MDF campaign: a CD, but no manifestos?

People are describing the MDF bugging affair as the biggest scandal in Hungary since the regime change, and there have been calls for a parliamentary commission of inquiry to be established to investigate the affair. But it would be a shame if the shock discoveries about the role of the security services were to overshadow the core of this issue: a failed campaign for the presidency of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), according to Ervin Csizmadia, the director of the Dignity Political Analysis Centre.

© Müller Judit

But is a party presidential campaign an internal matter? It's irrelevant who Kornel Almassy is close to. If he were indeed a Fidesz plant, then that would cast not him, but the MDF in a poor light, because they had failed to spot this when they made him party vice-president. Maybe a 'sleeping' vice-president didn't represent any danger. But that's still an internal party matter. For voters, what matters are his opinions, the political philosophy he represents, and his claims.

This could have been the subject of the campaign - but voters never learned how the young contender planned to change the MDF's policies, now how he would have done this. That makes the message of the CD of bugged conversations pretty clear: Ibolya David's rival had no real political convictions; his only task was to keep an eye on the enemy. That is, the CD appears to explain why there was no discussion. The MDF was therefore right to keep this corrupt politician outside the inner sanctum.

The question for the public is not whether Almassy is a Fidesz agent or merely a naive and lonely contender, but whether he had any political identity at all. It turns out that he had very little. And that is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this affair. It's clear without any examination that if there had been a real discussion, there would have been no reason to leak the CD. But since there was no competition, the affair had to be brought to a close with the aid of a deus ex machina.

And this CD, containing a conversation between the banker Sandor Csanyi and Janos Toth, became that deus ex machina. However strange this new story - especially since one of the people is Hungary's richest man - it would be wrong to forget the original story, which was about a party electing a new president. The party wanted to, but it wasn't able to do this in the normal fashion, so, following a noble Hungarian political tradition, it leaked a compromising tape recording to shut down an incipient internal debate.

Citizens who wanted to find out about the real divisions within the party are going to be disappointed. Citizens are also being told that the "nasty and dictatorial Fidesz" is behind this whole sorry affair. This is an inadequate, if satisfying explanation. We agree, to some extent: Fidesz did have an interest in bringing about an internal change to Fidesz, as did many other interest groups. In such affairs, the point is always that it is impossible to name the key figures in the scandal - we can only make informed guesses.

Ervin Csizmadia