Opposition starts the new year disunited
February 8th, 2023Commentators on both sides of the political divide are sceptical about the prospects of the opposition posing any kind of threat to Fidesz any time soon.
Commenting in Népszava on the separate assemblies held over the weekend by four opposition parties, Gábor Czene believes that neither the Socialist Party nor the LMP nor Momentum have come forward with any palpable idea of how the opposition could pose a serious challenge to Fidesz. Each party’s support is hovering just below or just above the 5 percent parliamentary threshold, he remarks. The Democratic Coalition, on the other hand, is supported by 20 percent of decided voters, he continues, but its leaders are extremely unpopular. ‘We would be hard put to explain how all this could lead to a change in government’, Czene concludes.
Magyar Nemzet’s Gergely Kiss disputes DK leader Gyurcsány’s accusation that the government has lost Hungarian sovereignty to Russia. On the contrary, he writes, Hungary lost its sovereignty as a result of the policies of Mr Gyurcsány’s government in the late 2000s when it had to place itself under IMF control. Now, with high domestic ownership ratios in the bank, energy, and telecommunication sectors, Hungary has reached high levels of sovereignty, Kiss writes.
In Mandiner, Dániel Kacsoh describes Ferenc Gyurcsány’s weekend address as an attack on representative democracy, as the leader of the Democratic Coalition said no negotiations, bargaining, or agreements are admissible with the government. ‘You are either with or against Orbán’, Mr Gyurcsány said, which in Kacsoh’s opinion means that the opposition leader rejects any form of coexistence with the three million Hungarians who returned Mr Orbán to government for the fourth time in a row last year.