Botka makes peace with Molnár
August 2nd, 2017A left-wing columnist excoriates the leaders of the MSZP for wasting time waging internal wars rather than channelling social discontent and representing a credible alternative to the incumbent government.
In an angry OpEd piece in Népszava, Róbert Friss dismisses the reconciliation between MSZP frontrunner László Botka and Zsolt Molnár, a member of the Party Presidium, as uninteresting for anyone in Hungary save for a few people absorbed by politics.
(Molnár went to Szeged, where Botka serves as the city mayor, to make peace with him, after the latter had called him a traitor. After the meeting, he said that all their disagreements had been settled, while Botka told the press that Molnár would wholeheartedly support his policy. For the antecedents see BudaPost, July 31.)
Friss believes after such skirmishes left-wing voters will have a hard time finding a party worth voting for, while the smaller potential allies of the MSZP will be even more reluctant to join the Socialists in an electoral alliance. If the MSZP, he writes, has been unable to fill ‘even a telephone booth with protesters for the past ten years’, it is because it doesn’t understand that its job would be to translate popular discontent into a political project. Politicians should ‘be the voice of the people’ and those who don’t feel the ensuing tremendous responsibility must disappear from the scene. ‘And they will’, Friss concludes.