| The Russian market for the Hungarian voter Hungarian Prime Minister and leader of the liberal-socialist bloc Ferenc Gyurcsany yesterday accepted congratulations from his rival, the head of the conservative right-wing opposition Viktor Orban, who lost the parliamentary elections. The final results will be announced in the next few days, but it is already clear that the coalition of 44-year-old Gyurcsany will have at least 210 seats in the 386-seat parliament. Orban, 42, immediately announced his resignation as opposition leader.
“In the elections in Hungary, the global trend prevailed over the national-patriotic one,” Lyubov Shishelina, a leading researcher at the department of international economic and political research at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Vremya Novostei yesterday. According to her, the victory of the ruling party for the second time in a row is “unprecedented for the new Hungary.” “But this means,” our expert emphasized, “that the socialists are getting their own unfavorable inheritance.” The cabinet faces a fight against unemployment, which has grown by 3% over two years, and a huge budget deficit of 6.1% of GNP.
Opponents call Gyurcsany and his associates “Mercedes socialists,” thus indicating an alliance between party reformers and big businessmen. There were two millionaires in his previous office. According to Ms. Shishelina, in the countries of the former socialist bloc the socialist idea is increasingly being used “exclusively as a profitable election move, even a commodity.” She called “one of the paradoxes of the political life of Hungary” that there are more rich people in the ranks of the socialists than in the right-wing party.
Gyurcsany, nicknamed the “millionaire prime minister,” is a former Komsomol leader who successfully participated in privatization in the 1990s. He ranks 50th in the ranking of the richest people in Hungary. The Prime Minister is married for the third time to Klara Dobrev, the granddaughter of Antal Apro, a member of the Presidium of the HSWP during the time of János Kádar. The Apro clan is very influential in the Hungarian banking industry. Gyurcsany returned to politics in 2002 as an adviser on strategic issues to Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy. A year later he became Minister of Sports, Children and Youth, and in November 2004 he himself headed the cabinet.
Ms. Shishelina drew attention to the fact that “the Russian theme was actively used by socialists in the election campaign.” In March, a month before the parliamentary elections, President Putin visited Hungary. Gyurcsany intends to expand the Hungarian presence on the Russian market, thereby strengthening the Hungarian labor market. Katerina LABETSKAYA |
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