A conservative columnist believes new fault-lines may appear within the opposition as their newly elected candidate for Prime Minister asks for civic candidates to be included into the joint opposition electoral list next year. A left-liberal commentator thinks Fidesz is taking the threat of opposition victory next year seriously.
Hungarian press roundup by budapost.eu
Background information: just one day after having been proclaimed the winner of the opposition primary, Péter Márki-Zay asked the six opposition parties to allow him to form a seventh parliamentary group, with independents and representatives of his Everybody’s Hungary Movement and a centrist New World People’s Party. He asked them to accept ten candidates to be proposed by him onto the joint opposition list to be composed by the end of the year. The approximately 40 to 45 mandates the opposition may hope to win out of the 83 to be filled from party lists leave the opposition parties with very narrow elbow room for negotiations and the six are reported not to agree to more than five ‘Márki-Zay candidates’– the minimum required to form a parliamentary group.
On Mandiner, Gellért Rajcsányi predicts that by having elected an outsider as candidate for Prime Minister, the supporters of the opposition have created new potential divisions among the six parties of the coalition, because most of them are left-wing, while Márki-Zay identifies himself as a staunch conservative. His idea to amend the agreement concluded by the six parties about the joint electoral list will cause further problems, Rajcsányi suspects. All in all, he defines Márki-Zay as a ‘wild card’ or a ‘dark horse’ and suggests that the newly elected candidate for Prime Minister will regularly become cause for headache to his allies.
In Népszava, Miklós Hargitay deplores the decision of the President of the Media Board to resign just 10 months before the end of her term. Monika Karas is expected to become Vice President of the National Audit Agency. Hargitay is certain that she left her job to allow the current parliamentary majority to elect her successor for a nine-year term. The left-wing commentator takes this as indication that Fidesz is seriously pondering the possibility of losing the parliamentary election next April.
Featured photo illustration by Zoltán Máthé/MTI