The leader of an online group of the Tisza Party surprisingly openly expressed his concerns regarding Donald Trump's victory the other day, when he talked about the fact that all the "Western help" that Péter Magyar and his party have received so far may dry up because of this.
Meanwhile, the Tisza activists are insulting the citizens who support Trump in the USA and Viktor Orbán at home.
On Wednesday, Péter Magyar congratulated Donald Trump on his victory in the US presidential election on his Facebook page and highlighted:
the Tisza Party is ready to work together with the new American administration to further develop the relationship between our countries.
Magyar wrote all this as if there was any reality to the cooperation between the Tisza Party and the Trump administration, while the new American president is a close ally of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
If you want to get a real picture of how the victory of the Republican politician was received in and around the Tisza Party, it is worth looking at the non-public forums of the Tisza.
End of American support?
The comments of Attila Márk Porpáczi stand out among the comments worrying about Trump's victory. The man is the Zala county organizer of the Tisza Party and the administrator of the political formation's Discord channels. Discord is an online platform designed for chatting, on which people can communicate with each other in different virtual rooms either live or in writing via a microphone.
In one of the rooms, there is the party's "programming group" , from which several conversations were sent to the Hungarian Nation.
In one of the chats, Porpáczi explains that his party's "biggest trump card is Western aid" , because no one is interested in programs and digital confessionals, but "Facebook is very popular" . The organizer of Tisza indicated that the access to the social media page of the party and Péter Magyar is being boosted with external help. The background of the phenomenon and how it occurs is still unknown, but social media experts regularly note that, for example,
Péter Magyar's Facebook page produces much higher reach numbers than pages with orders of magnitude more followers.
There is also a direct connection between his Hungarian party and Facebook's parent company, Meta:
Dóra Dávid, Meta's legal advisor, became Tisza's EP representative in the summer European Parliament elections.
Soft power
In response to Porpáczi's statement, one of the activists asked back in the aforementioned "programmer" Discord room whether "Facebook is Western help?" And the organizer of the Tisza Party didn't care:
not only Facebook, but sharing research, know-how, expertise and other soft power support. The Tisza received a lot of help
he highlighted.
Up until now, it could have been guessed that the Tisza Party received a significant contribution from abroad, but no one around the party has talked about it so openly so far. When Porpáczi about the "sharing of research" , the question can rightly be asked, by whom, for what purpose and from what source, what exactly can these materials contain?
The so-called know-how means expertise in a certain subject. In the case of the Tisza Party, all of this can apply to political communication, how to build a party, techniques of power, and essentially any knowledge related to politics.
Such knowledge is mainly possessed by think tanks, political scientists, and politicians, so it is clear from Porpáczi's words that professional foreign experts work around the Tisza Party.
Other soft power support can be extremely diverse: it can typically mean economic, cultural or even media support from abroad for Péter Magyar. And Donald Trump's victory could mean that these subsidies will completely or partially disappear.
"Trump is campaigning for fools"
Americans have suffered under the administration of Joe Biden and the Democrats for the past four years. Food and fuel prices skyrocketed due to inflation, buying and renting real estate became more expensive than ever before, and all of this meant a significant additional burden on all social strata except the richest. If we consider immigration and many other issues in addition to economic factors, Donald Trump's victory can hardly be called a miracle. However, in the Discord groups of the Tisza Party, they see it all differently: the outcome of the election was explained by the stupidity of the voters.
According to Attila Márk Porpáczi, already quoted, "denying that Trump is campaigning for dumber strata is meaningless" . The Tisza organizer repeated his words several times, extending them to Hungarian voters:
there are a lot of stupid people here, in the USA too
he wrote. According to Porpáczi
Trump was voted into power by "as...gghülys" against their own interests.
The other activists of the Tisza Party apparently shared Porpáczi's opinion.
Balázs Láng, the former communication guru of the Bajnai-Gyurcsány governments and the current organizer of the Tisza Party, expressed similar opinions in the group of Tisza members living abroad.
There are many bastards of God in Hungary... and unfortunately there are even more bastards in the USA...
they wrote. Most of the comments express opinions similar to this, although some are much more nuanced. AMB, for example, only wrote about Trump's victory: "What about the people? Are they completely out of their minds?”
From all of this, it seems that the Tisza Party is not as happy about Donald Trump's victory as Péter Magyar would like to show.
Featured image: MTI/Szilárd Koszticsák
