NOTE: This is the fifth of several articles I am writing to promote my fundraiser to cover the Hungarian election starting next month. To find out more about the fundraiser and how you can help, click here.
I was originally planning to write one article for each of the major Hungarian political parties, but beyond Fidesz and Jobbik, none of them really merit their own posts. With the two largest leftist opposition parties polling at around eight percent each, none of these groups has a prayer of unseating Viktor Orbán, at least not on their own. Additionally, given the interlocking, incestuous, and drama-filled nature of the Hungarian left, it’s difficult to discuss any one of these parties in isolation.
In contrast to American (and Anglosphere) politics, continental European politics is defined by a constant rush of party-switching, coalition-building, and horse trading. This is due in part to the more collectivist mentality of Europeans as well as proportional voting systems that allow parties to win seats according to their percentage of the vote, in contrast to the American first-past-the-post system where the biggest vote-getter wins everything. With the exception of France, every European country uses some form of proportional representation.
Hungary uses a mixed system, where 106 members of the National Assembly are elected from first-past-the-post constituencies (similarly to the U.S. House of Representatives) and the remaining 93 members are elected from nationwide party lists via proportional representation. Parties must win at least one constituency seat or five percent of the nationwide party vote in order to gain representation, with the threshold raised to ten percent for two-party coalitions and 15 percent for coalitions of three parties or more. Additionally, parties must nominate at least 27 constituency candidates in order to nominate a nationwide party list. In order to be nominated in a constituency, a prospective candidate must obtain 500 valid signatures from residents of that constituency.
This system has allowed the leftist opposition to fragment into a number of micro-parties due to their inability to get along. While there was a brief attempt to form an alliance between the parties in the 2014 election, it fell apart after only three months due to constant infighting. With the exception of MSZP and Párbeszéd, all of the leftist parties are fighting the 2018 election on their own, greatly reducing the likelihood they will be able to topple Viktor Orbán.
Here are the major leftist parties.
MSZP (Magyar Szocialista Párt/Hungarian Socialist Party)-Párbeszéd (Dialogue)
As mentioned above, this is an electoral alliance between the MSZP and Párbeszéd parties, meaning they will field a joint party list and prime ministerial candidate, as well as not run constituency candidates against each other.
MSZP is the largest leftist opposition party in Hungary and currently the largest opposition party in the National Assembly. It is directly descended from the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP), which ruled Hungary during much of the Cold War. That’s right: instead of being rounded up and shot, Hungarian communists were allowed to rebrand as “social democrats” and continue running in elections. Ain’t life grand?
MSZP was the dominant party for the first twenty years after Hungary transitioned to democracy, holding power from 1994 to 1998 and again from 2002 to 2010. In this time, they screwed it up by their own admission: Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány famously delivered a speech in 2006 in which he admitted that MSZP had lied to the voters and accomplished nothing during its tenure in office, sparking mass protests across the country.
The Socialists also stepped in it in other ways. As it was run by corrupt “post-communist” bureaucrats, it practiced the same corrupt post-communist politics seen in other Eastern European countries: downsizing, outsourcing, and graft. MSZP inked deals to sell off portions of Hungary’s infrastructure to foreign investors, a process that was fortunately halted when Fidesz came to power in 2010. The Socialists also allowed existing infrastructure to decay; a friend of mine told me that prior to 2010, downtown Budapest was falling apart, with crumbling buildings, faded paint, and torn-up streets the norm.
Most significantly, the Socialists bungled Hungary’s economy to the point that they were forced to grovel to the IMF for a loan when the global financial crisis hit in 2008, enslaving the country to the whims of globalist bureaucrats. This final move destroyed any chances MSZP had of retaining power in the next election, and Gyurcsány was turfed out of power in a no-confidence vote in 2009. His successor, a toady by the name of Gordan Bajnai, would preside over the party’s landslide defeat in 2010, where they won less than a fifth of the seats.
Since then, MSZP has continued to slowly sink, as the people approve of the job Fidesz is doing and newer left-wing parties steal away Socialist votes. The party retains a core of elderly supporters who reflexively hate Fidesz and the right, but young Hungarians have abandoned MSZP in droves. In 2014, MSZP’s Attila Mesterházy was the prime ministerial candidate of the Összefogás (Unity) alliance, but the group failed to make any headway against Orbán. Most recently, party leader László Botka resigned in October, claiming that Fidesz had secretly infiltrated MSZP in order to neuter it.
As for Párbeszéd, it’s a green/feminist party that was formed in 2013 by several MPs who defected from the LMP party. It initially formed an alliance with Együtt, another minor leftist party, before breaking off the agreement after the 2014 election (starting to notice a pattern here?). Gergely Karácsony, Párbeszéd’s effeminate co-leader (European green parties always have male and female co-leaders for some reason), is the joint prime ministerial candidate for the MSZP-Párbeszéd list. He also serves as the mayor of Budapest’s Zugló district, known for its thermal baths, communist high-rises, and Gypsy prostitutes loitering around hourly hotels on Mexikói út (literally “Mexican Street,” showing the Hungarian sense of humor).
DK (Demokratikus Koalíció/Democratic Coalition)
DK is a splinter of MSZP, established in 2011 by Ferenc Gyurcsány during one of his “screw you guys, I’m going home” spats. The party is similar to Tony Blair’s New Labour or Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, combining corporatist, crony capitalist economics with support for poz and degeneracy. DK is basically a vanity project for Gyurcsány, without whom the party would collapse and be forgotten.
