House Speaker Kövér says power can be wearing
January 5th, 2017A left-wing columnist praises the Speaker for his sincerity about the negative side-effects of power on a ruling party, but rejects his idea that the Left intends to ally itself with radical right-wing Jobbik in order to defeat Fidesz.
In an interview with the authors of a 2017 yearbook by the government-friendly Nézőpont think tank, the Speaker of the National Assembly said “power tends to weaken the ruling party, has a lethal effect on spiritual strength and inescapably entails mistakes and fallibilities”. Commenting on calls for a temporary alliance between left-wing forces and Jobbik, Mr Kövér recalled the post-war Communist practices of co-opting masses of former Hungarian Nazis in order to defeat moderate Christian parties.
Népszava’s Róbert Friss appreciates Mr Kövér’s “lonely ability” to break out from his party’s Realpolitik and “give governance some perspective”. However, he rejects comparisons between today’s Left and the post-war Communist leadership and believes that the left-wing opposition in its present shape represents no danger to the incumbent government. Even if it managed to defeat the government by allying itself with Jobbik, he continues, it is “intellectually too weak” to build a new regime. Ultimately, Friss thinks it would have been the duty of Fidesz to build a system of “alternating governance” with political rivals taking over the levers of power from one another.