Tamas Suchman on Gyurcsany and the Free Democrats
It is rumoured that the Socialist MP Tamas Suchman has called for early elections and the dismissal of Ferenc Gyurcsany, the prime minister. He denies the claims. His view is that minority government can only work if the Socialist Party manages to cooperate effectively with the Free Democrats, whom he regards as its only possible partner.
hvg.hu: What happened when the Socialist Party's leadership met? Reports have been contradictory.
Tamás Suchman: I wasn't there. I'm not a member of the presiding council. It's not true that I called for early elections. But I've made my views on minority government clear. I think you have to take a deeper look at the problem, and this has been lacking as events have developed recently. There are two matters that have to be cleared up. The first is a theoretical observation. Many questions were left unanswered by the regime change in Hungary, and we have to work out where we go from here. We've come to the end of the path set by the roundtable negotiations and the Antall-Tolgyessy pact. Whoever were in government would be in the same situation as we are in now. We have to take another look at those decisions taken in 1989-90 and come up with a new model. This is the task of the entire Hungarian political elite.
The second observation follows from the first. There is a problem with politics. All parties should be campaigning with a sense of obligation to the nation, but the opposition is not doing this. It is focusing exclusively on gaining power and is ignoring the country's problems. At least that's what they've been doing for the past six years.
hvg.hu: Government parties always bear a heavier burden of responsibility. And now it looks like the coalition is falling apart.
Tamás Suchman: You can't ignore the fact that the opposition is holding the government under constant pressure - and its politics have grown more radical. It's been impossible, for example, to get all the mainstream parties to condemn extreme phenomena, like neo-Nazi movements. The situation now is that the country is facing huge challenges, and should be using EU subsidies to promote developments that will take several parliaments to carry out - and this means it's very serious. The country is not focusing on major programmes that will continue until 2013, but on a tribal war between political camps. The opposition's attacks at home are below the belt - but even abroad, Viktor Orban is not sparing the governing parties. It's striking that when Gyula Horn was in a similar situation, he did not condemn Hungarian politics when he was abroad.
hvg.hu: The opposition claims the main reason for the crisis is that the Socialist Party is doing the opposite of what it promised in the manifesto on which it won the 2006 election.
Tamás Suchman: In 2006, I didn't criticise Gyurcsany's decision to deviate from our electoral programme in certain respects. Rather, I said that there had been no attempt to address facts so honestly over the past 16 years. I said that we wouldn't get the political support we needed to sort things out. I said that social security and the role of the state could only be changed with a national consensus. I said the prime minister needed a broader base of political support to carry out his reforms, and that if we just set about changing things without that then we would be in real trouble. That's still the case: neither the media nor the intelligentsia or the state of cooperation between the parties is up to the task of pushing through a major reform programme.
Politicians have known this since the regime change, which is why they've swept so many questions under the carpet. Now, a harassed society is being confronted with problems that should have been resolved in the first half of the 1990s. it's not clear what we'll achieve with a minority government. We've never had that before. The kind of minority government the PM is now committing himself to can only be a temporary solution. For it to work and not fall apart in a few months, you need a real contract with the Free Democrats, and you need to rebuild the coalition. Gyurcsany cannot content himself with the Free Democrats' promise to support him on an ad hoc basis. If the Free Democrats cannot be persuaded to sign up to something more concrete, then he has to resign. From what I know of him, I think he'll do just that in this case: he'll behave like a proper European politician.
hvg.hu: It looks like our European partners will also accept the Socialists' attempt to hang on to power.
Tamás Suchman: The EU has its own problems. Its being reformed and it is unable to protect its weakest members from the consequences of the international financial crisis. Now we're seeing the US dollar adjusting to the euro- and Europe is paying for this. Of course Brussels is concerned about a minority government in Hungary. It looks like the Socialists' and the Free Democrats' long-term marriage is in crisis. But the Socialists don't have another potential ideological partner. The conservatives do have a progressive wing, but their world view is too different from the Socialists'. The fundamental problem is not that Gyurcsany and Koka can no longer work together. The problem goes back to the conflicts that have been building up since 1994.
Pelle János
