The news editor was sacked and in response the journalists went on strike. Far from being Stalinists, as the government implied, many were dissidents under the old regime. Their real crime was defending independent journalism from government attacks. As the MDF's popularity slumped its propaganda changed tack, passing references were made to assisting the Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries and the defence of the nation from resurgent pro-Russian 'Communists' became its main theme. These desperate efforts however, failed to halt its decline.
Economic realities are inescapable.
Thus the principal organ of the foreign business community in Budapest admits that living standards have fallen since the so-called reforms began. Fighting to protect living standards is dismissed as 'nostalgia'. It admits that bearable conditions of life, and they were little more than that under Stalinism, are quite definitely a thing of the past. Despite the MDF's occasional lapses into demagogy, the bulk of the election material was banal. Billboards featured candidates sporting identical statesman-like expressions, sitting beneath near identical vacuous slogans.