New Socialist leader wants Botka to head party’s election campaign preparations

Budapest, June 27 (MTI) – Newly-elected Socialist Party leader Gyula Molnár said on Monday that he wants to see Szeged Mayor László Botka take charge of the party’s preparations for its 2018 election campaign.

Molnár told InfoRadio that Botka could lead the talks the party would conduct with potential partners for the 2018 general election.

The Socialist leader also said that he intends to fundamentally change his party’s parliamentary work and the way it communicates.

Molnár said he wanted to open up his party to civil organisations and trade unions.

He said the party needed to make its outward communication “more professional”. One thing that the party did wrong in the past, he said, was that it had the same people in charge of putting together its strategy and communication plan.

Regarding the Socialist Party’s work in parliament, he said that in the future, the group should not take part in work “that is falsely presented” as the democratic functioning of the national assembly. He said it was enough for his group to concentrate only on the 10-15 issues that serve the nation’s and the party’s interests and effectively boycott everything else.