For the third time in a year, on October 12, Hungary is having elections, this time for mayors and municipal councils. They're predictably depressing. If you want to know more about them anyway, go on ... take the plunge below the fold!
Context: The national and European elections earlier this year
As most of you will know, the conservative-populist Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban won a second government term last April, when it won two-thirds of the parliamentary seats on 45% of the vote. It was a strategically important threshold of seats to achieve again, as the party has been using its two-thirds majority to push through an array of far-reaching legislation that can only ever be repealed again by another two-thirds majority, all but setting its legacy in stone.
Fidesz's share of the vote revealed a genuinely broad appeal; the outsized share of seats (see chart below) is due both to a divided opposition and a series of electoral reforms Fidesz pursued in its first term to make it easier to win big. A five-party center-left opposition alliance led by the Socialists won just 26% of the vote, the far-right Jobbik 20% of the vote, and the green-civic LMP 5%.
In the European elections which followed a little over two months later, Fidesz rode its renewed victor's status and low turnout to an even more sweeping win, getting 51% of the vote. The opposition looked especially humiliated as it had entered the elections on separate lists, quasi using the elections as a kind of opposition primary to see how their respective electoral strengths would match up to each other. Badly, it turned out. Jobbik got second place with 15% of the vote as the splintered center-left got third (the Socialist Party, 11%), fourth (former PM Ferenc Gyurcsany's Democratic Coalition, 10%), fifth (former PM Gordon Bajnai's Together 2014, 7%) and sixth (LMP, 5%).
The center-left opposition held up better in Budapest then elsewhere. The Socialist Party's former strongholds in some industrial and rural areas outside the capital have largely collapsed - the opposition won just 2 of the 88 constituencies outside Budapest in the national elections, and Jobbik's riding high in many of them instead. But it did better in Budapest, where the center-left alliance won 10 of the 20 parliamentary districts, despite the gerrymander the Fidesz government had rushed through. All in all, Fidesz won 38.5% of the Budapest list vote in the national elections and the opposition alliance 36.8%, with 12% going to Jobbik and 9% to the LMP. In the European elections, the left was as splintered in Budapest as it was nationally, with the Socialists, Democratic Coalition and Together 2014 winning 12%, 13% and 13% of the vote respectively and the LMP another 8%. Still, the Fidesz vote stayed behind its national score at "just" 44%. Jobbik got 10%.
Fixing the outcome: last-minute electoral reform
All of this might have made it seem that the center-left at least has a shot in Budapest in the local elections next month. Currently Budapest is governed by a Fidesz mayor, István Tarlós, who'd soundly defeated a Socialist candidate 53% to 29% in 2010, and succeeded a liberal mayor who'd been in office for all twenty years since the end of communism. Tarlós is fairly popular, but considering the even balance between Fidesz and the left in Budapest in the national elections, the opposition might at least have had a good chance to pool enough council seats to provide a check on Fidesz power.
That opportunity was all but blocked before the campaign even began, however. The Fidesz government quickly powered through a piece of administrative and electoral reform: the city council as it existed will be abolished. Instead, the city will have a council chiefly made up of the individual mayors of the 23 districts of Budapest, with some additional "compensatory" seats for runners-up. Gone the old system's proportional representation; in with a system that gives districts of greatly varying size equal weight and is likely to leave even mid-sized parties without any representation. The new majoritarian system of course greatly benefits the largest individual party: Fidesz. A calculation by Portfolio suggested that, if the outcome of last April's national elections would be repeated in the upcoming local elections, Fidesz would get some 70% of the seats under the new system; even taking the compensatory seats into account that were added, it would be over 60%.
It was a genius move, however, not just because of the clear advantage the new system gives to Fidesz in the distribution of seats. The new system also forced the hands of the center-left parties. There was now no longer any alternative to bundling their forces again, and doing so in a hurry. Since they deeply distrust and despise each other, Fidesz could just lean back and watch the show.
The spectacle of opposition
After much haggling and bickering the center-left arrived at an agreement on a common mayoral candidate, as well as common mayoral candidates in those city districts where they might, together, stand a chance. (In safe Fidesz districts the parties would keep running individual candidates against each other.) True to form, the Socialist Party had the agreement approved by its members ... but only after unilaterally making several modifications that the other parties were not informed about, triggering another round of recriminations.
Ironically, the main position the Socialists ended up conceding, that of the common mayoral candidate, has turned out to perhaps work out least. The reformist Together 2014 got its way and a fairly non-partisan candidate, Ferenc Falus, became the opposition's candidate for city mayor. His lack of political experience has resulted in a number of PR failures, including a bucket challenge he issued to Tarlós in the fairly surreal video below, and he's now treated as laughing stock not just by Fidesz but by part of the opposition too.
