New Year’s Day assessments
January 3rd, 2019A liberal commentator thinks that Prime Minister Orbán botched his chances in 2018 and predicts his fall within eight years, while a pro-government columnist argues that Mr Orbán’s political line is slowly becoming the European mainstream.
In Heti Világgazdaság, Iván Zsolt Nagy believes that after his unprecedented third consecutive electoral victory, PM Viktor Orbán should have parted with his combative rhetoric and sought reconciliation. If he had, the author argues, the Prime Minister could have easily kept his job until 2030. Despite the continued confrontational line has chosen, Nagy predicts that he can still win the next election in 2022, but will lose in 2026, because the new generation will turn against him by then.
In Magyar Hírlap, on the other hand, Mariann Őry thinks that 2018 was ’the year of identity’ and therefore the policies of reconciliation had no chance of success. A year ago, President Macron of France promised a year of national unity, but by now he probably regrets having left that remark on the Internet. The ‘yellow vest’ protest has shown that people who feel neglected by the governing elite are fighting back, in defence of not just their living standards but also of their identities. Őry believes that the forthcoming months before the European Parliamentary elections could also be marked by strong identity clashes throughout Europe.