Desperate to secure a majority at next year’s Hungarian general election, the opposition Fidesz party’s behaviour is beginning to exhibit precisely that chief quality that also characterizes the incumbent MSZP Socialists: taking the Hungarian electorate for fools.

Recognizing that the ruling MSZP are likely to have an insignificant role in a post-electoral parliament, prompted the chairman of the Fidesz council László Kövér to concede on the 2nd of September this year that it was in fact Jobbik, The Movement for a Better Hungary, which constituted in his own words the “great threat” to his own party’s prospects.

Those listening to Mr Kövér’s statements this week on the matter of political corruption can be in little doubt as to how Fidesz has decided to meet the challenge it faces from the Jobbik party, namely, by trying to adopt Jobbik’s policies as their own; and then thinking that the Hungarian people won’t notice.

In an interview given this week to MTI, the official claimed that a future Fidesz government would endeavour to “bring to account in the courts” those Socialist ministers and politicians who had been responsible for turning Hungary into an economic basket-case, once such a government had brought in the legislative measures necessary to mount criminal prosecutions.

Mr Kövér’s statement was made in a month in which Fidesz has also touched on the subject both of welfare restructuring, and law and order reform; with its plan to appoint former Interior Minister Sándor Pintér as a “security czar.”

Regular readers will know that all three issues: criminal proceedings against demonstrated corruption, a radical welfare overhaul, and root-and-branch police reform (crucially featuring a Gendarmerie to deal with Hungary’s rural crime epidemic); have been central elements of Jobbik’s platform since the party’s inception.

Yet the Magyar Távirati Iroda (MTI), or Hungarian Telegraphic Agency, a major source of English language news material on Hungarian stories, did not explain why the desire to see political criminality actively prosecuted merited international distribution only when it was expressed for the very first time by a Fidesz functionary, not when it was once again re-asserted by Jobbik Chairman Gábor Vona in an interview on Hungarian state television less than a week ago.

Neither did MTI ask the Fidesz politician, how it was possible that if his party was so keen on hunting the politically corrupt through the courts, they had not – even once – used their considerable financial and investigatory status as the main parliamentary opposition to issue an official charge against such Socialist politicians during the long years in which their own inactivity has contributed to the country’s fiscal collapse.

The Fidesz council chairman’s statements therefore mean either, that they have been comfortably warm inside parliament twiddling their thumbs while the victims of corruption outside it have been cast out into the jobless cold, or, that the Hungarian court system is currently so riddled with partisan cronyism as to make effective jurisprudence of political matters impossible; as demonstrated by this Summer’s verdict on the former Hungarian Guard association.

Moreover, given that Fidesz has recently chosen to spend so much time calling Jobbik’s policies their own, where are the press’ descriptions of Mr Kövér as an “ultra-nationalist,” with “extremist” views whose “radicalism” endanger Hungarian stability?

László Kövér is in fact fooling no-one. As he himself states, it is only pursuing “Socialist” corruption that interests Fidesz. His party wishes to exact revenge against the MSZP not for ruining the country by having their hands in the country’s coffers, but for the fact that the MSZP removed and replaced Fidesz’s own hands in it, with the election of 2006.

Jobbik alone has the moral authority necessary to pursue those who have enriched themselves at the country’s expense regardless of which party they may have belonged to; and the public knows full well that only a party utterly untainted in the endemic corruption of the last 20 years has the independence necessary to carry out such a project.

Perhaps the recent opinion polls have emboldened Fidesz into thinking that they may claim any policy as their own? If so they should bear in mind that each recent poll has always indicated a far greater proportion of the electorate is “undecided” than are supporters of their own party.

Proof enough, if proof were needed, of the Hungarian people’s lack of enthusiasm for replacing one government consisting of self-profiteering billionaires like Prime Minister Bajnai, for another, containing self-profiteering billionaires like former Interior Minister Pintér.

Jobbik’s own general election manifesto is due for publication on January 16th, we trust that the Fidesz council chairman will remember to have his photocopier switched on.

(jobbik.com)