It has lost most of its supporters, its popularity has fallen below the parliamentary threshold, it is being eroded by internal struggles – Jobbik has never been in such a bad state. Analysis.
More than a month ago, I concluded my article analyzing the situation of Jobbik, which is currently undergoing a renovation, by saying that although Péter Jakab successfully defended his position, he cannot be calm and would probably do better if he looked behind his back more often than before. However, I did not think that my suspicion that the party leader has enemies again in the party, and what's more, within the presidency, would become a certainty so quickly.
Péter Jakab has since resigned from his position after the members of his presidency tried to overthrow him, moreover, he was chosen as his deputy under the leadership of Anita Potocskáné Kőrösi. All of this is interesting because a lot has happened in the last few cycles in Hungarian politics, but it was not typical for a third- or fourth-line politician to overthrow a party president. In order to understand the story, it is worth taking a closer look at what actually happened. With the 1.1 million list votes it received in the 2018 parliamentary election, Jobbik reached a historic peak - for comparison: the entire opposition alliance received 1.9 million votes in the 2022 election. The party saw the result as a failure, and true to President Gábor Vona's promise, he resigned and then left party politics. The competition for the vacant place started immediately. László Toroczkai and Dóra Dúró, representing the radicals who had previously been pushed into the background by Gábor Vona, unsuccessfully tried to get the leadership, Tamás Sneider pushed them out of the party.
The brand of the rebel politician, who came from the countryside and fought for the Hungarians, who ate Parisian bread and fries with paprika, was born.
However, as it turned out later, they had a plan B, they quit together with Előd Novák and founded the Mi Hazánk Mozgalmat, which turned into a party by August. They were later joined by two members of parliament, István Apáti and Erik Fülöp, twelve mayors, numerous municipal politicians and many old Jobbik members. Tamás Sneider proved to be a weak-handed president, he failed to hold together the disintegrating organization burdened by internal conflicts. In the fall of 2018, János Volner made another attempt to take over the leadership of the party, in response the Sneiders expelled him from the faction, and he left Jobbik.
During this period, the party's popularity steadily decreased, and its historically low result of 6 percent in the 2019 EP elections made it clear that it was in deep trouble. In the municipal election in the fall, the previously unimaginable happened: Jobbik ran jointly with the left and liberal parties in many places, with not very bright results.
And then Jakab came...
A key moment in the history of Jobbik's last four years was the renovation, originally announced for the fall of 2019 and then postponed to January 2020. Péter Jakab stepped back in the autumn because the committee did not accept his demands, but in January he won a complete victory. He became the president of the party, managed to hold the next reshuffle after the 2022 election, and filled the presidency with his own people, as he requested.
Or was it the other way around? A former member of Parliament from Jobbik tells our newspaper that Jakab did not actually have a team, but one of Jobbik's power groups was looking for a suitable leader with whom to come to power, and Péter Jakab was chosen. He added that Jakab initially did not want to be a party leader, only later "was he caught by the conveyor belt". If we accept this, a picture emerges that Jakab demanded for the presidency those who "invented" him, since that was the only way he could be elected. This group put everything on Péter Jakab, and he took on the role. A purge began, Tamás Sneider and then Andrea Varga-Damm were pushed out of the faction and the organization, besides István Szávay, Tibor Bana and János Bencsik among the old ones.
In the person of Jakab, they tried to build up a former spokesperson, a person responsible for communication, and since then Jobbik's politics has largely been exhausted in communication. The party logo and image were changed, the double cross was replaced by the double cross, and instead of the party's statutes, a so-called declaration of principle became the guiding principle.
There were no strong, well-known characters left in the organization at its lowest point, all of its routine, popular politicians left, and the leadership was largely taken over by former second- and third-line representatives. Jakab was one of them. Since they had no known characters, they had to be built up - they started with Jakab. The brand of the rebellious politician who eats Parisian bread and fries with paprika, wears a combination of jeans, T-shirt, and faux leather jacket, comes from the countryside and fights for the Hungarians, was born.
The 6 percent result achieved in the 2019 EP elections, a historic low, made it clear that the party is in big trouble.
