I do not intend to analyse Dr Mikola's mistakes, though they certainly contributed to Fidesz's defeat by playing into the Socialist Party's hands. Nonetheless, his unguarded comments are much more a symptom of Fidesz's defeat, not its cause.

It was clear even before the elections that tiny swings would determine the outcomes in most constituencies. It was clear that the winning party would be the one that could stand convincing candidates in individual consituencies, backing them up with an acceptable and credible party manifesto.

Sun Wu, a character in Sun Tsu's famous ancient Chinese manual of war,

said: "The one who makes no mistakes will see his efforts lead to victory, and he will be victorious over those who have already suffered defeat." There were many people I spoke with during the election period who could not shake off a sense that something was wrong with Fidesz's campaign. "It's like they don't really want to win," some of them said. If Sun Tsu were with us today, perhaps he would agree that the right had lost the elections before the campaign even started.

Polling before the start of the campaign should have told Fidesz that people did not want to be whipped up into a panic by the elections.

People were not interested in stark confrontations or negative campaigning. People wanted to feel things were ok, that they were safe. It is too early to say why Fidesz ignored this, whether out of compulsiveness, because of poor analysts, or because their campaign staff simply did not understand. But their slogan, 'We are worse off than four years ago,' was wholly uneffective, as was clear a few days after it first appeared, and thus ill-suited for a party that hoped to win an election.

Voters regarded this gloomy campaign as a joke, and creative graphic designers came up with dozens of parodies of those cheerless Fidesz posters. Eventually, even Istvan Hiller, the Socialist Party's president, joined this parade of parodists. At his party's conference he quoted Ms Janos Fata, the unhappy subject of one of Fidesz's posters, who had talked about how the photographers had tried to make her look ever more depressed.

This was a problem for Fidesz, partly because most people felt they were doing better than four years before, and partly because it underlined the credibility of the right-wing party grouping. For in the second part of its campaign, Fidesz needed that credibility, because its campaign had moved on to promising Hungarians a better life.

Despite consulting with 3.2m people, as Viktor Orban reminded us so many times, Fidesz did not come up with a concrete manifesto that voters could endorse. Yet this was what the National Consultation had been meant to create. By contrast, the Socialists did not talk about the people. They used carefully thought-out key words, like future, building, motorway, jobs, education and investment. Furthermore, they had detailed plans for each constituency, so voters new what they could expect in their neighbourhood. These key words was much more effective than Fidesz's much vaguer battlecry of 'work, home, family.'

It went further: the Socialists talked euphimistically of a 'package of economic measures', involving spending cuts to get rid of the budget deficit. But this seemed both more acceptable and more comprehensible than the uncertainty that surrounded Fidesz's plans. Voters chose the clarity of the lesser evil over persisting uncertainty. And then there was Fidesz's style, which many thought unacceptable.

They promised too much, they told obvious lies, they pushed at the boundaries of legality during the campaign. But these are just illustrations of the confusion that led them to prescribe Dr Mikola as a cure for the nation. It was not the nomination of the loud-mouthed doctor that caused Fidesz's defeat: for that, a whole regiment of losers was needed.

Zoltán Meixner