Another diatribe against Vona-Left alliance
November 25th, 2017An old acquaintance of the Socialist Party constituency has resurfaced after several decades to warn against a tactical electoral pact with Jobbik and its leader.
In Népszava, a guest columnist says it is not a matter of life and death to overthrow the incumbent government and therefore an electoral pact between the Left and Jobbik would be inadmissible. The author is Béla Fábry who rose to public attention in 1989 as a simple high school teacher elected to the ruling Communist Party Central Committee in a wave of renewal, and who famously parked his Trabant car in front of the party headquarters among the shinier vehicles of fellow party officials. He tries to rebuke the main argument of those left-wing personalities who advocate a tactical alliance with Jobbik, namely that western democracies chose to ally themselves with a loathed foe, i.e. Joseph Stalin in a desperate effort to defeat Hitler. Fábry warns that Mr Vona is not a modern Stalin, while Mr Orbán is not a modern Hitler. Hitler was an existential threat to western democracies, while what he calls the ‘Orbán regime’ should be ‘relegated to the dustbin of history’, but not at any price, since it does not represent a lethal danger. Instead of seeking murky alliances, the Left should finally try and broaden its own electoral base, Fábry suggests. He believes that in the individual constituencies, people who want to send the government packing will vote for the most promising opposition candidate and thus, rather than legitimizing Jobbik’s candidates with an electoral pact, the Left should convince the electorate of the value of its own candidates and win back the left-wing voters it has lost to Jobbik over the past decade.