On the Mandiner website, political analyst Dániel Deák believes that the election of the new President signals the end of the conflicts of the past few weeks and thus political stability has been restored. He describes Mr Sulyok as a highly authoritative jurist whom even the opposition parties struggled to criticise.

Deák welcomes the new President’s promise that he will be perfectly transparent in granting pardons. Mr Sulyok’s career as a lawyer and as President of the Constitutional Court, Deák asserts, will guarantee that the kind of mistakes made by former President Novák who pardoned the helper of a paedophile offender, cannot happen again in the future.

Three opposition parties demand direct election of President

A left-leaning analyst believes Sunday’s demonstration held by the Democratic Coalition, Momentum and the MSZP was a failure.

On Index, Attila Tibor Nagy remarks that the number of opposition supporters who gathered in front of the Parliament building on Sunday was dwarfed by the size of the demonstration held by YouTubers nine days earlier. Thus, he writes, the three parties whose leaders addressed the rally only showed their weakness.

The large demonstration on 16 February, he continues, expressed outrage over the paedophile pardon scandal, whereas Sunday’s rally was held to demand the direct election of the President – a legal issue of little interest to the public, especially one day before the parliamentary majority would elect the new President anyway.

Weeklies on events since President Novák’s resignation

Commentators assess a wide range of issues connected to the paedophile pardon scandal, from the role of women in politics to why the opposition parties seem unable to profit from the failures on the government side.

In Magyar Narancs, Noémi Szécsi takes the case of the two women who had to resign from high posts as proof that women only play weak political roles. She views both former president Novák and former justice minister Judit Varga who had to give up her ambition to be Fidesz frontrunner in the European election as figures sacrificed by male politicians.

Demokrata’s Gábor Bencsik, on the other hand, sees them as exceptionally valuable members of the right-wing political community who had the moral strength to resign after making a mistake by granting a pardon to the helper of a paedophile offender. He hopes that the right-wing community has only lost them temporarily.

In Heti Világgazdaság, Réka Kinga Papp finds it telling that it was Youtubers and other Internet influencers who were able to organise a 150,000 strong meeting in Budapest to express dissatisfaction with the government over the pardon issue and more. However, she warns, real political change will need a new political generation to appear.

In Jelen, Zoltán Lakner believes that the paedophile pardon scandal opened an unexpected opportunity for the opposition to take the lead, expressing popular dissatisfaction over a moral issue. However opposition politicians are busy outmanoeuvring each other rather than building strong coalitions ahead of the local elections in June, he complains.

In his Magyar Hang editorial, Szabolcs Szerető also remarks that the opposition seems unable to exploit the opportunity provided by the scandal. Rather than coordinating their strategies, he explains, opposition parties decided to run separately for seats in the European Parliament, although, if united, they could force Fidesz below the ’psychologically important 50% level’ in the European elections.

In Mandiner, Dániel Kacsoh accuses the organisers of the large mid-February anti-government demonstration of falsely claiming that they were apolitical. In reality, he continues, they played the role of the leaders of a crowd hoping (in vain, he adds) to achieve a change in government.

Meanwhile, the opposition parties have again proven helpless and had no better idea than to come forward with the hopeless initiative that the president of the Republic be elected by direct plebiscite, rather than by Parliament, he writes.

MTI Photo: Zoltán Máthé

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