Eastern European Politics

...Nice.

Good job, everyone. Nice to see everything working exactly the way it should.

Well done.

If he was going to double back/fold, he should have done it the same day instead of doubling down like he did.

Apparently he was the ninth PM in the past seven years, having only taken the office last summer after his predecessor was similarly removed.

What'd he do?

Party president thought Grindeanu's trying to challenge his leadership, asked him to resign. Grindeanu refused, so the party withdrew support and his entire cabinet resigned. He still refused to resign, so they kicked him out of the party and voted no confidence, with the party president threatening to kick out anyone who abstained or voted nay.

So wait - the party leader in Romania isn't the premier?

That reminds me of Poland... .

No, because said party leader has a conviction preventing him from being so.

So basically a Spinners and Losers episode.

I find politics in parliamentary systems to be very confusing. It seems like the power-evaluation equivalent of the Stock Exchange, where perception and reality twist and turn, nothing is certain, no one is secure, and everything can change overnight.

Newest legislation proposal by Fidesz, officially designated as the Stop Soros Act (no, seriously):

• Any organization that receives foreign funding and encourages and sponsors the illegal entry of individuals from third nations to Hungary must register in a national database and pay 25% of all foreign funding to the state. If they do not register on their own volition, prosecutor's office will give them a 15-day deadline; failure to comply will pass the case to court, with consequences including being fined for double the foreign funding and the organization being dissolved altogether. What counts as such an organization is not stated in the document, meaning that it's basically saying that said organization must self-declare as being illegal.
• Any individual who threatens national security is not allowed to approach the national border closer than 8 kilometers. In specially notable cases, they may not stay in the country altogether. What counts as a specially notable case is, again, not stated anywhere. Nor is who counts as the "individuals".

You'd think that the parts relevant to organizations would apply to human traffickers, but it explicitly does not - it, however, very much applies to humanitarian organizations the text assumes are explicitly paying the migrants to enter Hungary illegally. So, if you give 1% of your income tax to such an organization, bam, you are automatically not allowed to go within 8 kilometers of the border. The whole document is Insane Troll Logic as far as legal documents go and holds exactly as much legal power due to being excessively vague. It's clear that this is just a propaganda stunt by Fidesz in preparation for the April elections.

Poll two and a half months before elections.

• All voters:
  • Fidesz: 33%
  • Jobbik: 10%
  • Socialists: 8%
  • Democratic Coalition: 5%
  • LMP: 4%
  • Everyone else: 1-2% per party
  • Doesn't know who to vote for: 34%
• Certain voters:
  • Fidesz: 50%
  • Jobbik: 16%
  • Socialists: 13%
  • Democratic Coalition: 8%
  • LMP: 7%
  • Everyone else: 1-2% per party

Turnout projections are 45%, with 59% of Budapest's citizens and 54% of those with higher education. Roughly half of the men and the >50 age group is interested in voting, but only 37% of the <30 age group; women and people with lower education are similarly not interested.

Voters who sympathize but are uncertain whether to vote:

• LMP: 65%
• Democratic Coalition: 63%
• Jobbik: 59%
• Socialists: 59%
• Fidesz: 57%

There's more than half a million of voters who want to vote but haven't decided. There's also an additional 900k who want Fidesz to go away but can't decide who to vote for. The ratio of those who want Fidesz to go and those who want them to stay is 40% and 38%.

Two months before elections, a poll measured public opinion of opposition PM candidate Karácsony.

• Popularity: up 10% since November and is now actually tied with Orbán. No leftist politician has reached this popularity since 2006. Breakdown per party voterbase:
  • Own: 92%
  • DK: 81%
  • LMP: 69%
  • Fidesz: 26%
  • No party: 44%
• Perceived competency: 34 on a scale of 0-100, 13 points behind Orbán. Up by 11 points since last June and way above all the other opposition leaders': Vona is on 27, Gyurcsány 24. He's seen as a bit young, but has four years of experience as mayor of a Budapest district.
• Perceived chances versus Orbán: 43-27, still the best out of the entire opposition (and up 9 points since last autumn).
• In favor of the rest of the opposition joining forces with him, broken down by voter affiliation:
  • Own: 96%
  • DK: 76% yes, 19% no. This goes directly against what the DK leadership wants.
  • LMP: 53% yes, 35% no. This is another case of voters and leaders disagreeing, as the party congress is adamant on maintaining "no coalition with any party that was ever in charge within the past 28 years" as official policy.
  • Jobbik: 43% yes, 42% no.

