MSZP attempts to absorb the electoral shock

Witnessing the Socialist party’s loss of one third of its previous voting base at the European Parliamentary elections, a right-wing pundit ironizes over the only MEP the MSZP has managed to send to Brussels. A defeated left-wing politician sends a bitter message to his fellow party members.

In Magyar Nemzet, György Pilhál finds it funny that while Socialist luminaries decry their party’s unprecedentedly poor performance at the European elections, their national board has allotted their only seat in the European parliament to the man who was in charge of the unsuccessful campaign. He adds that during his first five-year term in the European Parliament, Mr Ujhelyi regularly voted against the Hungarian government, in conformity with his earlier promise that he would ‘ring the bell in Brussels’. Pilhál writes that now the bell tolls for the MSZP itself.

On the ATV website, another former MSZP MEP, Tibor Szanyi bitterly criticises his party’s leaders who didn’t even put candidates’ names to the vote and only asked the National Board whether the original order of the names on the party list should stand. This is how Mr Ujhelyi was returned to his seat in the EP, while Mr Szanyi lost his. He thinks that after the MSZP got Just over six and a half percent of the votes (10 percent less than the Democratic Coalition), a serious change in policies would be indispensable. Without mentioning the DK by name, he writes that the MSZP has ‘behaved like a man who falls in love with a prostitute and gives her everything he has’. Szanyi announces that he will run for party chairman later this year on a platform of renewal.