Hungary’s Former PM Bajnai To Withdraw Into Shadows

  • 6 Jun 2014 9:00 AM
Hungary’s Former PM Bajnai To Withdraw Into Shadows
Gordon Bajnai, co-leader of the leftist opposition E-PM alliance, will withdraw into the background of Hungarian politics but will still remain an important presence within the alliance, Viktor Szigetvári, E-PM’s co-leader, said in an interview to news portal Index.

It was Bajnai’s personal decision to no longer take part in the day-to-day running of the party, and the question of what he decides to undertake in the future is “his own business”, Szigetvári said in the interview published on Thursday. 
 
“What is important ... there shouldn’t be a leadership crisis.” He added that Bajnai was seeing to the most important internal tasks and directing the alliance’s reforms. The three platforms must be dissolved and a clear leadership hierarchy put in place. Further, there must be a strong party board and members must be appointed, he said, adding that an open, unified and democratic party must emerge. 
 
On the question of whether there was any point in the long term of two separate parties operating in an alliance, he said they should be a united political force, though it would be enough to achieve that by the end of the first half of the current parliamentary cycle. Szigetvári said he would like to remain a leader in the party.
 
 Addressing criticisms, he said the alliance had not been politically or intellectually prepared to form a broad electoral coalition in the aftermath of the left’s crisis which emerged in 2008-2009.
 
 And they then had to deal with the leader of the Socialist Party. “It didn’t work because Attila [Mesterházy] cleverly drew us into what ended up being a power game, which, in the end, destroyed the Socialists.”
 
 The lesson of the general election was that if the parties of the left “once again come together like they did -- even if they coordinate more adroitly -- they still won’t be able to beat [PM] Viktor Orbán.”
 
Source www.hungarymatters.hu 
 
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