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New Wednesday of New Times by Peter Uj.
I’m interested
- Next weekend, the MSZP will hold an inaugural congress, where the two possibilities to start will be Bertalan Tóth, the current president, and Attila Mesterházy, the party president from 2010-14.
- According to Mesterházy, under Tóth’s leadership, the party is losing popularity and the MSZP will be completely exhausted by the next elections.
- According to Tóth and his allies, Mesterházy would pierce the opposition coalition, and according to them, Fidesz is spectacularly supporting him.
- Immediately before the renewal, Tóth’s leadership dissolved one of Mesterházy’s strongest bases, the Pest county party organization.
If all this had happened a few years ago, a national scandal and commotion would have accompanied the renewal of the MSZP. But the MSZP has already passed its peak, according to the latest polls, the party’s support is 5 to 7 percent of the total population, and we know that next week, even nastier data from Budapest may appear for the party.
This is the main argument of Attila Mesterházy, who was preparing to run for the party presidency in his own right, who was also a candidate for prime minister of the MSZP in 2010 and 2014. He promises that if he can return to the head of the MSZP, the party He will be stronger again, because he is able to address young people and communicate much better than Bertalan Tóth. According to him, if he does not win the presidential elections, by 2022 the support of the MSZP will be only 1 percent, the current leadership is very weak.
In his re-election next weekend, his opponent will be Bertalan Tóth, who assumed leadership of the party after the 2018 elections. In Tóth’s environment, Mesterházy fears the future of the opposition coalition; not said publicly, but in fact suggesting that Mesterházy is Fidesz’s man. (Three years ago, several people in the party said the same thing about Zsolt Molnár, who is now Tóth’s most important ally as party leader.)
The MSZP has never been a closed cohesive party, but the Tóths now hope this will be the last great civil war, and if Attila Mesterházy loses the Congressional vote next week, there will be peace of mind.
Vote online
Delegates learned late Wednesday that the reorganization congress would be held online because it was revealed that there was coronavirus among potential participants or those who were in close contact with the sick.
This means voting for presidential candidates electronically; the party leadership says that the election will remain completely secure and secret, but for those who do not handle the online interfaces with confidence, the procedure will be a bit cumbersome. “Anyone who has seen this will have two minutes, but those who are now familiar with the system may take twenty minutes,” said one of the party’s leaders.
Once this year, the party held an online congress, the introduction of a co-presidency system was adopted, in accordance with this, now a female president will also be elected. There is only one candidate for this position, Ágnes Kunhalmi. Kunhalmi, by the way, supports Tóth among the male candidates. In the previous congress, it was also decided that the MSZP wanted a full opposition coalition and authorized the current party leadership to negotiate with the other opposition forces.
According to Mesterházy, it was a bad idea to raise Christmas
Mesterházy has acted as an internal party opposition for years. In the 2018 campaign, he plotted against the launch of an outsider, Gergely Karácsony, as a candidate for prime minister. To this day, he believes it was a mistake to give up the execution seats to Dialogue, which has only 1 percent national support, for the sake of Christmas.
And when Tóth became president after the elections, he kept his parliamentary mandate, but in the meantime he became one of the leaders of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and, since 2020, the president of the organization. The Tóth hoped this would give up their internal political ambitions.
Tóth’s leadership has made it clear that they want Gergely Karácsony to be the joint candidate for the opposition prime minister in 2022, even though the mayor has repeatedly stated that he does not want to be a candidate. If Mesterházy were the president of the MSZP, it is almost certain that he would no longer want to win Christmas.
Gyula Budai also joined the campaign for the presidency of the MSZP
Rumors about the secret relationship between Mesterházy and Fidesz have spread on the left since the 2014 elections, and many attribute this alleged relationship to the fact that he did not hand over the leader of the left coalition list to Gordon Bajnai at the time. . His opponents from the MSZP, and quite a few from the DK, say that he has good relations with Antal Rogán’s friends, and it is also thanks to this that the pro-government press is clearly putting pressure on him in the current presidential election – as Magyar Nemzet and Hír can see. TV Fidesz deputy Gyula Budai in Wednesday’s Facebook post, in which he writes, among other things: “the last man of morality and normality on the left, Attila Mesterházy”.
