Unlike his opponents at the opposition primaries, Péter Márki-Zay was not a well-known person in Hungarian politics- until now.Continue reading
Critics of both the government and of the opposition parties welcome the result of the opposition primary but wonder what the program of the centrist candidate for Prime Minister will be and how he will put it through.
Hungarian press roundup by budapost.eu
On Individualista, his own new blog, László Seres decodes Márki-Zay’s worldview as a conservative-liberal one. The neoconservative author knows that, given the left-wing majority among the opposition parties, Márki-Zay will have to compromise on several issues, but he exhorts him not to make concessions on the fundamental ones. He worries about the apparent choice of Márki-Zay’s public law advisers, both of whom argue that the Fundamental Law and pivotal laws can be discarded without the required two-third majority in Parliament. Seres hopes Márki-Zay will eventually not take that “dangerous and mistaken track”.
On Válasz, veteran environmentalist sociologist András Lányi takes Márki-Zay’s election as opposition candidate for Prime Minister as harbinger of Fidesz’s defeat, because its shows that most opposition voters now realize that they can only win with a centrist candidate. Meanwhile, he is not sure whether DK leader Ferenc Gyurcsány wouldn’t prefer to lose and sit it out until Fidesz ruins itself during its fourth term, given the huge public debt it has accumulated. Meanwhile, he urges Márki-Zay to come forward with a serious programme – including plans to stop ‘the ongoing ecocide’.
Featured photo via Péter Márki-Zay’s Facebook page