“Neither tuition nor visiting fees are an essential element of the reforms, and thus the upcoming referendum will have no major influence on my governing,” Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány said in an interview with Friday’s issue of the Swiss conservative daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung entitled “What we are doing is not popular, but it is necessary.”
Gyurcsány conceded that “if at least 26% of the referendum voters opt to abolish visiting and tuition fees, the laws will be modified. The key issue facing the government is the deep societal division,” he claimed.
On another matter Gyurcsány claimed that he had not lied at Balatonőszöd in May 2006 before a closed Socialist caucus meeting, saying “if you argue in a committed way, you use words that, taken out of context, will assume a different meaning than planned. I told my party’s inner circle that things could not go on as they had been doing,” he asserted.
