Commenting on the move of Jobbik’s Chairman to remove several vice presidents in an attempt to transform Jobbik into a broad based party, a radical right-wing pundit argues that the party Chairman must be given a free hand to choose his deputies.

In Barikád, Jobbik’s semi-official weekly, editor Sándor Pörzse passionately argues against party vice chairmen being elected by the membership, for they ‘are simply unable to decide who is fit to become a vice chairman’. It is sufficient to promise them, he continues, ‘the reconquest of Transylvania, a ban on MAZSIHISZ (the Alliance of Jewish Faith Communities), and the placing of both  (PM) Orbán and (former Socialist PM) Gyurcsány in the same prison cell’, in order to be elected. A line has to be drawn between building a party from the grassroots and starting to operate as a professional organisation, he warns. The author, who is also a Jobbik MP, ends his column reiterating that ‘a boss’ must be allowed to choose whom he intends to work with.

In the same weekly, Party chairman Vona tells his interviewer, the son of veteran (and moderate) party vice chairman Zoltán Balczó why he wants to relegate some of his leading party officials to the rank and file. In order to defeat this government, he explains, Jobbik must become a united ‘people’s party’ with an appeal to broad layers of the population, beyond its own core electorate. He tells Mátyás Balczó that some of the current vice chairmen have ‘other main priorities’.