Reborn on the Fourth of July, a variation on the American film title, has been the optimistic catchphrase at MSP and SDS headquarters these days, since the two parties behind the Bajnai government will be holding their conventions on that date. The liberals are to elect new officials at theirs, due to chair Gábor Fodor's resignation, while the socialists have no such agenda items in mind (or so it seems for now). In the creative chaos that is the SDS, the only ones with a plan for now are intent on joining forces with the MDF, whereas the only sure thing at the MSP is what vice-chair Ferenc Juhász said on ATV television: the era commonly associated with Ferenc Gyurcsány ended with the EP elections.

More and more feel that as the former prime minister remains popular with the party base, few dare to risk antagonising those on the ground. No such considerations come into play within the SDS. Everyone is waging war against everyone else there. Four members who have resigned from the governing board and are reckoned to be onetime Fodor supporters, Gabriella Béki, József Gulyás, András Léderer and László Csőzik, signed a declaration with second- and third-ranking party members in an expression of concern for their party. The document condemns politicians who it accuses of leading the liberal movement to the brink of collapse, who ‘take pride in their pragmatism' and who ‘speak with contempt about the politics of principal'. It also complains that the SDS has become the ‘booty in the self-serving wars between the parties within the party'.

Kóka and the calm bits

Reading between the lines, one sees a picture of a renewed fight between the parliamentary faction led by Mr Kóka and another segment within the party, a conflict which was always rumbling beneath the surface during Mr Fodor's chairmanship. However, even experienced political volcanologists could not have anticipated the sheer force with which the clashes would erupt at the 13th June session of the party's national council. One delegate from the town of Békéscsaba said that Mr Kóka should step down from his post as faction leader and nominate a successor at the national convention in July. The outcome was tight: there were 27 votes in favour of the motion and 31 against, with four abstaining. Reacting to the situation with stoic calm, Mr Kóka took off and immediately distanced himself from the entire party. As he told the Hungarian News Agency (MTI), that day saw the faction as the ‘calmest, most functional part of the SDS' (read ‘the other bits of the organisation were hysterical and dysfunctional').

Mr Kóka can, therefore, keep planning. According to sources, the former economy minister means to form an alliance with the MDF this autumn. Apparently, after the EP elections, Mr Kóka and Károly Herényi, the MDF faction leader, picked up consultations where they had left off before. The intellectual underpinning of the talks? A paper written by SDS MP Bálint Magyar describing a joining of forces of the two small parties. This has now become a matter of urgency for the liberals, after it became certain that they will be hard-pressed to cross the 5% parliamentary threshold on their own.

The MDF only appears to be in a stronger position. The party leadership is also aware that the parliamentary elections will be a much tougher nut to crack than the single-round EP vote based on party lists. In fact, just selecting 176 individual candidates nationally and collecting nomination forms from voters may cause problems for the MDF. (Indeed, Mihály Dézsi, their man for the January by-election in Budapest's Ferencváros district, fell short of the candidacy.) And although it's full steam ahead for a change of voters and party members, the effort to recruit life-giving activists has fallen on hard times because the party's county-level organisations have been exercising passive and even open resistance in response to Operation Bokros - MDF HQ's drive to make former MSP finance minister Lajos Bokros their MEP candidate. (Heti Válasz has learned that the Csongrád County MDF refused to participate in the party's EP campaign and that the Békés County organisation is on the verge of closing up shop.)

However, any stumbling blocks to cooperating with the SDS have been overcome. With the pushing through of Mr Bokros - who, with his bona fide neoliberalism, is trying to make us forget his socialist roots - it became clear that no serious resistance to the liberal plan could be anticipated within the MDF. Ms Dávid is expected to win backing at the upcoming party congress on 20 June, never mind pledges made by allies of ousted officials Zoltán Hock, András Pettkó and Kálmán Katona. It appeared for a while that supporters of Mr Hock, the onetime party vice-chair, would come to an agreement with backers of Kornél Almássy, whom, along with Ms Dávid, they had deemed a traitor.

Is Ms Dávid's time up?

Even former MDF prime minister Péter Boross has stood behind a joining of forces. According to sources, in several talks with dissatisfied members, he agreed that Ms Dávid would have to go after the EU elections. However, this latest planned ouster fizzled out when Mr Boross expressed his amazement at the election results, whereupon he urged reconciliation within the party and said there was no justification for replacing Ms Dávid. The ex-PM could well be right. The outcome of the elections also shows that the MDF's airing their dirty laundry hardly stops voters casting their ballots for Ms Dávid's party. In other words, there would also be no obstacle to the MDF forming a joint parliamentary faction with the SDS and then both parties taking the bull by the horns in the coming elections. 

Hurdles to a ‘capitalist market party' coalition might also be overcome in the SDS. There is a serious chance that the liberals will elect a Kóka-compatible chair at their 4th July convention, one that would do little to stand in the way of an alliance. Pro-Fodor István Szent-Iványi and deputy faction leader Péter Gusztos have already declined the offer, former SDS chair Gábor Kuncze has no intention of returning, and Mr Fodor has no wish to remain as chair. There are many who are trying to talk Budapest mayor Gábor Demszky into taking the post, though sources say he dreads the constant battles with the parliamentary faction. This has improved the chances for politicians who back Mr Kóka, including Tamás Wittinghoff, mayor of the town of Budaörs, and Miklós Hankó Faragó, an MP from the town of Szombathely. What is more, mid-September marks the end of the six-month period in which Members from the MDF faction that was dissolved in the spring were prevented from joining any MP group at all. According to sources, the leadership of Political Capital, a consultancy assisting the MDF and one of the architects of the alliance with the liberals - or at least with some of them - has spoken several times to the MDF about the inevitability of the two parties' working together.

