Márky-Zay wants a base in future Parliament
October 21st, 2021A conservative columnist believes new fault-lines may appear within the opposition, as their newly elected candidate for Prime Minister asks for civic candidates to be included on the joint opposition electoral list next year. A left-liberal commentator thinks Fidesz is taking the threat of opposition victory in 2022 seriously.
Just one day after being proclaimed winner of the opposition primary, Péter Márki-Zay asked the six opposition parties to allow him to form a seventh parliamentary group, with independents and representatives of his Everybody’s Hungary Movement and a centrist New World People’s Party. More specifically, he asked for ten candidates to be included onto the joint opposition list to be composed by the end of the year. The approximately 40 to 45 mandates the opposition can realistically hope to win of the 83 to be filled from party lists, leave the opposition parties with very narrow elbow room for negotiations. The six are reported unwilling to agree to more than five ‘Márki-Zay candidates’– the minimum required to form a parliamentary group.
On Mandiner, Gellért Rajcsányi predicts that by electing an outsider as candidate for Prime Minister, supporters of the opposition have created new potential divisions within the coalition, because while most of its parties are left-wing, Márki-Zay identifies himself as a staunch conservative. His idea to amend the agreement concluded by the six parties about the joint electoral list will cause further problems, Rajcsányi suspects. All in all, he defines Péter Márki-Zay as a ‘wild card’ or a ‘dark horse’ and suggests that the newly elected candidate for Prime Minister will regularly cause headaches for his allies.
In Népszava, Miklós Hargitay deplores the decision of the President of the Media Board to resign just 10 months before the end of her term. Mónika Karas is expected to become Vice President of the National Audit Agency. Hargitay is certain that she left her job in order to allow the current parliamentary majority to elect her successor for a nine-year term. The left-wing commentator takes this as an indication that Fidesz is seriously facing the possibility of losing the parliamentary election next April.