In the convulsive search for a messiah, Median and HVG would even let go of basic professionalism, just so that Péter Magyar would not be needed.
Yes, Péter Magyar should found a party! Now I say this not only as a democrat, but also as a committed right-winger.
It is impossible not to notice that Mr. MZP is rapidly changing -
due to his sudden fame, he speaks more and more and says less and less interesting things, gets stuck straight into the flat topos taken from the front pages of the opposition press, and slowly and carefully puts on the overcoat sold in ready-to-wear sizes by the backward, buggery civilizing Hungarian into Europe, which is a better guarantee of failure in the Hungarian political market is not. This country was cut once in 1998 and once in 2006 by the European civilizing crooks, who at the same time operated the region's slowest catching-up economy for eight years, and during fourteen years of national governance, the country developed so much that the Hungarians no longer feel at all excluded from the European standard of living.
There is no demand or need for this political press zone today, thank God.
The inflated Péter Márki-Zay, in whom many still saw the future of the opposition in the fall of 2021, was also reinterpreted by the daily practice of party politics from a potential messiah in the eyes of the Hungarians to a practicing demented one, and then the 2022 election results, the hard numbers, finally blew him out. Today, there is no doubt in a sober analytical mind that the former savior has written himself off the Hungarian political market.
Péter Magyar is closing himself in here with slow steps: his novelty has faded, he has run out of meaningful things to say, and his integration into the structure of daily politics will completely grind him down. So just tear down a flag, just found a party, you already have everything on the path of narcissistic political messiahs. With his respectable national popularity of 68 percent, he will sit on the same shelf where so many other opposition politicians, from Attila Mesterházy to Péter Jakab: he will remain a wax figure, well-known in person, popular in certain circles, who talks big, but is unable to build political structures and a valid offer,
who, on the fifteenth of March, reads the twelve points as a slogan for the head of power with the usual molded blankness, and on the twentieth of August, the Intelms.
These harsh facts were roughly priced in by Hungarian politics, and the frenetic expectations surrounding Péter Magyar noticeably subsided. Today, for the first time, Hungarians will have to carry out concrete political actions with concrete people in the physical reality of the street; it will succeed accordingly, the hard core consisting of partly undecideds and partly existing opposition will remain with it, mass interest will slowly leave it.
A group cannot just let Péter Magyar go: the opposition core floating above the parties, which until now has been able to believe in all messiahs regardless of the number of failures. Which is emotionally unable to accept that replacing Viktor Orbán does not require one more, one more, and then one more narcissistic messiah, but quite boring things. A political proposal that goes beyond slogans, a credible appearance of the governmental ability needed to implement it, and classic political work, known as party building when he was single, is better than Viktor Orbán's.
Viktor Orbán will one day be replaced by a boring offer, at the polls, boringly. Or yourself.
If Hungarian voters had wanted one-man messiah projects, they could have accepted one of the previous eight. They didn't. So that's not what they want.
However, this is what the two cornerstones of the Hungarian opposition infrastructure, HVG and Median, really want. The latter certainly created an orbital popularity for Péter Magyar with the methodology personally developed by Gerry Mander and Judith Sargentini, and the former, as Zoltán Ceglédi, who is sensitive to political bullshit, very correctly drew attention to it, stating that the context necessary to interpret the number is the masses reading the title not for him, it should only be available to a small number of subscribers. Knowledge is power, and the ability to remain ignorant is no less. Thirteen percent support Péter Magyar, my old mother is a poor tram: this thirteen percent, which magnifies Magyar in a shocking way, was obtained by taking not all respondents as a base, but rather two-thirds who know Péter Magyar, and while those who "definitely" and "probably" do not vote for Magyar its proportion was served separately, the "certainly" and "probably" voters were added together to somehow come up with an impressive double-digit number even for a non-existent dream party. Either way. Even at the cost of distorting the base and simlis labeling the result.
In Vienna, Professor Königstorfer would have drawn the Median on my quantitative methodology exam last semester with a big red felt-tip pen, that's for sure.
As they have done countless times in the last fourteen years, they feel now: the decisive moment is here. They forge strength from frustration, believe in the messiah again, and even let go of the foundations of their profession, just so Péter Magyar is not needed. Then they will knock - as usual - a big one with him as well. And they write it on the blue Hungarian sky with ochre-yellow drops of sweat: surely there will be no change of government in Hungary without a change of intellectuals.
Featured image: MTI/Szilárd Koszticsák
