On 20 September 2006, the largest public protests since the fall of communism – perhaps even since the Revolution of 1956 – erupted in Budapest. The cause was a leaked videotape of a speech that Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány had made to newly elected party MPs just after his party's victory in parliamentary elections. The tape showed the Prime Minister telling the MPs that “we have obviously been lying for the last one and a half, two years” and that “I had to pretend for 18 months that we were governing. Instead, we lied morning, noon, and night” (BBC 2006).

In particular, his party had repeatedly claimed during the campaign of the previous spring that the budget deficit was only 4.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) – a level that with minor reductions could qualify Hungary for entry into the Eurozone. In fact, as he well knew, the actual level was 10% of GDP, which was high enough to scare away foreign investors and to require serious and painful cuts in public expenditures. He noted also in his speech that the party's policies of the previous four years, which had helped produce these deficits, were unsustainable and ill conceived.

To top things off, the bottom line of his speech was that party MPs would have to line up in favor of a harsh austerity package.