Gábor Demszky
| Gábor Demszky | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Mayor of Budapest | |
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In office 31 October 1990 – 3 October 2010 |
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| Preceded by |
József Bielek as Chairman of the Council |
| Succeeded by | István Tarlós |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
4 August 1952 Budapest, Hungary |
| Political party | SZDSZ |
| Spouse(s) | Martinné K. Róza Hodosán Vera Révai Anikó Németh |
| Children | Alma-Mira Dániel Dorottya András |
| Profession | politician, lawyer, sociologist |
Gábor Demszky (born 4 August 1952 in Budapest, Hungary) is a Hungarian politician, lawyer and sociologist by qualification. Demszky was the Mayor of Budapest from 1990 to 2010. He was a founding member of the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) between 1988 and 2010.
As a teenager, Demszky joined an informal Maoist radical group, which criticized the socialist Kádár's government from an ultra-hardliner communist viewpoint. After two years, he lost faith in political left ideas and took interest in libertarian ideology. He earned a degree in sociology from Eötvös Loránd University. During the late period of communist regime, Demszky was a leading figure of the then illegal underground democratic opposition to the Kádár-system. His main anti-government activities included the organizing of printing and publishing of illegal books, periodicals, and newspapers collectively called 'samizdats'. During this time he was surveyed by the secret services, harassed by authorities and he clashed multiple times with the state police during demonstrations for free press and multi-party democracy.
In the last years of the regime, he was a founding member of the SZDSZ party, which he led briefly during the late 1990s, before he resigned the post of party premier in protest over factionary in-fighting. He did not ask for his membership's renewal in 2010, therefore ceased to be a member. Since he left his office, he is in a set of former mayors who, despite being younger than the retirement age, are eligible for state-pensions, according to the law on local governments. He declared he doesn't plan full-time activity in the future.
Demszky was first elected as Mayor of Budapest in 1990, and has won all the elections in which he run for that position since then (1994, 1998, 2002, 2006). He is with one of the longest serving time among politicians holding the same offices since the fall of communism. During his first term, the primary goal of his mayorship was working against the collapse of public services and order and working against increasing homelessness and unemployment, while dealing with the soviet-era legacy: the environmental damages and the ruined down working infrastructure that had been suffering from underinvestment and lacked satisfactory repairs for at least one decade. Cityscape quality was also ruined because of the pragmatic modernizations of a shortage-economy.
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