For more than a decade and a half, the left-liberal forces have not come forward with political concepts and messages that focus on rural voters and respond to their everyday challenges, explained Gergely Erdős in his analysis for Magyar Nemzet. According to the internal political analyst of the Századvég Public Knowledge Center Foundation, it is easy to see that the public issues embraced by the left (for example, the case of Fudan University, the question of joining the European Public Prosecutor's Office or the plans for the transformation of the ministerial structure) are surrounded by disinterest among rural voters, who can rightly feel that , that the left-liberal parties have no real political offer for them.
As a result of the parliamentary election on April 3, the governing parties received a two-thirds mandate from the Hungarian electorate for the fourth time, while the last time the left suffered a larger defeat than the current one was in 1990, during the regime change. According to Gergely Erdős, domestic policy analyst at the Századvég Public Knowledge Center Foundation, given that the left-liberal forces performed weaker in the capital compared to their expectations, and only won mandates in two individual constituencies outside of Budapest, it is worth examining the reasons for their failure, paying special attention to their unpopularity in the countryside. .
According to the analyst, it is important to note as a starting point that the left-wing parties did not draw the appropriate conclusions from the results of the previous three parliamentary elections, that they will not be able to change the government without strengthening, or more precisely creating, their support outside the capital.
Instead of revising their policy, they used the long-followed recipe recently: they did not come up with anything meaningful to say targeting rural voters, and they also did not remedy their organizational deficiencies in constituencies outside Budapest.
It is noteworthy that some left-wing forces (LMP, Párbeszéd, Momentum) de facto do not exist in the countryside, while many of the basic organizations of the socialist party, which used to be embedded in small settlements, and Jobbik have ceased to exist in recent years, and a significant part of their dominant - and locally popular - politicians left - points out Gergely Erdős, who believes that
the left-liberal parties seem to be unable to build from the opposition, in the past 12 years they wanted to "save" the organizational and community-building and member-recruiting work that Fidesz, led by Viktor Orbán, gradually carried out in the opposition position between 2002 and 2010.
Among other things, the 99 Movement associated with the name of Gergely Karácsony can be interpreted as a specific symptom of the left's flawed infrastructure-building strategy, with which the mayor of Budapest tried to create a mass movement from above, without success, skipping the necessary steps of organic political construction from the bottom up.
Gergely Erdős stated that we should also not forget that for more than a decade and a half, the left-liberal forces have not come up with political concepts and messages that (also) focus on rural voters and respond to their everyday challenges. As he writes,
it is easy to see that the public issues embraced by the left (such as the case of Fudan University, the question of joining the European Public Prosecutor's Office or the plans aimed at transforming the ministerial structure) are surrounded by disinterest among rural voters, who can rightly feel that the left-liberal parties have no real political their offer to them.
the entire article in Magyar Nemzet here.
Author: Krisztina Kinceses
Image: Roviden.hu
