Twenty Years of European Greens
1984 - 2004
edited by Arnold Cassola & Per Gahrton
György Droppa Hungarian Greens
- EGC delegate in Mayvik, Finland 1993
- EFGP Committee Member 1997 - 2003
At the beginning of the ’80s in Hungary we started to create a movement, called the “Danube Circle”. We were fighting against the dams on the Danube. There was not too much hope to win the case, especially because information had been kept secret, and there was no legal way even to register our group as an NGO. Whatever we were doing, we had to bang our heads against the wall. To learn and to act against the dam, we had to criticize the regime. It was very unusual work, not only for us, but also for those in power!
They did not know what to do with us, with environmentalists, speaking in political terms. Protests, demonstrations, scientific work, the collection of the information mosaics, the editing and distribution of samizdat papers, that was our everyday life. At the end of the ’80s, the regime started to soften up, and we started to look for international relations. The mistake we made was not to turn political immediately. We waited until 1992. One year later, we received an invitation to Finland. It was the first “official trip” of my life. The trip of realization!
One cannot choose one’s relatives, but one can chose his/her political family. Once there was a place, where a lot of people gathered, from a lot of different countries and cultures, to find a common solution for the old continent. That day, that atmosphere really touched me.
At home, I really had to explain my serious declaration that: “finally I have found my family”. So, I added, that my international home and my new friends, they all think in the same way as I do, and the only thing I have to do here at home, is to build an equally strong Green Party, like the ones in Finland, Belgium, Holland or Germany. I had changed gears, and events started to move faster. Our efforts, and our chances in our old-style new democracy, were not enough, and often one could feel the squirrel-wheel effect, trying to run faster and faster but, at the same times, staying in the same lousy place.
So many times, since then, I’ve told myself that it was only a beautiful dream. A dream that could not come true during my lifetime, a dream that could not come true here in Eastern Europe. These masses of unfulfilled dreams were a burden on my soul, but even in those moments there was a vision; a vision that helped me to recover again from my discouragement, and that was Majvik.
The warm hospitality of the Finnish people, not only that of the Greens, the incredibly beautiful place, the white nights, the rowing on the lake at midnight in the sunlight, and “Che Sarà”. We were all swinging and singing all night long, and we all knew that we had made it. Majvik’s remarkable memory is there, touching us, wherever we go.
