It took almost a day for their candidate to concede defeat and congratulate the winner — and finally honor his exhausted activists and tens of millions of voters by saluting them at all.
Donald Trump's landslide victory has already been analyzed by many. Into the public - no, not into professional political work! - as a fresh returner, it was not the first thing that stood out to me, as it did to many at home and abroad, but what I think spoke the loudest and the loudest about how great the future 47th president of the USA was. The silence. Grave silence around the House of Democrats.
It took almost a day for their candidate to concede defeat and congratulate the winner — and finally honor his exhausted activists and tens of millions of voters by saluting them at all. However, the numbers spoke for themselves on Wednesday morning.
The Democrats did not expect to win a big victory, but based on their pollsters, they believed that the final result would be close and that the result could depend on very little. And then I put it very benevolently... That's why they prepared the method that has already been tried in many places around the world, most recently in Georgia: in the case of a close or masked result in the media, with the help of a few noisy, disappointed loser opposition activists, it can even be seen as violent when photographed well, but in any case they cast doubt on the result with a noisy protest citing electoral fraud.
How many of these have we seen?!
Even from home, many people remember the marchers on the streets of Budapest after the badly failed 2018 election - fortunately here peacefully - who, in a quite surreal way, proving that they have no idea about the real state of the country, wrote on their flags that "we are the majority".
Then, in 2022, there was no more We Are the Majority or We Are the Losers demonstration, the artificial ice rink rang with emptiness. However, the side that was expecting a close result at the time, or more precisely a close opposition defeat, had everything necessary prepared. The questioning of the integrity of the elections (for the sake of security, they started to print them in the weeks before the vote) and their supporters' rants against fraud were not left behind. Their vote counters, who had gone to the countryside, were the first to start cooling off their colleagues from Pest, but the riots ended not because of this, but because the victory was so clear.
In the 2022 election, the number of votes cast for Fidesz-KDNP was the highest that a party has ever received in this country.
The conglomerate called the Obama machine in Washington counted for almost another day. Well, not the votes, because at first they also understood that there was not much to be gained there, but whether they would be able to mobilize a strong enough resistance against the results of the election, and they came to the conclusion that Donald Trump's victory was so great that they had a chance neither. (The former president's - quite amateurish - attitude in a similar situation in 2020 cannot in any way be compared to the financial, organizational strength and professionalism of the Obama machine.)
This victory cannot be questioned by any standards!
For a quarter of a century, Democrats consoled themselves with the fact that even the winning Republican presidential candidates received fewer votes than they did when they lost. They shouted injustice and even attacked the foundation of the American federal state's democracy, the electoral system. But now that too has fallen, many millions more people voted for the Republican candidate than for the Democrat.
Of course, nobody should think that there won't be demonstrations and protests. But in the light of the election result, all of these will only strengthen even more how bright Trump won over them.
The author is the head of the Free Europe Institute
Featured image: Ringier archive/Blikk
