The Őszöd speech (Hungarian: Őszödi beszéd) was a speech Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány delivered to the 2006 Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) congress in Balatonőszöd. Though the May congress was confidential, Gyurcsány's address was leaked and broadcast by Magyar Rádió on Sunday, 17 September 2006,[1] igniting a nationwide political crisis.
Liberally using vulgar language, Gyurcsány criticized the MSZP for misleading the electorate and said that its coalition government had enacted no significant measures over its tenure. The mass protests the speech's release precipitated are considered a major turning point in Hungary's post-communist political history. MSZP's inability to contain the speech's political fallout led to the popular collapse of MSZP and, more broadly considered, of the Hungarian political left, paving the way for Fidesz's supermajority victory in the 2010 Hungarian parliamentary elections.
Not only the content but also the profanity of the speech has been heavily criticized. In response to the criticism concerning the profanity, Ferenc Gyurcsány stated that "these words were the words of objurgation, passion and love" ("Ezek a korholás, a szenvedély és a szeretet szavai voltak").[2]
While giving the speech, he used – among others – the Hungarian word szar (i.e., shit) or its related terms (szarból, beszarni, etc.) eight times and the word kurva (i.e., bitch, whorish, fucking) seven times. The following table presents some of the profane remarks – of which not everything has been translated by the foreign (i.e., non-Hungarian) press in general – with their corresponding translations. Although 'fucking country' is the best idiomatic translation because of the strength of the words, kurva ország literally means 'whore country', and the connotations of immorality, unprincipled pursuit of money and therefore corruption are very strong in Hungarian.
In addition to the excerpts above, the following table contains excerpts from the speech for which Ferenc Gyurcsány has received heavy criticism.[citation needed]
Viktor Orbán, then-chairman of Fidesz, called Ferenc Gyurcsány "a compulsive liar" ("Hungarian: beteges hazudozó") whom his party considers as "a person who is a part of history and the past" ("Hungarian: a történelemhez és a múlthoz tartozó személy").[3][4]
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