Police were bracing for a return of violence in Budapest with more than 30 protests planned in the capital on Saturday on the 50th anniversary of the day Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising.
The protests, including ones by far-right groups, come less than two weeks after riots gripped Budapest on October 23, on the anniversary of the outbreak of the anti-Soviet uprising.
Police then used rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannon against thousands of violent mostly far-right protestors who even tried to drive a tank into a row of riot police. Authorities said 167 people were injured in the clashes.
On Saturday morning, Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany was among hundreds who placed a flower at a recently inaugurated monument to the uprising near Heroes' Square in downtown Budapest, in a quiet tribute on this day of mourning. But quiet commemorations may well be overshadowed by protests.
National Security Agency spokesman Peter Vajda told AFP on Friday that his office had "information that radicals belonging to certain radical organisations are considering tarnishing the anniversary by inciting violence."
Several of the far-right protests will take place in the afternoon on Liberty Square in downtown Budapest, where there is a Soviet World War II monument. Riot police are expected to be out in force on Saturday to ensure security and prevent a return of violent clashes.
The main right-wing opposition Fidesz party of former prime minister Viktor Orban is meanwhile holding a march for the "victims of the brutal police attack" of October 23 of last month, in which the opposition alleges police used excessive force against demonstrators.
The government this week launched a probe into the police crackdown. Symbolically, the Fidesz march will begin at the "House of Terror", a former headquarters of the communist secret police which has been converted into a museum.
The location is part of efforts by Orban to compare the democratically elected government to communist oppressors, an analogy widely dismissed by historians. Gyurcsany's Socialists are the successors to the communist party, but they have undergone a generational change over the past 17 years and have embraced parliamentary democracy.
Orban has sought to oust Gyurcsany through street protests since revelations from a recording leaked on September 17 that the premier lied to voters about the economy to win re-election in April. The revelations triggered a month of protests, which degenerated into riots on the first three nights following the leak of the tape.
While Fidesz has claimed the protests have been a spontaneous upheaval against the government, Gyurcsany has blamed Orban for inciting them with his inflammatory rhetoric and by associating his party with far-right radicals.
The Hungarian uprising broke out on October 23, 1956 and was bloodily crushed by Soviet tanks on November 4, sealing the country's fate as a satellite-state of Moscow until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. The brutal suppression of the two-week rebellion resulted in the deaths of some 2,800 Hungarians. A further 12,000 were wounded and 200,000 fled to the West.