This is something like what former MDF faction leader Mr Herényi must have been referring to in the e-magazine Stop.hu when he responded to the question of whether any other bold moves can be expected after the push for Mr Bokros's MEP candidacy. He said cryptically, ‘It's not about what you can expect from the MDF. It's about what you can expect from the situation. After all, there are processes of change that have come about in the world of politics that are extraordinary, and extraordinary situations call for extraordinary solutions. The weakening of the SDS and the strengthening of Jobbik have caused a shift in the political spectrum, and this could have consequences that may bring surprising results'. This paper has learned that the pro-alliance Kóka-Magyar axis is not anticipating, for example, that Mr Fodor would be part of this new cooperative effort. As one source put it, ‘he'd be gone and forgotten'.     

A better future!

With the advance of Jobbik, the hot topic until the next elections may be the fight against ‘the brown peril'. That is why many were watching the Fidesz congress with interest on 13th June to see what sort of signal the big winners in the EP elections would be sending the radical right. Well, Fidesz didn't exactly go out of its way. In his speech, vice-chair Lajos Kósa used a football metaphor to characterise the approach that can be expected of his party: when both Barcelona and Debrecen are starting in the Champions League, the last thing on the Catalonian team coach's mind is the Hungarian forwards' dribbling skills. Re-elected party chair with five votes against and 1,211 votes in favour, Viktor Orbán made a promise to restore law and order that was aimed at Jobbik voters concerned about public safety, but he also made it clear: ‘We want to run the country without a forced coalition - and perhaps we can. We only want to form a coalition with people of free will, not with any other party'. He spoke even more plainly on the Hír TV news network on 12th June when he said that Fidesz expects votes from both MSP and Jobbik supporters alike without seeking cooperation with those parties. According to Mr Orbán's assessment, this is because Fidesz occupies the political centre in Hungary between one mid-sized force with extremist tendencies to its right and another one to its left, i.e. Jobbik and the MSP.

However, even some in the Fidesz camp need to acclimatise to the restructuring of the political playing field. István Tarlós, Fidesz faction leader in the Budapest Assembly, for example, had fallen behind by one party brochure. It seems that at a 14th June demonstration to demand the resignation of the Bajnai government, he greeted the crowd with ‘A better future!' This, despite the fact that the phrase is practically a trademark of the Jobbik-linked Hungarian Guard (and used between the wars by the Levente Movement, is a rightist educational organisation for boys - and not by the fascist Arrow Cross party, as a few overzealous Nazi hunters have suggested). Hawk-eyed observers of Fidesz-Jobbik collaboration pounced on this gaffe, while Mr Tarlós started making awkward excuses about not being aware of the origin of the greeting. Fidesz vice-chair Zoltán Pokorni, however, wasted no time getting behind Mr Orbán when he told e-news magazine hvg.hu: ‘We don't need to woo the people that vote for Jobbik. We don't need to use the kind of language they like. We need to prove ourselves by running the country well and win them over too'. On the issue of the Hungarian Guard's role in strengthening public safety outside the capital, Mr Pokorni made it clear that they should play no such role.        

‘Emotion and heart', says Pál Losonczy, an organiser for Jobbik's EP election campaign. According to him, it is these two factors that determined the party's breakthrough. Number 18 on the party list, Mr Losonczy is a founder of Hír TV and, as a café owner in Budapest's Terézváros district, he won fame for helping to expose property scandals there. He puts the party's success down to members' enthusiasm and says that they entered the fight with minimal financial resources.

In response to this reporter's scepticism to both the number of posters displayed and the visibility of the campaign suggesting otherwise, Mr Losonczy gives an example. He claims that their campaign film, which was downloaded over 400,000 times through YouTube, was produced for a total of Ft70,000 (about €250). One key to the success of the short film was the fact that even the voice of the narrator matches this law-and-order party's message. It belongs to Gyula Szersén, the actor many remember as the Hungarian voice of the dogged Inspector Cattani, out to fight corruption in a popular Italian TV series. Mr Losonczy also notes that the SDS's anti-Jobbik poster campaign gave them a strong boost as it sparked interest in the party in many areas that Jobbik had not yet canvassed, though he feels the strongest momentum was created by the ‘ground battle' fought by its 400 local organisations.

But there had to be more to the funding behind all this, and so I asked Gábor Szabó, Jobbik party administrator and campaign director, why they hadn't released a financial report in past years. Mr Szabó said, ‘Our articles of association state that the document shall be approved by the national committee, but that body is only about to be set up now. After it's formed, we'll submit the reports, which we otherwise have available, and this will include those on past periods'.

When I asked where the money for the estimated Ft80-100 mn (€290-360,000) poster campaign came from, Mr Szabó responded, ‘That's a strong exaggeration: we spent Ft16 mn [€58,000] on 400 giant posters and managed to put up 50-60 more free of charge'. According to the party administrator, the chief source of funding for the campaign was their share of the state subsidy granted to the foundation they set up in 2006 with the Hungarian Truth and Life Party (MIÉP) (roughly Ft26 mn (€94,000)). In addition, they received Ft20 mn (€72,000) in donations, primarily from Hungarian small and mid-sized enterprises and from individuals that pay generally five to ten thousand forints (roughly €20-40) each. This covered the cost of 50,000 stickers and 2 mn leaflets.

Mr Szabó also highlights the efforts of volunteers. Party members in the northeastern Hungarian village of Gönc, for instance, pieced together bits and bobs to prop up the party's giant poster there. Since the State Audit Office also went over Jobbik's books in late May, we will be able to get a closer look at the party's finances from that agency's summer report.