Ferenc Gyurcsány is in many ways the Hillary Clinton of Hungary: a ludicrously corrupt and widely despised politician who keeps loitering around because of constant bootlicking from his fanboys. His CV prior to entering politics is a classic tale of Eastern European graft and opportunism; he was an enthusiastic communist during the Cold War, but suddenly pivoted to democracy and free market economics after the Wall fell, making a fortune working for globalist financial institutions and benefiting from cronyism on the part of his ex-communist buddies.
Gyurcsány’s tenure as prime minister was one disaster after another, enough so that fellow leftists are unwilling to work with him due to his astronomical unpopularity with Hungarian voters. For example, in the initial negotiations to form the Unity alliance for the 2014 elections, DK was initially excluded because the other parties believed that associating with Gyurcsány would be poisonous to their chances of winning. Unity eventually relented and allowed DK to join, likely contributing to their poor results against Fidesz.
Currently, DK is polling even with MSZP, likely due to Gyurcsány’s name (as I mentioned, he has an inexplicable base of fanboys) and the fact that the Socialists are weak and divided.
LMP (Lehet Más a Politika/Politics Can Be Different)
LMP is a far-left green party, though it likes to masquerade as a “transpartisan” institution in the style of Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! party in France. Their main policies are what you would expect from treehuggers: environmentalism, green energy, combating climate change, the usual. LMP is also strongly opposed to the expansion of Hungary’s Paks II nuclear power plant, both because they’re anti-nuclear energy in general and because the government is financing the expansion with Russian assistance.
The party’s leader, Bernadett Szél (oh, excuse me, Doctor Bernadett Szél), is your typical too-smart-for-you academic who shouts “citation needed” whenever right-wingers make an obviously true statement. For some reason, she serves on the national security committee of Hungary’s parliament, which provided some major laughs recently when she was revealed to be on George Soros’ payroll. LMP primarily draws its votes from the hippie-dippie set, of which there aren’t enough in Hungary to make a difference.
Együtt (Together)
Együtt is a left-wing party formed in 2014 to stage public demonstrations and stunts against the Orbán government. I covered one of their events last year, where they protested Vladimir Putin’s state visit to Hungary by blowing whistles and flipping off his motorcade. Most of the Hungarian public see them as clowns and jokers—for obvious reasons—and it’s unlikely this will change in 2018.
Együtt was formed by former Socialist Prime Minister Gordan Bajnai, whom you’ll recall was the poor sap left holding the bag after Ferenc Gyurcsány destroyed the economy and skated off. Unlike Gyurcsány, when Bajnai’s party lost the 2014 election, he got the hint and retired from politics, causing the party to be hijacked by attention whores such as Viktor Szigetvári and Zsuzsanna Szelényi, the latter known as the Sarah Palin of Hungary for her dumb accent and even dumber public statements.
Momentum
Momentum is what would happen if Tumblr started a political party. I’m not kidding you. They’re a radically left-wing, antifa-influenced party that is pro-gay, pro-tranny, pro-migrant, and pro-insanity. Their leader is András Fekete-Győr, a self-hating Magyar who spent much of his life imbibing poz abroad and now wants to impregnate Hungary with his AIDS baby.
Momentum’s big claim to fame is scuttling the government’s bid to make Budapest the home of the 2024 Olympics last year, arguing that Hungary was too “racist” and “xenophobic” to deserve the honor of hosting such an event. Fekete-Győr successfully collected enough signatures on a petition to force a referendum on the bid, after which the government unceremoniously cancelled it.
Since then, Momentum has been picking up speed among the hipster and SJW set, enthralled by Fekete-Győr’s pledge to make Hungary a racially diverse, tolerant, “modern” country like Germany or France. Momentum is aided by the fact that it is completely divorced from Hungary’s traditional political class—Fekete-Győr was born in 1989 and didn’t enter politics until relatively recently—and by its condemnation of other leftist parties as being just as corrupt as Fidesz.
If you think Momentum has “George Soros operation” written all over it, you’d be right. The party’s messaging is primarily in English instead of Hungarian, because Hungarians aren’t their primary audience: they’re targeting the brain-dead leftists in the U.S. and Western Europe who think that Viktor Orbán is a fascist and a Putin puppet. Momentum’s best chance of gaining power is by convincing globalist institutions that the Hungarian government is “tyrannical” and needs to be deposed externally, either through pressure from the European Union or some other type of foreign intervention. Fekete-Győr is clearly positioning himself as the leader of an Arab Spring- or Euromaidan-type uprising, comparing Fidesz to Hungary’s communist government.
At the moment, Momentum is scraping near the bottom of the polls, due to their relative newness and lack of appeal outside the hipster set. They’re also likely hurt by the fact that much of their natural constituency has relocated to other E.U. countries to escape Hungary’s “backwardness”: Hungarians living abroad are only allowed one vote (a party list vote), while Hungarians in Hungary are allowed two votes (constituency vote and party vote).
However, Momentum is doing a better job than anyone else of not only firing up the young Hungarian left, but in getting positive coverage from the international fake news media. I wouldn’t discount them, even if they fail to win any seats this April.
Read Next: The Hungarian Election: How Jobbik Cucked Out
The post The Hungarian Election: George Soros’ Army of Leftist Losers appeared first on Matt Forney.