Csizmadia Ervin © Szakács Barbara

The MDF bugging scandal has grown to unprecedented proportions. The earliest (somewhat biased) responses have already been made public, and there is a good chance that the affair will continue as all other such affairs have - raising passions without creating any space for reasoned discussion. It's been like this on several occasions in past years, and it would be surprising if it were different this time. We know how planned scandals work.

I don't want to follow this course. There is something else that needs to be discussed. The key fact is that the affair arose in connection with the campaign to elect a new president of the MDF, even if the leaked CD of telephone conversations with a private security company has overshadowed this fact. A party presidential election is a very serious matter - the Free Democrats have achieved their highest level of media exposure during party president campaigns in recent years, for example. This wasn't happening in the MDF, however, because Ibolya David has not had a real challenger within the party for many years. So it's astonishing that an unknown like Kornel Almassy "suddenly" emerged as a challenger. This 32-year-old's political career is stranger still.

The most striking aspect of this story was the complete absence of a political discussion in this campaign. Normally, two contenders will discuss their policies during a campaign - but there was no sign of this at all in the MDF race. There was no sign of a presidential campaign within the MDF. The candidates announced no programme, they weren't campaigning, and nor were there any visible differences of opinion, even though this is the basis for a fair political battle.

Whether in the press or on the MDF website, there are no signs of a substantive discussion. There are condemnations, even threats, of course, but no discussion. It's very different from the Free Democrat campaign - they, of course, have been washing their dirty linen in public for years, spoiling us with news of the internal battle between Fodor and Koka over the kinds of liberal alternative that should be on offer.

Let me clear, though, that the bugging scandal is closely related to the presidential campaign. In fact, this content-free campaign led directly to the bugging affair. Why weren't the two candidates arguing with each other? Why weren't they debating policy? There is an official MDF explanation for this, which many commentators appear to be taking at face value. Officially, the reason there was no Free Democrat-style public debate was that it was clear from the beginning that Almassy wasn't really and MDF man at all, but a Fidesz front, financed by Fidesz-linked businessmen. Clearly, runs the argument, there was no point in engaging a false candidate in a reasoned debate. That's fine, so long as the whole affair is an internal MDF matter.

© 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