Gergely Gulyás, the head of the Prime Minister’s Office, said that going by the opposition’s “behaviour” in parliament on Monday, there was reason to believe that they were making a push to “spread lies” about the government’s epidemic response bill on the international stage. Addressing a press conference, Gulyás slammed as “falsehood” the claim that the government’s decision not to set a time limit for maintaining the state of emergency would lead to a delay in holding elections, noting that the timetable for holding general and local elections is regulated by the constitution.
It is up to the government to determine the duration of the state of emergency, Gulyás said, adding, at the same time, that the bill’s sponsors had proposed that parliament should be the one to decide how long it should be maintained for. This, he said, limited, rather than expanded, the powers of the cabinet. In response to a question, he said the government had no way of extending earlier resolutions online. But if it did, he said, then Anett Bősz, a member of the opposition Democratic Coalition’s group, who had been the first to suggest such a solution, “would be the one screaming the loudest”.