State Secretary János Árpád Potápi said that one of the most important achievements of the March 15 revolution 175 years ago was that it forged national unity.
“The unity of the nation, the understanding that we can rely on one another and the mother country, gives us strength even in the hardest of times when our most important values are under threat,” the state secretary told a commemoration of the revolution’s anniversary on Monday in Edmonton. The message of 1848 is that “even when outnumbered, we are able to achieve our goals if we join forces,” he said. Hungarians acted together also last year when the war broke out in Ukraine and 150,000 ethnic Hungarians came under direct threat, with Hungarian communities around the world organising donation drives, he added. Meanwhile, Péter Szilágyi, the deputy state secretary for policies for Hungarian communities abroad, said in Cleveland that Hungary supports peace “as everything needed for a worthy human life can only be provided in peacetime”. Marking the March 15 national holiday, he said that “Hungary today is seeking the difficult path of representing Hungarian interests with the same unwavering consistency as it did in 1848 when it put self-determination first”. Szilágyi said that the government elected in 2010 had defined promoting the preservation of diaspora Hungarians’ national identity as a strategic goal. “Thanks to joint efforts over the past years, diaspora Hungarians have gained new impetus: through the various programmes and grants, we have proven that Hungarians around the world can count on us.”