The Left stands accused of radicalism

A pro-government columnist thinks the Left hasn’t learned the lesson of the elections and sticks to the radical language which, he suggests, caused its crushing defeat on April 6th. He predicts that these tactics will further weaken the left-wing opposition.“The Left behaves just like a fugitive in a second rate thriller who rushes back into a house in flames to find refuge,” Dávid Megyeri writes in Magyar Nemzet (print version). He disagrees with the leftist analyses that interpret Jobbik’s electoral success as proof that radicalism has growing support in Hungary. On the contrary, Megyeri explains, Jobbik managed to improve its result because it tried to appear as gentle and moderate as possible. Unlike Socialist leader Attila Mesterházy, from whose campaign speeches  Megyeri quotes a few denigrating remarks about the Prime Minister (for example, that “Viktor Orbán is Putin’s Poodle, who sits, lies down and wags his tail”).  When it turned out that the electorate did not appreciate that tone, he continues, Attila Mesterházy, instead of changing course, refused to congratulate the Prime Minister on his victory. And so did his allies, namely Ferenc Gyurcsány and Gordon Bajnai. Megyeri also accuses the left-wing opposition of fomenting the protest movement against the Nazi occupation monument (see BudaPost, January through April) and recalls that Communist leaders in the post-war period, heaped the slander of collective guilt on the Hungarian people as a whole, in order to force them into submission. Hungarians, Megyeri concludes, are highly unlikely to buy that masochistic and unjust picture of themselves, but “Gyurcsány and Co, after ruining the country are apparently determined to ruin the Left as well”.

Tags: Bajnai, Gyurcsány, Jobbik, Mesterházy, Orbán