EPP leaders expect Fidesz to quit
May 10th, 2019As leading Christian Democrats all but take Fidesz’s departure from the European People’s Party for granted, a left-wing analyst wonders if distancing himself from his old allies will prove profitable for PM Orbán.
CDU chair and potential Merkel successor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told Reuters that she expected Fidesz to quit the EPP after PM Orbán withdrew support for the bloc’s candidate to head the European Commission (see BudaPost, May 6). EPP Chairman Joseph Daul told the press that Mr Orbán will be expelled from the EPP or will leave voluntarily, unless he changes his attitude.
In 168 óra, Zoltán Lakner finds it peculiar that in the run up for the European Parliamentary elections, PM Orbán is campaigning against ‘his own party family’. He is supposedly doing so in an effort to make the EPP change course and ally itself with right-wing forces rather than with European Socialists, but he stands alone with that ambition, with not one single Christian Democrat leader supporting him. On the contrary, Lakner continues, while Mr Orbán is getting ever nearer to rightist parties that Lakner defines as extreme right-wing, the distance that separates him from his former conservative allies is increasing. The left-wing analyst is not yet sure whether that strategy will bear more fruit for Mr Orbán than what he loses by turning against Europe’s Christian Democrat leaders.