Márki-Zay dismissed as ‘unfit’ for the job

A pro-government daily carries two articles on the same day sharply criticising the opposition candidate for Prime Minister.

In Magyar Hírlap, Péter G. Fehér suggests that if elected Prime Minister, Péter Márki-Zay, ‘a self-avowed liberal’, would soon privatise energy providers. The new owners, he continues, would be Western multinationals which would immediately raise utility prices to international market levels, that is more than three times the current price consumers must pay. That would leave them with enormous profit margins, given the low prices stipulated by the Russian-Hungarian contracts on the long-term supply of natural gas. Then, Fehér predicts, they would pay huge taxes to their countries’ governments, which face Moscow on the ‘Eastern front’. Thus, Moscow would end up financing the campaign against itself. Under such conditions, is Mr. Márki-Zay really serious when he declares that he would develop relations with Russia in a spirit of mutual respect? Fehér asks.

In a short piece in the same daily, Péter Forró writes that Mr Márki-Zay constantly makes disconcerting gaffes which his people then spend days explaining away. After enumerating several earlier examples, he quotes the opposition frontrunner miscalculating the duration of unemployment benefits, failing to remember the number of his own children, then spitting into his facemask before putting it back into his pocket. Certainly, the man who is most fit for the high office of Prime Minister, Forró concludes, ironically.

Tags: Márki-Zay