With recent opinion polls showing overwhelming support for the government party, we are apt to forget that a slight majority of the electorate voted for the opposition parties on April 8, 2018. A good number of these voters today blame LMP and Jobbik for the two-thirds parliamentary majority that Fidesz-KDNP secured. Immediately after the election both of these parties found themselves in deep crisis, and at the moment it is difficult to predict what their ultimate fate will be.
Both parties have lost much of their support, and in Jobbik’s case the situation was further aggravated by a split within the party. Its original hard core defected to establish a quasi-neo-Nazi party. Nonetheless, I find the situation of LMP, where the crisis was limited to individual departures from the party and its leadership, more serious than Jobbik’s. László Toroczkai’s “Our Home Movement,” given its extremist ideology, is not, in my opinion, a viable formation. Moreover, the number of people in leadership positions who followed Toroczkai’s call is relatively small. The situation is different in LMP, which seems to be crumbling before our very eyes. It is a slow but, I fear, unstoppable process.
Let’s start with the fact that LMP has lost about half of its followers since April. At the beginning, people left because of LMP’s refusal to cooperate with other left-of-center parties. They claimed that with a modicum of cooperation Fidesz’s two-thirds majority could have been prevented. But soon enough voters also began to realize that the very structure of LMP makes the party non-functional. What ensued was most often described as a farce. The ethical committee began meting out “punishments” to perceived offenders, including the co-chair of the party, Bernadett Szél. Her male counterpart would undoubtedly have met the same fate, but Ákos Hadházy not only resigned his post but also quit the party. The final blow was the revelation that Mária Schmidt, one the chief ideologues of Viktor Orbán, had telephone conversations about the party’s chances at the election with Erzsébet Schmuck, LMP’s campaign chairman. There have always been suspicions concerning the relations between Fidesz and LMP, which naturally were strenuously denied, but after this telephone conversation was publicly confirmed, many people felt that they had been duped, that LMP is a stooge of Fidesz, a creation of Viktor Orbán to weaken the opposition forces on the left.
Meanwhile, Bernadett Szél disappeared from sight, allegedly to assess her situation. The ethical committee allowed her to retain her position as co-chair, but she was forbidden to hold any other office in the next two years. I think most people in her situation would have resigned immediately, but I had the feeling that for Szél a complete break with the party, what Hadházy had opted for, was out of the question. At the end, she settled for a compromise solution. She resigned her positions as co-chair and as leader of the party’s parliamentary caucus but retained her membership in the LMP caucus. I have the feeling that Szél didn’t think through how untenable her position will be if she sticks to her decision.
Source: Magyar Hang / Photo: Norbert Farkas
Szél’s alleged reason for remaining a member of the party is that, in her view, LMP is the only “green party” in Hungary. She is convinced that “either the future will be green or it will not be.” Although it is true that Szél put an incredible amount of time and energy into trying to prevent the construction of the Paks II nuclear power plant, the party’s record on environmental issues is otherwise slim. Moreover, her justification for staying in LMP because it is a green party doesn’t make much sense. As an independent she could work just as hard on environmental issues and Paks as she did in the past eight years within LMP. By staying, she will find herself in the difficult position of having no power and very little voice in a group in which she was leading force for a number of years. The new co-chair, László Lóránt Keresztes, I suspect, will try to take the party in a direction that might not meet with Szél’s approval.
Mind you, I’m not at all sure whether this is the last word on Szél’s status within the party and the parliamentary caucus. Szél published her letter of resignation, a three-and-a-half page missive sent to the top party leadership, on a Facebook page open only to party members. In no time the letter found its way to the offices of HVG, even before a previously announced interview given to Magyar Hang could be published. This letter, in which Szél explained her reasons for her decision, prompted R. Benedek Sallai, the former secretary of the party who had the dubious distinction of knocking over the chair of Ákos Hadházy in a “friendly” political discussion, to attack Bernadett Szél. He accused her of being “incapable of looking into the mirror while seeing faults everywhere else.” Sallai said Szél’s alleged behavior was “pathological,” and he blamed Szél and Hadházy for making unauthorized political decisions. In a low blow, he said that she relinquished her posts because they entail work. This is an unfair accusation because it is a well-known fact that Szél is an extremely hard-working politician. “Detti is leaving the sinking ship,” he wrote, adding, in a mixed metaphor, that the party “will end up in the garbage heap of politics.” Perhaps Sallai is right and LMP deserves this fate. If so, Sallai will have to accept responsibility for his role in sinking the party or, if you prefer, tossing it into that garbage heap.