You can't make sense of this without some recent history. Item #1: the Taxi Blockade exactly 17 years ago, on 26 October 1990. A day after declaring on public radio that there won't be fuel price increases, the then new first elected right-wing government raised them. So that Monday morning, taxi drivers organised a blockade of every main street crossing and bridge in Budapest (below just on Erzsébet bridge), later the rest of the country, and bus and some truck drivers joined them -- this was resolved after four days by negotiations. (I went to highschool by bike along the normally bike-hostile main roads.) But on the Right, it had a lasting bad memory, with conspiracy theories that it was a politically arranged coup attempt...

Item #2: on the morning of 4 July 2002, the looniest right of the local far-right held its first idiots' revolution: 'officially' as an illegal protest against election fraud (another right-wing conspiracy theory), a hundred or two activists blocked Erzsébet bridge with stopped cars, themselves, and the police forces whose deployment they triggered. According to some reports they hoped that, like in 1956, there will be a snowball effect into a revolution against the government... but only chaotic police action followed.

The event today was announced by a far-right web forum yesterday, intentionally as illegal protest because 'the Taxi Blockade 17 years ago wasn't announced to police either'. Their hope was that police deployed against them will ensure the blockade of traffic in itself. Someone was brazen enough to forge an email in the name of the police, and send it to newspaper editors with the announcement that police won't intervene.

Then this morning a few hundred protesters gathered on the Pest side of Erzsébet bridge. After 8h, they managed to stop traffic at least in one direction for one hour, but as the photo on top shows, police quickly managed to constrain its actions to one lane. But meanwhile, three protesters climbed a neighbouring bridge, taking them down blocked traffic there, too. They had some placards, which were unreadable from below...

There were lots of arrests. But I read no reports of violent acts or tear gas. Tho' the large number of journalists still could capture some 'nice' photos:

Then groups of dozens (and equally large groups of journalists accompanying them) radiated out to block traffic at other points in the city. Currently the largest group is blocking a tram in the middle of a main crossing.

A fun fact is that the major of the core of Pest, who is an ambitious young yuppie in the next generation of main right-populist opposition party Fidesz, spoke out against the protest yesterday -- which was not the first time he had to deviate from the don't-criticise-extremists-on-our-side policy of Fidesz.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}