Foreword

The second half of 2004 brought amazing changes in the political life of Hungary. The most important turn was the fall of Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy, and the election of the new Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány by the Parliament. It was not much less interesting to see the new Prime Minister try to introduce and use new communication style and means. The experiment was called tabloidization, or boulvardization by the political analyst, who criticised it although understood the reasons. The efforts were understandable particularly until they seemed successful, that is, until the beginning of 2005: what else could justify the deployment of new communications means if not the improvement of the indices of the polls. And that was what happened; in August the Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP), the leading party in government was lagging behind the Alliance of Young Democrats (AYD), the leading party in opposition by 18 percent, from October on, that is, from the election of Ferenc Gyurcsány, the gap was decreasing remarkably. By the Spring of 2005, however, the experiment seems to have lost its impetus, the Prime Minister himself seems to have given it up, perhaps mainly because the communications moves bumped into walls and sometimes proved to be counterproductive.

The paper presents the trial and the failure. I will use and weigh two approaches, the one of political marketing and that of popular culture studies. According to my hypothesis, the communications offensive led by Ferenc Gyurcsány used considerations and tools taken form political marketing. In the framework of that strategy of political marketing, however, the use of the components of popular culture was very important, therefore an analysis based on the popular culture paradigm is also necessary.

In the following, I am presenting the approach of political marketing; then criticisms raised by popular culture studies against political marketing approach; afterwards I am to outline the part of popular culture approach that will be used in the analysis; and in the end, the analysis itself follows.