WARSAW — Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary
said on Friday that his government would abandon, at least for now, a
proposed tax on Internet usage that drew tens of thousands of
demonstrators to the streets this week.
“We
are not communists, we don’t govern against the people,” Mr. Orban said
in his regular weekly interview on Hungarian radio. “We govern together
with the people. So this tax, in this form, cannot be introduced.”
Ebullient
protest organizers — who had charged that the proposed tax was an
attempt by Mr. Orban’s right-wing government to choke off one of the
last sources of information not controlled by him and his allies —
called for victory celebrations across the country.
“After long years, Viktor Orban
has recognized that he doesn’t represent the point of view of the
majority on an issue, and has admitted that the majority of the people
rejected this tax,” said Balazs Gulyas, 27, a former member of the
Hungarian Socialist Party who set up a Facebook page last week that
inspired the protests.
Mr.
Orban said that instead of pushing ahead with the proposed tax, the
government would begin discussions early next year about a broad variety
of Internet issues, including regulation and taxation.
Government
press officers had said that the organizers of the protests — which
began in Budapest on Sunday and swelled much larger in the capital and
in other cities on Tuesday — had deliberately misrepresented the
proposal as a new tax when it was actually just an extension of an
existing telecommunications tax.
Under
the proposal, Internet data was to be taxed at 150 Hungarian forints,
or about 61 cents, per gigabyte. After the first protests on Sunday, the
government inched back, saying it would cap the tax at 700 forints per
month, but that failed to appease the protesters.
Zoltan Kovacs, the chief spokesman for the Orban government, said this week that the protests were an attempt by Hungary’s socialist opposition to revive their flagging movement by pretending it was nonpartisan.
As
the protests grew though, the proposal also drew criticism from
right-wing quarters. Even Heti Valasz, a conservative periodical that
normally supports the government, attacked the proposal.
“Orban
has a good political instinct,” said Balint Ablonczy, domestic
political editor of Heti Valasz. “The most important thing for him is to
keep voters on his side. Everybody was against the tax. We have written
two pieces a day against the foolish plan.”
Julia
Lakatos of the Center for Fair Political Analysis, an independent
research group in Budapest, said she thought Mr. Orban had proposed the
tax, in part, to draw attention from a recent rift with the United
States. Officials at the American Embassy in Budapest said last month
that six unnamed Hungarian public officials had been declared ineligible for United States visas after “credible evidence” that they were involved in attempts to bribe American companies.
“This
was a distraction from the government’s foreign policy conflict with
the United States and, in this sense, it reached its aim,” Ms. Lakatos
said. “However, it came at a much higher political cost than was
expected as this was the largest protest so far against the current
government.”
This
was not the first time that the government of Mr. Orban, who has been
accused of authoritarian impulses by domestic opponents and some Western
leaders, has reacted to incipient protest movements.
In
2012, when former President Pal Schmitt, a member of Mr. Orban’s ruling
Fidesz party, was accused of having plagiarized his doctoral thesis,
public outcry abated only after he resigned. The same year, the
government pulled back from a proposal to cut subsidies for university
students that had ignited student protests.
“I guess he got afraid of the demonstrations,” said Tamas Bodoky, editor of Atlatszo.hu, an investigative reporting website. “Not for years have we seen demonstrations of this size in Hungary.”
Protest
organizers said they would continue to keep an eye on the Internet tax
proposal and vowed to keep their movement alive, but others were
skeptical about their ability to do so.
“I
am afraid this will put an end to the gatherings,” Mr. Bodoky said. “At
least unless we have another ridiculous move by the government.”