A left-liberal commentator thinks Fidesz is taking the threat of opposition victory in 2022 seriously.

Just one day after being proclaimed winner of the opposition primary, Péter Márki-Zay asked the six opposition parties to allow him to form a seventh parliamentary group, with independents and representatives of his Everybody’s Hungary Movement and a centrist New World People’s Party.

More specifically, he asked for ten candidates to be included onto the joint opposition list to be composed by the end of the year.

The approximately 40 to 45 mandates the opposition can realistically hope to win of the 83 to be filled from party lists, leave the opposition parties with very narrow elbow room for negotiations. The six are reported unwilling to agree to more than five ‘Márki-Zay candidates’– the minimum required to form a parliamentary group.

On Mandiner, Gellért Rajcsányi predicts that by electing an outsider as candidate for Prime Minister, supporters of the opposition have created new potential divisions within the coalition, because while most of its parties are left-wing, Márki-Zay identifies himself as a  staunch conservative.

His idea to amend the agreement concluded by the six parties about the joint electoral list will cause further problems, Rajcsányi suspects. All in all, he defines Péter Márki-Zay as a ‘wild card’ or a ‘dark horse’ and suggests that the newly elected candidate for Prime Minister will regularly cause headaches for his allies.

In Népszava, Miklós Hargitay deplores the decision of the President of the Media Board to resign just 10 months before the end of her term. Mónika Karas is expected to become Vice President of the National Audit Agency. 

Hargitay is certain that she left her job in order to allow the current parliamentary majority to elect her successor for a nine-year term. The left-wing commentator takes this as an indication that Fidesz is seriously facing the possibility of losing the parliamentary election next April.

Márki-Zay gathers support among intellectuals

Critics of both the government and of the opposition parties welcome the result of the opposition primary but wonder what the programme of the centrist candidate for Prime Minister will be and how he will put it through.

On Válasz, veteran environmentalist sociologist András Lányi takes Márki-Zay’s election as opposition candidate for Prime Minister as harbinger of Fidesz’s defeat, because its shows that most opposition voters now realise that they can only win with a centrist candidate.

Meanwhile, he is not sure whether DK leader Ferenc Gyurcsány wouldn’t prefer to lose and sit it out until Fidesz ruins itself during its fourth term, given the huge public debt it has accumulated. Meanwhile, he urges Márki-Zay to come forward with a serious programme – including plans to stop ‘the ongoing ecocide’.

On Individualista, his own new blog, László Seres decodes Márki-Zay’s worldview as a conservative-liberal one. The neoconservative author knows that, given the left-wing majority among the opposition parties, Márki-Zay will have to compromise on several issues, but he exhorts him not to make concessions on the fundamental ones.

He worries about the apparent choice of Márki-Zay’s public law advisers, both of whom argue that the Fundamental Law and pivotal laws can be discarded without the required two-third majority in Parliament. Seres hopes Márki-Zay will eventually not take that “dangerous and mistaken track”.

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