The Hungarian Prime Minister (PM) started his own blog on the last day of January. The post long posts are coming with daily regularity. Originally many people were a bit skeptic about how this happens and if the man behind the blog is really Ferenc Gyurcsány. But after more than two weeks the shocking part is now gone and it is more conversational style with the entries receive hundreds of comments. If you wonder how the PM have all this time to write all the - sometimes several page length – posts, he also gave the answer to this, admitting that he records the messages on tape and his staff puts the script up in the web with the pictures. So I though it would be interesting to see how the Hungarain blogosphere reacted to the newcomer blog. (We’ll also get to the Hugh Grant part a few paragraphs later, keep on reading ).

Pollner on Mediablog quoted the first entry of the PM and added only one small question, regularly asked in the first days of operation of the PM blog:
“Is it just a passing adventure, or has Hungarian politics discovered the blogosphere?”

On Parlamentblog Déli Riporter wrote:
“He writes he was convinced that the blog is needed. We certainly agree in this. The Prime Minister of Hungary in power should write a blog.”
Though in a comments Déli Riporter admits he still considers this just a campaign move.

Pocakos points to the fact that the left wing oriented leading daily (Népszabadság) offered online space for the PM blog [Henrik’s note: as our current government is also left wing at the moment], but he instead chose the site of a foundation to run it on. With his always precise journalist point of view Pocakos asks two questions:
“Would Népszabadság Online (NOL) think about providing a blog space to the head of the any government in power even without political relations? And would the head of the any government in power would blog on NOL?”
He also states that he thinks “Gyurcsány as the head of government made a wise decision not to take this offer.”
Finally he also raises the question of the future of the blog, looking into a further horizon: “Will Ferenc Gyurcsány’s blog run with such intensity after the elections – even perhaps in opposition side – on the webpage of this foundation?”

After the first two weeks of the PM, Sztahanov wrote:
“You can say what you want, but I think he does a good job, especially in the light of the history of Hungarian business/corporate blogging up to now.” He also adds “it is apparent that it is somewhat taken seriously. Well, we’ll see what’s going to happen with it.”

Something interesting also happened lately, which made it through even to international main stream media, where you can read more about the Love Actually scene with our PM edited inside it as a wedding surprise gift to the government spokesman.

Pestiside (in English) offers and insight into what they think “it all actually means:”. You can predict the style of the entry even by the opening statement: “Okay, we’re back again - and not a minute too soon, because it seems that in our absence a lot of you have lost your friggin’ minds.”

Bajla writes from his actor point of view:
“I might even live to see that we we’ll dance together with our colleague Feri [Henrik’s note: Feri is a nickname for Ferenc] in one of audience attracting the musical comedies. It might not be all that bad, they might even raise the funding of theaters and the salary of actors.

My only suggestions to this colleague is to quickly change the glasses to lenses, because it is bad manners to garishly appear on theater stage with glasses.”

Also this would not be a true Hungarian story if there would be no counter blog involved . Someone started a fake-Gyurcsány blog (called “dA ReAl GyUrcSÁny FeRcsI blog “) with a pinch of unhidden dislike of the PM and lots of sarcasm).

[Henrik’s note As the campaign progresses for the upcoming elections in April I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to show some more interesting reflections from the Hungarian blogoshpere.]

(The referenced blogs are in Hungarian, except for Pestiside, which is in English)

Tags:
Campaign
Blog
PM