Bajnai’s thinktank accused of trickery
August 20th, 2012Only a day after heaping praise on an analysis by Gordon Bajnai’s foundation, Magyar Nemzet believes that Haza és Haladás are deliberately overstating the electoral chances of Fidesz, in order to establish themselves as the leading force uniting the Hungarian Left.
As BudaPost reported last week (See BudaPost, August 18), the left-liberal thinktank Haza és Haladás (Homeland and Progress) has released an analysis of the possible tactics of the opposition, in light of the new electoral system. The authors (including Viktor Szigetvári, former PM Bajnai’s chief of staff during his one year in office, then campaign manager of the Socialist Party) concluded that the Left can only win the next elections if its various components form an alliance or an outright electoral party.
In Magyar Nemzet, András Kovács suspects that the authors were deliberately exaggerating when they suggested that Fidesz is in with a good chance of winning most of the newly outlined constituencies. Some heavily pro-Socialist constituencies have been erroneously termed swing-districts, he argues, while real swing-constituencies are described as pro-Fidesz in the report. Kovács believes the intention behind such ‘data-rigging’ was to mobilise the left-liberal public behind the project of an electoral union of opposition forces. Since those organisations are in constant rivalry among themselves, Kovács continues, they would need a uniting leadership, imposed from outside. That is precisely the ambition of Bajnai and his foundation, the commentator concludes.