He seems to be candidate for "last, best hope" for now.

edited 5th Feb '18 11:49:55 AM by amitakartok

Would it be a good idea for the Socialists to pick a fight with the liberal parties about now? It seems like said liberals' party leaders have decided to kneel before Orban.

I'd preferentially leave that shit for after the elections, for better or worse. Doing it now would play right into Fidesz' rhetoric of the opposition being too busy fighting each other to get anything done.

That said, working together is kinda hard for them. Aside from LMP's lack of compromise, DK recently made a derisive remark that everyone except them is on Fidesz' payroll and Jobbik took a massive hit in popular support after Fidesz opened up the floodgates of baseless slander on Vona. In such an atmosphere, it's no wonder people aren't voting.

Is that rhetoric or the truth? LMP is committed to never working with anyone ever, DK is more interested in fighting the LMP and Socialists for votes than in trying to build a coalition, and Jobbik is...Jobbik.

That said, I get that it'd be bad politics for the Socialists to return fire against LMP/DK (ahaha, that acronym is accidentally hilarious). Not that there's a lot of good options for them unless Jobbik is willing to support a Socialist minority government (and I don't know what kind of Deal with the Devil that would require).

It's not that Jobbik wouldn't offer support, it's that the other would rather die than accept it and give everyone ammunition against them. I mean, we're now at the point where a newspaper recently pointed out in front page news that the sickle-shaped red part of Jobbik's logo looks suspiciously like a Muslim crescent moon. Granted, the Hungarian internet immediately unleashed the Memetic Mutation, but still.

A forecast made by the Republikon Institute by request of a news website is stating that if LMP doesn't join up with the MSZP-PM alliance, Fidesz will likely regain two-thirds supermajority in the elections.

edited 8th Feb '18 5:21:40 PM by amitakartok

Yeah, but what's the alternative except for a Fidesz government?

I mean, I'm pretty sure that the only way to unfuck your government is for everyone from communists to fascists to pull together.

Something a bit funny. Back when they came to power, Fidesz nationalized some utility companies, lowered prices that proceeded to beat their chests as the benefactors of the people for lowering utility costs. Thing is, E.On is currently selling gas at market price which is lower than the national price.

So, when a known-to-be-anti-Fidesz commercial TV station's reporters asked Fidesz' vice president for an opinion - seeing as he's the guy who pulled off the utility cost thing back then -, he went on an outburst that the company is obviously trying to manipulate the upcoming elections in Brussels' favor by "siding with them in this political tit-for-tat", called out to the company to "hold their hounds a little" and to the populace to not let themselves get fooled.

edited 13th Feb '18 9:54:17 AM by amitakartok

More shenanigans.

• Jobbik's election posters got vandalized with black paint. The govt's response was that although officially they don't encourage anyone to do this, they consider this a valid expression of freedom of speech.
• Student protest tomorrow, as Fidesz hasn't sat down for talks with them. In fact, Fidesz is dismissing the protest as politically motivated, because why else would it be in the middle of the election campaign? Student spokesman's response was that if they actively refuse talking about something during the election campaign and do so in such a dismissive and arrogant tone, it can only mean that they're trying to hide something.
• Last month, the govt brought the planned November salary raise for medical professionals up to January, no doubt as a PR stunt. Except the majority of these salaries are increased by as little as 1 HUF per month or only by a few hundred per month. So the docs are now pissed of the govt trying to take them for idiots and are preparing to go on strike before the elections in protest.
• And for the dessert, the agricultural minister has recently gone on record stating that if Soros' plan to settle migrants into Hungary succeeds, the national cuisine will cease to exist and the Hungarian people will have to eat nothing but fried cockroaches and grilled scorpions. Yes, he went and said that.

What's the deal with George Soros? Bilderberg-style conspiracy theorists keep name-dropping him, but a cursory visit to his Wikipedia page suggests a run-of-the-mill Warren Buffett-style activist billionaire. Certainly more benign than the likes of Rupert Murdoch.

He's from a (non-observant) Jewish family - do the math.

Oh come on, again?! I thought we were over that crap and that Muslims were the number one target?

No, they hate Muslims for being terrorists, while Jews are behind everything aka the great conspiracy. The far right hates these two groups for different (batshit insane) reasons.

WE FOUGHT A SIXTY-MILLION-DEAD WAR OVER THAT SHIT. EASTERN EUROPE SUFFERED MORE THAN ANYONE AT THE HANDS OF THE NAZIS. HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING?

Sorry.

It's just so frustrating.

Oh, they learned something alright.

It's that the reason why the "us-versus-them fearmongering with external threat" demagoguery tactic has survived so many millennia is that it works.