Among other things, Buddha argues that Mesterházy will not sleep with Gyurcsány. At the same time, Mesterházy recently stated in the Church of Faith newspaper that the MSZP should cooperate with Gyurcsán because “Wherever I go, I hear from all voters that even the devil needs to befriend to disrupt this government. This is also valid for MSZP, Gyurcsány, Momentum, Jobbik “.
Pest County Out of Election
Gyula Budai supported Mesterházy on Wednesday mainly because the MSZP dissolved the Pest county organization just two weeks before the congress. This is interesting for presidential elections because there would have been a relatively large number of county delegates, about 10 percent of the participants would have voted, and the majority wanted to vote for Mesterházy. “They are largely my supporters, so this decision hits me “ Mesterházy told ATV about the dissolution of the organization on Tuesday.
MSZP leaders – Tóth party chair, Molnár party leader – claim that the county organization had to be disbanded because the overwhelming majority of grassroots organizations had an irregular renewal in August, and then congressional delegates were elected from irregular way. There was a basic organization, for example, where only four of the eighty members participated in the selection of the local delegate, and in many cases it was decided without protocol, by telephone consultation. The party’s ethics committee feared that if someone challenged the election of Pest County delegates in court, the legitimacy of the entire congressional and presidential election would be compromised and the county’s irregularities would be very clear. Therefore, some members of Pest County are preparing to challenge Congressional resolutions because they believe they have been illegally expelled from Congress.
The contrast between county and party leadership is not new at all. Until August, Zoltán Fekete was the county president, who came to the party’s leadership in early 2019, accusing them of covering up certain economic abuses in 2016. He also wrote a letter to the chairman of the MSZP board at the time, which did not contain no specific allegations, just vague allusions, but the letter went to the Fidesz newspaper called The Pest Guys, and it was brought there in its entirety at that time.
According to national MSZP leaders, in fact, Black had suspicious financial affairs and, furthermore, hundreds of people had recently joined the party’s county organizations. The newly admitted members did nothing about the merits, but due to their significant number on paper, the county could (have) delegated even more delegates to congress. A Socialist Pest County councilor told 444 that he believed Black had grown weary of the party leadership when he recruited dozens of people for the party, such as the core organization Csomád, but elsewhere before the current renovation. He said he should have curbed the debauchery of Black long ago, who has consistently diluted the county’s membership with shady elements in order to have a comfortable majority on every vote.
Black shot lurking
Black’s membership was suspended by the MSZP’s ethics committee at the end of July, but not officially because of suspicious entries, but because he secretly recorded a conversation with his party leaders. The recording has yet to be made public and you don’t even know what’s in it, but Black later admitted that he actually recorded a discussion without the permission of the participants.
By the way, the pro-government press also reported on this whole recording case, the Hungarian Nation wrote about it for the first time. Since then, Black has been expelled from the party, although the decision is not yet final.
While he was county president, Black clearly supported Mesterházy in the party, inviting him to events for county foundations, for example, “where he celebrated with wild strangers to us,” said a former party member who saw such an event in Aszód. . According to his report, Mesterházy was also good for the counties, for example he regularly donated laptops to local socialists.
Mesterházy is the last strong critic
Recently, those who have been dissatisfied with the MSZP leadership have left the party in turn. Tibor Szanyi, a former MEP, left after the EP elections, then László Botka, the mayor of Szeged, after the local elections, and in February this year, the party’s two new district mayors, László Kiss ( District III) and Sándor Szaniszló (District XVIII). So if Tóth can win the online vote without the Pest County delegates, he can rightly hope that he will not have a significant opponent and that the civil wars in the MSZP will end.
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