 years of court battles that the property was returned to the nation.
In passing, I’d just like to remind you all of the obvious: at this time there were no complaints from the liberal angst brigade regarding the independence of the judiciary.Fifteen years. Fifteen years for the state to finally peel the greedy, grasping fingers of the remnants of the communists from a small piece of the nation’s property.
That’s truly nothing short of shocking.
And that’s what we’re still dealing with today. Here we have people who 'appropriated' anything that took their fancy from the nation, with brazen arrogance. And what punishment was meted out to them? No punishment was meted out to them. Their friends and cronies were the ones in the important jobs.
This is what people, criticising from abroad often fail to notice: it wasn’t just a couple of bad apples in the system, the system was based on the concept of only bad apples being involved.
This was the communist way, something that foreign journalists always seem to not notice. Of course, those journalists are always ably assisted by those Hungarians who were involved in the great, perpetual pilfering of the nation’s wealth. Then there are those who would like to be able to get their fingers back into the nation’s pies.
From a purely detached point of view, this isn’t a difficult concept to grasp: either you know that you 'misappropriated' something and you want to cover that up, or you 'misappropriated' items or saw others doing the same, and you fancy a piece of the action. What’s so hard to understand?
But, we know, as we knew, and they know, as they, too, knew that what happened was not right. These people preached water and drank wine. Wine that wasn’t theirs to drink in the first place. This, again, is not advanced algebra in Sanskrit, it really isn’t that hard to see what happened, and see what would happen if these people were ever let near the rudder of the nation again. These people have trained themselves to be kleptomaniacs where the property of the state is concerned. We have broken with that way of doing things. And yet, with the assistance of the Leftwaffe, the global Leftwaffe, these clowns would see themselves handed the keys to the kingdom once more.
Gyurcsány, Varju. Clowns? Most certainly, but to see them as mere clowns distracts from the danger they pose.
These people robbed the country blind. They want nothing more than the chance to rob the country blind once more.