10 January 2014
For the past four years, the Hungarian Left-Liberal opposition have told us that they are going to win the next election. This boast is now no more than a hollow and bad taste joke.
Over the past four years, the political opposition in Hungary have failed to unite in any meaningful way and worse, have offered the Hungarian people nothing in the way of political vision. Their crass and amateurish attempts at forging political cohesion were laughable: the Hungarian voter was treated to repeated showings of dark room machinations and manipulations, as leader after leader sought to enhance their own ego and agendas at the expense of the people they claimed to represent.
All too often, opposition figures like Mesterházy and Bajnai were deceived by foreign commentary and narrative, which painted Prime Minister Orbán as a neo-dictator. They failed to actually study the veracity of the claims and who was making them and crucially, failed to appreciate that external support would never translate into effective political capital for the Hungarian opposition.
Take the case of Gordon Bajnai. This man believed he was a credible Prime Minister in waiting. Yet both he and his community of ‘Think Tank’ advisors proved inept time after time at solidifying this image in the polls. His charge into electoral politics was new. He had never been elected to anything but people were asked to believe that presiding over a government in 20109-10 which had economically failed and was riven with scandal and more importantly, rejected at the polls, was actually a mandate to lead again in the future. Unsurprisingly, his failure to create a meaningful third force between Fidesz and the Socialists was a severe handicap. His negotiation skills were also unmasked as being limp – he was unable to convince Mesterházy and Socialist Party members that he was indeed a credible Prime Minister candidate for a joint campaign and he singularly failed to distance himself from disgraced former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány.
Of course, there seemed little Bajnai could do to rebut the criticisms of his many business failures, another feature of his inability to demonstrate credibility. Bajnai is now yesterday’s man and should leave politics quietly.
Attila Mesterházy has proven to be no better than Bajnai as a political force. One is never actually sure if he is in charge of the Socialists and given the array of political dinosaurs giving him ‘advice’, this is not surprising. Seeing off Bajnai was always his first concern for so long but the energy put into that struggle diluted any effort he needed to exert in order to develop a comprehensive and coherent political policy. In this he was and is a failure. Tell me any policy that you can identify with the Socialist Party? Exactly!
The Socialist Party, like Bajnai, has no political vision short of being in power. They have yet to appreciate the backlash they faced in 2010 and why it happened and as such, have failed to properly deal with Ferenc Gyurcsány. Is he an ally? Is he a threat? Deep down, I think they know he is toxic at election time but few, if any, wish to tell him that.
With Bajnai and Gyurcsány scrabbling around in the 4% range of opinion polls, it is hard to see what they offer the opposition. LMP and the Liberals are insignificant and need not detain us further. The Socialists admit they cannot beat Fidesz and frankly they are not really trying. Shifting deck chairs on the Titanic as it sinks seems an appropriate metaphor for the Left-Liberal opposition in Hungary today and they only have themselves to blame.
I am sure Viktor is laughing loudly at the spectacle he faces. However, I somehow think he will not be complacent – after all, he has the chance to extinguish a generation of poor political operators.
The losers in this are the Hungarian voters. What have they done to deserve such a pitiful opposition? In short, they are witnessing the real death of Socialism in Hungary and the end of neo-liberalism as a political vision. These twin events have done as much as anything to emasculate politics in Hungary, certainly as much as anything the supermajority has done. The Hungarian people have also become more intelligent voters and crude attempts to hijack politics with manipulation, such as the Socialist Party’s unclear association with ‘dodgy videos’ and Gordon Bajnai’s association with infantile gestures such as the beheading of a figure of Viktor Orbán at a public rally are recognised for what they are – the legacy of another time in Hungary.