The police did not claim at all that 250,000 people were present at yesterday's event.
Péter Magyar referred several times to the fact that a crowd of hundreds of thousands gathered at his Saturday demonstration. Only twice on the Facebook interface. On Sunday he wrote:
Hundreds of thousands of us have shown that we are not afraid"
And this Saturday night:
According to the police, 250 thousand, according to government propaganda 24 thousand (😂), in reality 3-400 thousand people".
However, using expert means and based on the number of previous demonstrations, it is not possible to talk about the 100,000 crowd predicted by Péter Magyar, but not even 50,000; the number of participants in the demonstration is approximately the number of participants in the teachers' demonstration on October 6, 2022, which, according to Litmus' calculations, was 40-50 thousand people,
and about 39-44 thousand at the Saturday demonstration.
In other words, Péter Magyar - at least based on the number of employees - did not succeed in reaching the camp of the dissatisfied with the government even in October 2022. Especially if we take the demonstration on October 23, 2022, where there were still 65 thousand people according to Litmus.
At the same time, we were also curious about the other part of the statement
would the police really have estimated the number of the crowd at a quarter of a million, as Péter Magyar claimed.
So we contacted the Budapest Police Headquarters to find out what is true about this.
We got this answer:
"Dear Mr. Editor!
The Budapest Police Headquarters has never made estimates regarding the number of participants in each meeting, and we will not do so now either.
Sincerely,
BRFK Communication Department"
In other words: no, the police could not confirm Péter Magyar's story about the crowd of hundreds of thousands.
Featured image: Lawyer Péter Magyar speaks at the National March and Demonstration for a New Hungary event he announced on Kossuth Lajos Square in Budapest on April 6, 2024. MTI/Koszticsák Solid
