Strategies for the revival of the Left

Political analysts advise the left-wing parties to re-learn how to make politics and to implement a four-tier strategy of reinventing themselves. One specifically warns against sterile warfare over symbolic issues.

The two governing right-wing parties, Fidesz and Jobbik have been the only ones to conduct professional politics in the last four years, while the Left has spent its time moralizing and playing petty internal power-games, writes Csaba Tóth, chief analyst of the Republikon Institute in 168 Óra. The actors of the Left, he believes, have failed to really address the electorate and have been idly waiting for Fidesz to weaken gradually by itself. If they want to win any elections in the future, Tóth claims, these parties have to re-learn how to do politics. In other words, they have to offer an inspiring and mobilizing political vision to the voters; build the infrastructure necessary to win a majority and communicate with the electorate in a constant, coherent, program-based fashion.

In the weekend supplement of Népszabadság, Zoltán Lakner draws the outlines of a comprehensive strategy for the reconstruction of the Left, and predicts that if the defensive, reactive, risk-avoiding strategy applied so far continues, the Left-wing camp will gradually disappear from the political scene. So he advises the adoption of a novel, more radical and reformist program, which would rely on four significant policy shifts: to build their own interpretation of history, to work out a project for the future of Hungarian society, to put forward a consistent welfare programme and to develop a grass-roots movement to support them. Lakner advises the Left to proactively build its own symbols instead of reactively opposing ideas put forward by the governing conservatives. The Left, he writes, should also create and enact a new, progressive vocabulary, a left-wing narrative that could compete with the rival and dominant conservative one