Tarlós looks very scary in that poster.
I'd be hard-pressed to remember any details, but it must have included soldiering on over issues like the big battle between the then government and Demszky over subway line 4 (the government withdrew funds it was legally obliged to pay but denied both the obligation and the political motive), highway construction financing, and war over the media. What I remember well is sitting before TV and wanting to punch into that smile after every sentence spoken. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
And consider that this is his own election poster, not a negative campaign poster by an opponent!...
To be fair to him, he is probably less mad than he is made out to be in the 'left' media. Or as some commentator noted on Index.hu, the internet news site I most often use and link pictures from, "not a far-rightist but a black-belt populist". *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
(Le Pen is of course both Vichy far-right and a black-belt populist -- and a narcissist.)
*Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I think there have been too many comments already for me to say any more. (Though the idea of him being a former Communist is not incompatible, of course, with him being a stinking anti-semitic rabble-rouser... Just as he could be the same thing on the far right).
That's what I thought to post him -- he's the collague of Le Pen, and even had Le Pen invited for a rally a few years ago. He is István Csurka, leader of MIÉP.
(Re Migeru, there is a small communist connection. He took part in '56 as a youth, was sentenced, then got free, to become a celebrated playwright. When in the late eighties he sensed that the system is crumbling, he suddenly became outspoken and got silenced, then joined the right-wing mass party MDF, from which he broke away to form his far-right party. In the nineties, it came out that when in prison, he signed a paper that he will be an informant for the secret service. He claims he never wrote a report an none turned up, on the other hand, some agents reported in words, and it is suspicious that he was a supported [not tolerated, not banned] playwright until the end, and that he has rather good secret service connections that resulted in some leaks to him.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
(For the record, I'm not testing you, I'm curious how much a face tells of the person to strangers.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him.
Then all fifty-plus conservative men in politics are worried about keeping control?
No? Every single politician? Yep, I think you're right!
The party was a reincarnation of the party that won the first and last free elections after WWII (before the communist takeover), a socially conservative but economically redistributive party with the slogan "Bort, búzát, békességet!" = "Let there be wine, wheat, peacefulness" (hence the cutting of the bread at the election event). But it was soon hijacked and turned a single-person party by Torgyán.
If Tarlós is a black-belt populist, Torgyán was a grand master or even god. A privately highly intelligent attorney from the capital, he had a special gift to pretend to be a fiery rural simpleton, and work his (mostly truly rural simpleton) audience into a frenzy. His remembered wisecracks are innumerable (called "torgyániáda"). He was also very vain, with a funny sense of dres code and hairdo.
For about a year in the 1994-1998 period, his party even led opinion polls... then with growing scandals of his party, which also caused it to multiply by cell division, he fell back. Still he could join Fidesz's government in 1998. But Orbán was even more gifted at demagoguery and intrigue than him: he let Torgyán sink in some corruption affairs, and finished off his party by accelerating the cell division.
Being unable to live without publicity, a year or two ago, Torgyán resurfaced -- as permanent talk show guest... *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
