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Tories and Fidesz

I’m sure all good Tories wish Cameron well. But one could argue that a Cameron win might be the worst of all outcomes for the Tories. Call it the sorrow of granted wishes, but if he wins, the Conservatives will run on visionless, unimaginative, timid platforms for years. ~Denis Boyles Via Massie Besides being a […]

I’m sure all good Tories wish Cameron well. But one could argue that a Cameron win might be the worst of all outcomes for the Tories. Call it the sorrow of granted wishes, but if he wins, the Conservatives will run on visionless, unimaginative, timid platforms for years. ~Denis Boyles

Via Massie

Besides being a bizarre call for a fourth straight national humiliation for the Tories, Boyles’ description of Cameron’s platform is unrecognizable. One can reject most or all of the “Big Society” platform, and one can attack it for being incoherent, but it is almost exactly the opposite of “visionless, unimaginative and timid,” or at least as far from it as one can reasonably expect a major center-right party platform to be in a predominantly center-left country. That would be a far better description for the Tory platforms from 2001 and 2005. Under the circumstances, it might have been safer to attack Labour for mismanagement and failure and avoid any attempt at proposing something new or remarkable at the same time. Indeed, one of the things the Conservative right dislikes about Tory modernizers is that they are forever proposing to re-brand and remake the party’s image and, to a lesser extent, its policies, too. There are certainly many Conservatives who don’t think their party needs to change that much, but quite frankly the Tories have tried it their way, as Massie reminds them, and come no closer to electoral success.

John O’Sullivan compares what he regards as Cameron’s failure with Orban’s recent overwhelming success in Hungary, and insists that the Tories ought to be replicating Fidesz dominance. As Massie notes, not only does this fail to take account of the sorry state the Tories were in after 2005, but it pays no attention to the differences between the political landscape and the electorates, as well as the state of affairs in the two countries. Britain had the Parliamentary expenses scandal, a financial crisis and exploding debt, but Hungary suffered from many of the same things to an even greater degree. Their government is on the verge of bankruptcy and faces even worse economic and fiscal woes than Britain, and Hungarians are among the nations that have most lost confidence in electoral democracy and capitalism in all of central and eastern Europe.

No wonder that the former ruling Socialists fared so poorly in both rounds of voting and Fidesz wracked up a two-thirds majority. Hungary also obviously has no other mainstream party on the left, so disaffected Socialist voters either voted Fidesz or cast protest votes for Jobbik, and Jobbik’s own status as a hard-line nationalist party necessarily limited how successful it could be. No less important, while Fidesz is a major part of the political establishment, it actually acted the part of an opposition party ever since it lost power in 2002. When Medgyessy dragged Hungary into the Iraq war along with the other embarrassingly obedient central and eastern European governments of “new Europe,” Orban and Fidesz were openly against it from the start. Can the Tory leadership say as much? Of course not. Fidesz has represented a credible center-right alternative to the Socialists for many years, but the Tories have only started to seem credible in the last two years, so Fidesz has had quite a head start both in terms of its political strength going into this year’s elections and in terms of the way it is perceived by the public. After all, it is not enough for a ruling party to have disgraced and discredited itself with failures and bad policies (Blair had already done quite enough of that by 2005), but there must be an opposition that is trusted enough to replace them as well.

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