In what has been described as the biggest scandal related to the governing Fidesz party since the clemency case, the government minister who started it all had no choice but to resort to something Fidesz politicians aren’t exactly known for: a public apology. The comment spoken by Minister of Construction and Transport, János Lázár at a public forum has been described by analysts as the most serious communication failure on the government’s side after their initial handling of the clemency scandal in 2024.
Lázár was speaking at a public forum in Balatonalmádi and set out to answer a question about the country’s demographic decline and its effects on the economy, when his train of thought led him to say the following: “Since we are not letting in migrants, the only way for us to cope with demographic problems is to tap into our internal reserves.” He then stated that the Hungarian reserves lie in the Hungarian Gypsy community.
”So if there are no migrants and someone has to clean the toilets on the InterCity train – because Hungarian voters are not particularly keen to clean up shitty toilets after others – then we have to tap into our internal reserves. And those internal reserves are the Hungarian Gypsies."
Mobilizing the Roma workforce is by no means a new idea. Back in 2014, Viktor Orbán remarked in a speech that “Europe’s greatest hidden reserve is the Roma community, and this is also true in Hungary.”
Their mobilization into the labor market has been ongoing in Hungary since the mid-2010s: while in 2015 only 40 percent of Roma between the ages of 15 and 64 were employed (of which 12 percent were doing communal work), by 2022, the proportion of employed Roma had risen to over 47 percent, with less than 5 percent of them doing communal work. Admittedly, the 47 percent employment rate is still far below the 75.3 percent employment rate among the non-Roma population, especially since there were virtually no communal workers among the non-Roma by 2022.
As politologist Dániel Róna pointed out on Telex, Lázár’s communication failure carries all the more weight because “a significant portion of the hundreds of thousands of Roma living in Hungary reside in constituencies that are key battlegrounds in elections, and in the last elections, the overwhelming majority of them supported Fidesz. For many years, Fidesz's primary audience has been made up of blue-collar workers, people with basic education, and skilled workers, and many Roma celebrities have openly stood by the governing party or have appeared at their rallies as special guests.
According to Róna, without the support of the vast majority of Roma, it is unlikely that Fidesz would be able to remain in power.
Fidesz’s challenger in the elections, the Tisza Party is aware of this too, and promptly jumped on the issue. Péter Magyar posted the excerpt from Lázár’s speech, and the party’s activist, a Roma teacher named János Orsós posted a video in which he called on Lázár to grab a toilet brush himself – the video was viewed by more than one million people. The National Self-Government of the Hungarian Roma issued an official statement asking János Lázár to revise his wording and confirm that the government considers the Roma community its partner, not a stigmatized group. A popular Roma singer expressed his outrage and bewilderment at the minister’s comments.
At first, Lázár defended his statement and even tried to hit back at the Tisza politicians who had jumped on the issue. Late on Friday, he even posted a video lamenting that "some people have tried to turn this into a racial issue over the past 48 hours”.
But something had clearly changed by the time he arrived at an “Anti-war rally” of Fidesz in Kaposvár on Saturday, where he was scheduled to speak alongside Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. During his speech he went out of his way to apologize to “any Hungarian Gypsies I may have hurt”. And he didn’t stop there. He thanked all the Hungarian Gypsies “who have helped us make Hungary better” and added: “I apologize, I am truly sorry!”
Róna points out that after Lázár's remarks about the Gypsies, more people Googled him on the internet than did István Kapitány the day after it was announced that he was joining the Tisza Party, and a particularly high number of these searches came from the counties of Baranya, Borsod, and Nógrád (which have a sizeable Roma population).
Lázár’s profuse apology on Saturday suggests that the government wanted to nip this in the bud as much as possible, in order to avoid making the same mistake as they did several times over the past few years, the biggest of these being the clemency scandal in February 2024. At the time, government politicians kept silent at first, then they made contradictory statements, before attempting to shift responsibility away from the government, until they realized that the case could only be closed by sacrificing president Katalin Novák and former justice minister Judit Varga, both of whom had to resign their posts and completely withdraw from public life.
There is no doubt that the Minister of Construction and Transport is keenly aware of the potential consequences of his words, as just in December, he said that he was convinced that if Fidesz were to lose the 2026 elections, “the clemency scandal will be one of the main reasons”.
A few days after his very public apology, when asked why he chose to apologize even though he so staunchly defended his stance shortly before that, he said that “some of his Gipsy friends had called and said that this was too much and too strong”. Telex asked him what the Prime Minister’s position on the matter was, to which Lázár said that “his position was that this statement needed to be straightened out and we did just that”.
Thus, it seems that Fidesz considers the matter to have been rectified, but whether this is something Hungary’s Roma population can simply forgive and forget will only be made clear when election day comes, on 12 April.
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