Jobbik’s demise explained

A pro-government analyst sees Jobbik’s poor performance as the main cause for the crushing defeat suffered by the opposition at the Parliamentary election on 3 April.

In Magyar Hírlap, Ervin Nagy suggests that former Jobbik supporters made up the lion’s share of over 800 thousand votes lost by the opposition lost since 2018. The political analyst, who was a founding member of Jobbik in 2003 and served briefly as its vice-chairman, recalls that his former party became an important force in politics as a result of its opposition to the left-liberal government headed by Ferenc Gyurcsány. When Jobbik decided to move towards the centre in 2015, he continues, it lost many radical right-wing supporters but gained the votes of other dissatisfied Hungarians in 2018. When it joined the opposition alliance last year, however, the strongest party of which was led by Ferenc Gyurcsány, Nagy asserts, two thirds of its voting base evaporated. Behind that shift from being an anti-Gyurcsány party to teaming up with him, Nagy identifies a deeper factor as well. Namely, Hungary’s political life is usually composed of two opposing camps. Formerly, the communists versus the anti-communists. When the SZDSZ, the liberal party, joined the post-communist MSZP in government in 1994, it was doomed to extinction because it crossed the main political dividing line. Today, Nagy believes, the main dividing line is between sovereignists and globalists. When Jobbik abandoned its anti-globalist positions and joined the globalist camp, it crossed the dividing line and condemned itself to an irresistible decline, Nagy concludes.

Tags: elections, Jobbik, sovereignism