With his spectacular and often scandalous actions and provocative parliamentary statements, Jakab successfully increased the number of his followers on Facebook, won the likes contest one after another, and began to dominate the party more and more. Most of the news about Jobbik was already about him, and this only got stronger after he was the first of the opposition leaders to announce that he was running for prime minister in the primaries organized by the left coalition. By the end of 2020, the party's popularity had recovered to a level of around 10 percent, and Jakab surprisingly led regularly in the measurements of several pollsters until the primary election for prime minister. It looked like everything was fine, but as it turned out later, they had reached the ceiling.
However, the results of the surveys covered up the shortcomings of the new Jobbik. The party chairman's recurring actions - he waved potatoes in the parliament, brought dry pasta to the prime minister, and then sat in his chair - gained short-term popularity, but after a while everyone paid attention to his exaggerated, citizen-poking gestures instead of what he had to say. If he had one.
Our source describes Jakab as a politician with excellent communication skills, good standing, and character, but as a particularly vain, almost exhibitionist person and a naive, weak leader who longs for recognition and after a while believed that he would become "someone". For example, Prime Minister candidate. In any case, the character started to get tired, and it didn't help that the spectacular Instagram videos of spontaneous singing or dancing on a pig butchery invented by the communication staff were also rather ridiculous. Although the president pulled the party up for a while, the support he could get with him reached its maximum.
The extent to which he dominated Jobbik was really visible when he did not make it to the second round of the primary election for prime minister. With the decline in its popularity, the party also weakened, which indicates that the new supporters, most of whom were primarily Jakab and only then Jobbik voters, turned away from them. The president himself previously admitted that he was not necessarily a leader, and later it turned out that the organization was primarily not managed by him, but by those behind him. It is far from Jakabé alone being responsible for the downfall of Jobbik, he brought what he could, and that was worth it.
Gyurcsány's deadly embrace
However, it is indeed Péter Jakab's responsibility that under his leadership Jobbik made probably the biggest historical mistake of all, which played a role in its coming close to dissolution: it made an alliance with the left-liberal side. In this way, he compared himself, since with his alliance with Ferenc Gyurcsány, the MSZP and the others, he went head-on against the founding declaration adopted in 2003, in which they stated: "The primary task facing the Jobbik Movement for Hungary is the communist successor party and the extreme liberals that have merged with it removal from political power.”
The party was primarily controlled not by Péter Jakab, but by those behind him.
In addition to betraying their voting base, they also made the mistake of believing before the primary election that they would win if their candidate ran in as many individual districts as possible. They no longer counted on the fact that given the more difficult to win districts, it is far from clear that they will win even a single individual mandate. It didn't even work. Therefore, many of their leading politicians - including János Stummer, Lajos Rig, Balázs Ander and Anita Potocskáné Kőrösi - did not enter the parliament, which they were understandably not happy about. Stummer tried to make up for himself with the presidential seat at the renewal, and Potocskáné and Ander, it seems, Jakabon wants to take revenge for his elimination.
Communication without content
It is not only the above that led to the fact that Jobbik's popularity does not even reach the parliamentary threshold today. How weakly politicized it is can be demonstrated most sensibly by the example of Mi Házánk. On the one hand, a good number of its members and voters switched sides from Jobbik to it, on the other hand, the formation followed the opposite path to Jobbik, starting from zero, and according to some measurements, it is now the strongest opposition party.
With the alliance with the left-liberal side, Jobbik compared itself to itself.
In contrast to Jobbik, Mi Hazánk has a clear character, consistent world view and vision of Hungary. Without any kind of value judgement, evaluated from a purely political point of view: he finds certain issues well and brings them to the public's attention. Such was the case of mistrust of vaccines against the coronavirus, wage detention in Siberia, cases of executors or the issue of the protection of life. With his spectacular gestures, he was able to counter the Facebook censorship and the fact that he received less publicity than Jobbik. This was the case when Előd Novák took down the lmbtq flag from the City Hall, when Dóra Dúró was publishing a book, or when they occupied Andrássy út to prevent the Pride parade. Jobbik, on the other hand, does not have a clearly definable voting base - in fact, it may not even have a voting base today - and it had almost no real program apart from its own slogan, according to which it stands "on the people's party". It seems that the people have abandoned him for good.
Is there a sequel coming?
Dániel Ábel Pálfy's article in the Mandiner weekly
Featured image: vaconline.hu
