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SMK Elects Berenyi as New Party Chairman
Saturday 10 July 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Dunajska Streda, July 10 (TASR) - An extraordinary congress of the ethnic-Hungarian SMK party in Dunajska Streda (Trnava region) on Saturday elected Jozsef Berenyi as the new chairman that should lead the party until the ordinary congress next year.
Before the congress, Berenyi was SMK vice-chairman. He replaced Pal Csaky in the chairman post.
SMK, which in June's general election suffered a debacle (only 4.33 percent) and didn't make it into Parliament, has good prospects of returning to the scene in four years, claimed Berenyi, pointing to the party's presence in the European Parliament and regional and local authorities. "We've the best constructed structures in southern Slovakia," he added.
Berenyi said that it is the entire former leadership that is responsible for the failure in the general election, therefore his mission will be to bring "new blood" into the party. At the same time, changes should be carried out with appropriate regard to continuity, he stressed.
One of the chief causes of SMK's election defeat was wrongly led campaign, which focused more on eliminating a certain party from the race (Most-Hid, which eventually become part of the new Government), rather than promoting itself, said Berenyi. Further reasons were escalation of Slovak-Hungarian tension weeks ahead of the election, and SMK's refusal to take part in television debates, added Berenyi.
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