This seems to have fueled the mayoral candidacy of Lajos Bokros. As non-affiliated minister of finance in the Socialist/Liberal government of the mid-1990s, he authored the (in)famous "Bokros package," which pushed through massive, impopular budget cuts in social spending. The deeply neoliberal package came as a surprise at the time: in opposition to the preceding conservative government, the Socialists had campaigned on a softer economic policy, yet ended up going much further than the conservatives had. In later years, Bokros became an MEP for the center-right Hungarian Democratic Forum; led that party to a last, fatal defeat in the 2010 elections; and withdrew his newly founded "Modern Hungary Movement" from the national elections earlier this year when it was clear it didn't stand much of a chance, and the center-left alliance rejected his approaches. Unsurprisingly, his appeal to the broader electorate is limited. That said, he's still praised as a realistic, pro-European reformist by a stratum of urban middle-class liberals.
The gloom of polling
There hasn't been a lot of polling about the Budapest elections. The most detailed poll came from the Fidesz-slanted Nézőpont Institute, and its numbers are devastating: Tarlós is at 50%, Bokros at 14%, Falus at 10%, the LMP and Jobbik candidates at 7% each, and an additional 9% indicated they would vote for the left but were undecided for whom. (In this methodology, reflecting Hungary's Fidesz-centered political system, Bokros is counted among the "left".) With frustrating vagueness, the rival Ipsos polling institute only wrote that Tarlós has a "two and a half times greater" support than any of the center-left opposition candidates.
These lopsided numbers are all the more aggravating since the fundamentals of Budapest's electoral constituencies haven't really changed since the national elections last April - not that that's saying much, of course. Roughly a third of the Budapest electorate supports Fidesz, Ipsos writes, a quarter supports the left-wing parties (mainly the Socialists), and a tenth each supports Jobbik and the LMP, with the rest undecided. The Nézőpont poll finds something similar, though it portrays the left as more divided: 32% of all eligible voters in Budapest prefers Fidesz; 26% prefers either the Socialists (8%), the Democratic Coalition (8%) or Together 2014 (10%); 9% the LMP and 7% Jobbik.
The power of incumbency
Those numbers should point to at least a competitive race in those districts where the left runs only one candidate. But that doesn't mean it necessarily works that way in the races for district mayors, and it definitely isn't working that way in the Budapest mayor race. Fidesz voters are traditionally motivated to turn out, whereas left-wing and liberal voters are in a despondent funk. Fidesz enjoys the power of incumbency: after its landslide victories in 2010, no fewer than 19 of the 23 districts currently have a Fidesz mayor, and Tarlós embodies how this advantage can be used to surpass overall Fidesz support. Candidates running for one left-of-center party can't necessarily count on the voters of the other ones, even when there is a formal endorsement. Drastically increased emigration to Western Europe has cut the number of young, well-educated people who might be more likely than their peers to have liberal views.
Finally, to be honest, Tarlós's first term as Budapest mayor has succeeded in signaling a welcome break from the stagnation and corruption that marked the later years of Socialist/Liberal control in some eye-catching ways. There's no denying a certain new dynamism in terms of public investment in urban renewal: streets have been repaved and redesigned, new trees are lining many streets, grey walls have been painted, central streets made more pedestrian-friendly. This determined dynamism has also featured lamentable excesses: plans kept being unveiled to revamp some of the most popular leisure spots around town (Normafa, Romai Part, the Varosliget), not coincidentally in ways that would take away green, public spaces where ordinary Budapesters can hang out for free, to the benefit of private/commercial interests or prestigious state projects. In addition, much of the recent beautification of downtown Budapest is being paid from EU funds. But still - there does seem to have been a change in pace and investment, and this can't hurt Tarlós and some of the district mayors.
A nasty campaign
I'm too weary to follow the tick-tock of the election campaign in the media, but on the streets it has turned predictably nasty. A lot of Fidesz posters have become "annotated": people write "dictatorship" on one, draw swastikas on another, and I saw two big billboards in Buda where someone painted "Fidesz steals and cheats" across. The opposition, meanwhile, is the target of more professional attacks. Stickers have appeared in my neighbourhood warning that the new opposition candidate will bring back former district mayor Hunvald (convicted of corruption), and in the downtown fifth district election posters for the Together 2014 candidate Peter Juhasz have had strips of black paper pasted over his eyes, criminal-style, with the text "JUNKIE" (or, more literally, "DRUGGIE") printed on it. Those posters were up real high on the lamp posts too, so whoever did it must have had an impressive ladder.
At least in that case, the satirical Two-Tailed Dog Party added a note of levity by going one further and pasting some more stickers on the same posters, so they now say things like:
"Finally, a druggie politician"
"He who loves drugs, can't be a bad person"
"Better a druggie tomorrow than ten thieves today"
"Isn't it true that you're a druggie too?"
