It was only years ago that Free Democrat parliamentary faction leader (and former party chairman) János Kóka was the protégé of former prime minister and Socialist Party chairman Ferenc Gyurcsány. Then the two of them stopped getting along, and Kóka, while still chairman, even pulled his party out of the governing coalition, although because they’ve since supported the Socialists from the outside, it was nothing more than a change in window dressing. Gyurcsány, as you well know, took his party and has brought its popularity down, so that in some polls it’s even dipped below 10%. Kóka, by contrast, took his party’s popularity down into the 1-2% range, and played an obstructionist role so that his successor as Free Dem chairman Gábor Fodor was unable to do much to change that.
Now with new Free Dem Chairman Attila Retkes calling for Kóka to resign, since the party wants to distance itself from the Socialists but its parliamentary faction does not, Kóka has insisted he will stay on. Gyurcsány, in his attempt to reshape the Socialists, brought their popularity down to levels not seen since they were the Socialist Workers. Kóka, it would appear, wants to do his former mentor one better, and show that unlike Gyurcsány, he is even capable of destroying the party he belongs to.
While in all honestly I doubt that Kóka is really trying to destroy the Free Democrats, given the party’s decline since he has been in a leadership position, I wouldn’t blame you if you thought that he actually was.
