LMP accused of complicity with Fidesz

A fiery liberal pundit alleges that Viktor Orbán owes his two thirds majority to Hungary’s Green Party. Zsófia Mihancsik scorns a young analyst who claimed that voting LMP would help prevent the government’s two thirds majority. The analyst replies that “the old dear doesn’t understand the first thing about voters’ minds if she thinks they can be commandeered to vote for any party.”

On Galamus, founding editor Zsófia Mihancsik argues that LMP played a selfish game by refusing to join the opposition alliance in order to retain their separate place in parliament. She quotes Princeton lecturer Kim Lane Scheppele, the government’s long-time critic, who wrote on Paul Krugman’s New York Times blog that if LMP had joined the alliance, the left opposition would have gained an additional 11 district mandates instead of the five that LMP got from its list votes, for a net gain of six. Just one of those would have been sufficient to strip the government side of its two thirds majority. Mihancsik accuses LMP of intentionally helping Orbán to stay in power and of hubris by claiming to be the one force able to prevent the two thirds outcome. As a matter of fact, she concludes, they not only failed to prevent it, they actually won their seats in parliament “at the expense of the others”. In a footnote, she scorns “a pro-LMP TV and radio analyst” who criticised left-wing personalities for having imposed an unwanted unity on opposition parties. Had they been joined by just one more party, a more even parliament would have resulted. She advises the analyst (and LMP leader András Schiffer) “to give back their licence”, either because they don’t know what they are talking about or (if they do), because they are lying.

Although he was not mentioned by name in the Galamus article, political analyst Zoltán Czeglédi rejects the “pro-LMP” label and argues that Mihancsik’s maths do not add up. “Anybody who claims that in the absence of LMP candidates LMP voters would have supported the left-wing alliance, hasn’t learned the first thing about the politics of recent years and fails to understand that you cannot place house-to-house orders for voters, like ordering pizza”.

Tags: elections, LMP, Orbán, two-thirds