Orbán in trouble

I know this is a surprising if not ludicrous idea according to most people. How can I say this when according to the latest polls Orbán’s party could easily win the election if it were held this month? How can I say this when there is a minority government and when no one knows what Gábor Fodor will do? How can I say this when Viktor Orbán almost daily “negotiates” with, for instance, businessmen and representatives of the IMF and announces at least twice daily that he wants to have a new “contract” with everybody who is anybody. Yes, I’m sticking by my guns: the more he talks, the more he acts as if he were only a few steps away from being Hungary’s prime minister, the less likely it is that he will have the opportunity to become prime minister earlier than 2010 and perhaps not even then.

The performance of the last few weeks seems to me a series of desperate moves to extricate himself from the web of contradictions that he himself spun. His trouble began with his boastful speech to young political scientists. The politician who until then had publicly claimed that the country’s economic problems could be solved by simply lowering taxes and giving people more money privately proposed to seminar participants (they were sworn to secrecy) an austerity program twice as severe as that of the current government. When the private became public and he was confronted with the charge that he must have been lying to the Hungarian people, he tried to explain things away. But however he tried and is still trying things don’t sound any better.

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