Meanwhile, a couple of tiny parties that are also running seem to have an impressive campaign budget. I saw signs for the Green Party (0.4% in the national elections) everywhere earlier on, and now there are posters for Liberal Party candidates everywhere - a very small party that managed to get 1 seat in parliament thanks to a deal with the opposition alliance, but has apparently turned against it since. I can't help wonder where their funding comes from.
In the national elections, a number of new parties with innocuous-sounding names like "Sports and Health Party" or "New Dimension Party" managed to get enough signatures (many of them copied from each other, it later turned out) to appear on the ballot even though they didn't have much in the way of party structures or history, didn't do much in the way of campaigning, and seemed reluctant to talk to any press. There was a lot of speculation about "camouflage parties", covertly set up by Fidesz allies to confuse voters and split the non-Fidesz vote by whatever minor extra margin; considering that Fidesz ended up renewing its two-thirds majority by just one seat, every bit counted. One of the thirteen micro-parties that ended up getting less than half a percent, for example, got on the ballot as "Together 2014" even though it had no connection whatsoever to Bajnai's Together 2014. The elections were a profitable business for those small parties in any case, since qualifying for the ballot also qualified them for state subsidies; afterwards, it was revealed that six parties that received fewer than 10,000 votes in the whole country (one as few as 1,572 votes) each got $700,000-$2,100,000 in public funding. So there's some reason to be suspicious of exactly how the country's smallest parties operate, with what motivation.
Outside Budapest: The national picture
I've focused on Budapest, but if the political situation there sounded dire, it's perhaps reassuring to remember that it's a lot worse still in the rest of the country.
Judging on the last polls by Tarki, Ipsos and Nezopont, the overall balance of forces is defined by Fidesz dominance, a very large share of undecided voters, and a weak and fragmented left-of-center opposition.
Depending on the pollster, 29-43% of eligible Hungarian voters is undecided; many of those will surely not turn out next month (local election turnout was just 47% four years ago). Another 31-35% supports Fidesz. The center-left opposition parties are pooling some 15-18% of the vote, with the LMP getting an additional 2-4%. Jobbik is supported by anywhere between 8-15%.
The center-left opposition support breaks down in 10-12% for the Socialist Party, 3-5% for the Democratic Coalition, and just 1-3% Together 2014.
Among decided or, in Nézőpont's terminology, "potential" voters, Fidesz gets 42-56% of the vote, the center-left opposition pools 23-27%, Jobbik gets 15-26%, and the LMP 4-9%. And yes, those are some huge discrepancies between pollsters. That 23-27% for the center-left then breaks down into 11-18% for the Socialists, 4-8% for the Democratic Coalition, and 3-4% for Together 2014.
Those numbers hint at how strong Jobbik is outside Budapest, and how weak the smaller center-left parties, especially Together 2014, are outside Budapest.
That's not stopping them from running far and wide. The Democratic Coalition is running separate lists for all 19 county assemblies outside Budapest; Together 2014 in eleven of them. On municipal level, every possible combination of one or more center-left party is being run in some council or other. Only the LMP is more determined than ever to keep a firm distance from the (ex-)socialist family of parties, having survived an acrimonious split over exactly that question. But this penetration is not as deep as it is wide. The total numbers of candidates fielded suggest that, substantively, the left is retreating to the cities. Admittedly, the political life of many villages is generally dominated by independents. Still, Fidesz is running candidates, by itself or in alliances, for 925 of the 3,000 or so mayoral posts in the country. Jobbik is running 265. But the Socialists are running or endorsing only 144.
Beginning of the end? More likely, it's the end of the beginning
Some disturbing news items suggest that, rather than slowing down its frenzy of new legislation and efforts to bring all independent and semi-independent institutions under centralized control, the Fidesz government is planning to ramp them up once these elections are over. After all, there will be three long years without elections after this - three years without risk of punishment at the ballot box. So whatever the government is planning, expect it to start coming out soon after October 13. Based on remarks the Minister of Economy has already made about budget reforms, media reports are calculating a vast austerity package of $7 billion in spending cuts. Leaks of unclear reliability are suggesting painful education reforms, some form of health care privatization, as well as a new round of centralization measures: "any independence that remained on local level could be eliminated, with jurisdictions to be clipped, authorities and background institutions to be merged or terminated".
Is that why the government has been trying to make life impossible for the only major foreign-owned TV station, RTL Klub? Because they want the news market cleared of awkward actors they can't control, before they embark on a radical reform agenda that might prove very impopular? There is never a lack of speculation here; and Fidesz's ever-defensive sensitivities have created a government culture of secrecy that's revived a Soviet-era tradition of tea leaf-reading Kremlinology.
So what are the prospects for these elections and after? I was once told this Hungarian joke:
- What's the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?
- A pessimist will moan that things could not possibly get any worse than this. But an optimist knows better: it can always still get worse!
