The liberals could not see this, but Orbán could. That project was, again, stopped by Orbán in his populist offensive in the 2018 election.īy 2022, Jobbik voters, whom the liberal elite and Márki-Zay both considered voters successfully converted and pacified into a pro-Western, pro-market liberal consensus, turned out to still be Jobbik voters in the 2010’s-mould: angry, radical, anti-liberal, partially opposing Covid measures and vaccines. The party’s then leader, Gábor Vona responded to the challenge by gathering supporters for a carefully formulated and slow shift towards a political centre. The party soon found itself in political no-mans land, with its momentum being completely halted. Following Jobbik’s emergence on the electoral map in 2010, Orbán was deft in moving the party Rightward and taking anti-immigrant territory previously dominated by Jobbik. In truth, the real challenger to Orbán came not from the Left, but from the far-Right party rival Jobbik. But the reality was that neither Márki-Zay or his opposition backers, including Budapest mayor Gergely Karácsony, had any idea about what would be their counter-offer for Hungary in the place of Orbánism. His success in the primary came after viral interviews in Hungary’s hip new YouTube channel, and gathering a small group of young, upper-middle-class faithfuls who saw him as some kind of a centre-right, pro-Western replica of the Hungarian prime minister. The southern small-town knight of La Mancha was not interested in that. The problem was that the designers of this plan forgot the most important ingredient to any electoral breakthrough: reading the room, and reacting accordingly.
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