Hungary’s Opposition Before Elections: Chronicle of an Organized Defeat

„The campaign of the opposition coalition has been a disaster. The alliance of five different parties has proved incapable of forging a shared and coherent election program. The leaders struggle for internal influence, more preoccupied with neutralizing one another than waging a campaign. Repeated scandals blow up in their faces (a vice president of the Socialist Party was caught red-handed with several undeclared bank accounts in Austria and Switzerland holding huge amounts of money). The opposition seems to have lost all hope in winning, and so it has changed its tune. To emerge from the contest with minimal damage, it has resorted to the classic weapon of those facing certain defeat: the opposition has turned to denigrating the electoral system, calling into question the fairness of the rules.