Opposition parties ponder joint platform for EP elections
January 9th, 2019A pro-government commentator thinks that opposition parties will lose votes if they run jointly in the 2019 European Parliamentary election. A liberal analyst wonders whether the protests against the Overtime Bill have united opposition voters.
On Saturday, MSZP leader Bertalan Tóth proposed that opposition parties run on a joint list of candidates for the European Parliament. Magyar Idők reports that the opposition parties will meet to discuss the proposal on Thursday. Momentum and Jobbik have already announced that they will run on their own.
Magyar Idők’s Bálint Botos predicts that a joint EP list that includes former PM Gyurcsány would result in another massive defeat for the opposition. The pro-government commentator thinks that an alliance of ideologically diverse opposition parties will frighten away voters who want to make principled choices and elect politicians who have a clear idea how to govern. A list of opposition parties would be supported only by hardcore Orbán haters who do not care about anything beyond harming the government, he writes.
In Népszava, András Kósa cites Róbert László, the chief electoral analyst of the liberal Political Capital think tank, who calculates that if the opposition parties run separately in the EP election, Fidesz will win more seats with the same ratio of votes than in the case of a joint opposition list. László notes that opposition voters for a long time rejected the idea of a joint opposition list, but this may have changed since last week’s joint protests against the so-called ‘slave law’.
Tags: election, European, opposition