Gyurcsany said politics had to be taken back from the streets and put back inside the walls of Parliament.
The prime minister has conceded that the local elections were an expression of voter opinion. Voters had expressed a critical opinion of the government's policies. He congratulated Fidesz on the party's victory.
Viktor Orban, the president of Fidesz, said the confidence vote was a "deceitful, cheap trick." At a press conference, he called upon the coalition parties to unseat Gyurcsany within 72 hours. If they did not do this, Fidesz would summon the first in what might turn out to be a series of rallies on Kossuth ter.
Ildiko Lendvai, leader of the Socialist benches in parliament, said Orban was mistaken if he believed parliament could be influenced by ultimatums. He was wrong, she said, to try and use street protests to blackmail the Hungarian parliament. She added that a vote of no confidence should be tabled by somebody who lacked that confidence.
For this reason, she said, Orban himself should table that motion.
Gabor Kuncze, president of the Free Democrat junior coalition party, said the vote of confidence might help to move things forward and put an end to the uncertainty. He added that the Free Democrat parliamentary group had not voted on whether to support the prime minister in Friday's vote, but he believed that the party would.
Orban was trying to circumvent the legal system, he said. If electoral losers tried subsequently to win on the streets, this would lead to anarchy, he added.
Turning to Orban's recent claim that he had known that the budget deficit stood at 10 per cent, Kuncze said: "How can his electoral campaign be reconciled with that statement. How can he reproach Ferenc Gyurcsany for this, while claiming that he has never lied in his life?"
On the election results, he said: "We have clearly suffered a defeat."
He added that holding on to the mayoralty of Budapest and the mayoralties of three Budapest boroughs was an acceptable result.
He said the local elections were not a referendum and did not supersede the results of the parliamentary elections. It was the responsibility of the governing parties to establish and maintain political and economic stability. This was the aim of the government's programme, which the Free Democrats were committed to as coalition partners.
Ibolya David, the president of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, said in a statement: "Today, two people are responsible for peace in the
country: Ferenc Gyurcsany and Viktor Orban." The party demanded immediate steps from "the people concerned." They demanded that the Free Democrats and the Socialists withdraw their confidence in Gyurcsany and that Viktor Orban should call people back off the streets and make it clear that he would not use such methods against a representative democracy in future.
Gabor Halmai, a constitutional lawyer at Szechenyi University, explained that governments could call a vote of confidence if they felt that the trust placed in them had weakened.
Halmai said there were two ways in which parliament could vote out a prime minister under the Hungarian constitution. One was a vote of confidence, the other a vote of no confidence. A motion for the latter could not be tabled by the government but only by the vote of a fifth of the MPs.
A vote of confidence could be tabled so that the PM could "find out if he genuinely enjoyed the confidence of a parliamentary majority."
Votes of confidence can be tabled both in general terms and in respect of a specific law. The law professor stressed that a lost vote of confidence would oblige the PM to resign.
He said the PM could resign regardless of any confidence vote, which would bring down the government at the same time. If the government's aim were to resign, he said, then it would not table a confidence vote, but would simply announce its resignation.
MTI/hvg.hu
