Opposition unity – not easy!
June 7th, 2013The leading right-wing daily paints a desolate picture of the state of the left wing opposition – less than one year before the next elections.
In her Magyar Nemzet editorial, Matild Torkos argues that there is no basic difference between the numerous groupings seeking leading and auxiliary roles in a future opposition alliance, but at the present stage disintegration is the rule.
She believes that despite assurances to the contrary, the Socialist Party has already decided to nominate its own chairman, Attila Mesterházy as candidate for Prime Minister. In other words, the last ”crisis managing” left-wing Prime Minister, Gordon Bajnai and his Together-2014 party will play a secondary role in the alliance. It hasn’t managed, in fact, to increase its electoral support during the 7 months since Bajnai made his re-entry into politics (See Budapost, October 28, 2012). The main losers, she continues, are the MPs who left LMP early this year to join Together 2014 (See BudaPost, January 30). Now their only option will be to support the Socialist Party chief, which is barely compatible with the past of the co-founders of LMP, a party whose name means “Politics Can Be Different”. The real role they might have been assigned to play, Torkos suggests, was to weaken LMP in Parliament. Ferenc Gyurcsány, she believes, has “written himself off” with the latest scandal over his famous 2006 “lie speech” (See Budapost, May 28). In conclusion, she thinks that at least one place on the future Left ticket should be reserved for Andor Schmuck, a former Socialist who runs a network of pensioners’ clubs and who has taken over the leadership of the small Social Democratic Party from László Kapolyi, a minister under the last years of Communist rule and now a multi-billionaire.
Tags: Bajnai, Gyurcsány, LMP, Mesterházy, MSZP