Famous politicians like Katalin Szili, László Botka or Tibor Szanyi have left the party in the last decade or so. They are now being followed by István Ujhelyi, Mandiner wrote.

Another (quasi) regular left over the weekend from the MSZP, which has been shrinking for years. István Ujhelyi , the party's member of the European Parliament announced on Sunday that he was stepping down after he had been unable to "shake up his party" for years.

With this, the politician drove another nail into the , which had seen better days . The MSZP, which was established as a successor party in 1989, has been in government several times since the regime change, and when it was forced into the opposition for a while, it was present as its strongest player in the Parliament. That's over today.

The first cracks in the socialists, who had worked in a unified manner until then, appeared after the 2004 EP elections with poor results, which swept away (no doubt, there were other reasons for this) the then Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy, who was succeeded by his former Minister of Sports and Youth , Ferenc Gyurcsány on the post.

Although the Socialists won the 2006 elections with Gyurcsány, the Prime Minister's public speech in Öszöd and the handling of the situation did not bode well for the party's future even then.

The exit wave was then started by the former prime minister after the severe election failure in 2010, after Gyurcsány left the then 59-member opposition MSZP faction together with ten of his colleagues a year later.

as Csaba Molnár, Ágnes Vadai , László Varju or Iván Vitányi left the faction and the party forming the Democratic Coalition.

It is true that before the Gyurcsánys, in October 2010, another influential politician left the party: Katalin Szili . The former Speaker of the House, who faced the former prime minister, sharply criticized his party for another defeat in the local government election, and started his own movement, which became a party, called the Social Union.

The internal fights continued in the following years, after the elections after 2010, the party was present in the parliament in decreasing numbers. The decline is continuous: in 2014, only 29, 15 in 2018, and then only 10 after this year's election were able to form representative groups.

former vice-president Gábor Simon , who was brought down by his hidden foreign accounts and is currently on trial for budget fraud and other crimes, which caused a particularly large financial loss, or László Boldvai, who was involved in an offshore scandal through  his wife . , the former treasurer of the party.

Meanwhile, in 2017, the neglected member of parliament Imre Horváth left the socialists in shambles , as well as Márta Demeter, who was convicted in the first degree for abuse of office .

László Botka, who for some time cherished dreams of becoming a candidate for prime minister . The mayor of Szeged signed up in December 2016 to accept the opposition's candidacy for prime minister, but he resigned a year later. The insulted Botka came down hard on the opposition , which he believes has been ensnared by the political mafia and does not even want to win in 2018.

Botka was followed a year later by another old biker Tibor Szanyi who faced the party leadership after the failure of the European Parliament elections in 2019, and who was recalled from the post of vice-president due to his "behavior adversely affecting the party's judgment with his statements and actions".

In the worsening situation, Szanyi announced in January 2020 that he was leaving the party.

, László Kiss and Sándor Szaniszló moved to the DK . Gyula Molnár also got another year, 2021 . was expelled from the ranks of the MSZP in June of last year , after he announced before the election that if he won individually, he would strengthen the faction of the DK, not the socialists. László Szakács acted similarly .

Read the full Mandiner article here.

Author: Róbert Baranya

Image: Tamás Kovács (Faction in 2022...)