A conservative pundit warns that actors on both sides of the political divide tend to see the devil in each other and offer mutually unrealistic scenarios to explain history and current events.

In his weekly Heti Válasz editorial, Gábor Borókai quotes veteran left-wing sociologist Zsuzsa Ferge who told Klub Rádió recently that she had gone through three dictatorships, namely the Arrow-Cross regime in 1944, Rákosi’s tough Stalinist rule in the early 1950s and the present one, which she described as being ‘incomplete but very much one’. Whereas, Borókai adds, the Kádár regime when (from 1956 to 1990) no political or trade union freedom existed at all, doesn’t appear to her as a dictatorship. Two irreconcilable worlds are at war and their narratives are exacerbated by the fact that income levels on each side depend very much on whether their politicians are in government or in opposition. The latest diatribes are directed against the Prime Minister’s plan to refurbish a building on Castle Hill and transfer his office there from the Parliament building. He is being fiercely criticised for adding a balcony to the building, although all similar buildings have balconies in that area. This kind of attitude has not changed a bit over the past two and a half decades. What has changed, Borókai remarks, is that the younger generations do not buy allegations that the two historical extremist dictatorships can in any way be considered comparable to the state of affairs in today’s Hungary. Meanwhile, Borókai warns ‘all sides’ not to lose their sobriety and measure lest they become irrelevant.