Steven N.“I’m glad I was the only one who made mistakes, and everyone else was perfect. At least this is what I learned this from the Direkt36 investigative report,” wrote Péter Márki-Zay on Facebook on Wednesday in response to Direkt36’s detailed investigative article on the failures of the opposition’s election campaign that it published on Tuesday.
The opposition’s nominee for prime minister claimed that while the article gave an accounting of the opposition’s shortcomings, it did not say what they had done well.
He then pointed out in his post what Direkt36 had failed to point out. As he wrote, the opposition did not lose the election and give a two-thirds majority to Fidesz for the first time. However, he pointed out that:
For the first time, we chose 106 nominees in a primary election, held a six-party joint campaign, received 400,000 Ft. in micro-donations in a nearly 3 billion Ft. campaign, had 27,000 vote counters in 11,000 places around the country, bused in 100,000 people for a rally in March, formed a joint opposition list and joint platform, and now have three Roma representatives in Parliament.
The opposition candidate acknowledged that he had said a few things poorly, “just as there were weak posters, communication materials, logistical problems and shortcomings throughout the campaign.”
But he also claimed that:
Whoever thinks these things are responsible for the enormous, 20% loss is lying. And at the same time, they legitimize the Fidesz regime, which claims that democracy still exists here and that it is only because of the opposition’s weakness that we could not prevent a two-thirds victory for the fourth time in a row.
Márki-Zay wrote that the real causes for the defeat were not due to the opposition, but because of the overwhelming superiority “a hundred times over in resource dominance, in Fidesz’s propaganda machinery, in the independent press and institutions that have shrunk over the years, in the feudal dependency system and vulnerability, in databases for the entire population, and in the capacity to mobilize.”
“We were fighting a tank division with a slingshot,” summarized the opposition politician. [HVG]
