There are at least five reasons why the opposition wins the time slots in Budapest
“The left is only watching from the shadows as the voters slowly drive them out of the capital” – he rejoiced Máté Kocsis, Fidesz faction leader, after the victory of the government party candidate in the by-election in Zugló on Sunday evening.
The Párbeszéd candidate for municipal representative, Dalma Kökény, was one vote behind Pál Juhász-Pintér of Fidesz in a district where Rebeka Szabó won – despite a much higher turnout – very easily, beating the then government party candidate with 551 votes.
This was the ninth defeat in a row for the opposition alliance in the by-elections in the capital city since the beginning of the summer. Sunday in Újpest, and two weeks later the II. in the district they can somewhat improve this ratio.
1. Disillusionment
The disillusionment of the opposition voters is much greater than we thought – said Márton Illyés, a member of the Momentum board, as the main reason for the series of defeats.
The two-thirds victory of Fidesz in 2018 is also based on the apparent opinion polls and the results of the by-elections, that the popularity of the opposition in the first few months, however, recovered in the longer term. For example, in July 2018, Fidesz’s Sára Botond won the Józsefváros interim mayoral election with 62.85 percent of the votes against Péter Győri, supported by the parties (against 36.39 percent). More than a year later, András Pikó defeated Sára in the local government election – albeit in a close battle.
According to Illyés, the principle of pulling for the winner is still alive a few months after the parliamentary election, Fidesz voters are willing to vote in the by-elections as well, like disillusioned and apolitical opposition members.
“The opposition voters are there, they haven’t moved, they’re just very disillusioned”
Máté Kanász-Nagy, the member of parliament of the LMP, who is currently campaigning in Újpest before Sunday’s by-election, said to Telex. He finds in Újpest that the opposition parties have to shake up their supporters to go vote. According to him, this was a problem in several districts. The former deputy mayor of Újpest of the LMP believes that it is only possible to convince the opposition voters with personal meetings, knocking, and street forums, no other means are working now.
Kanász-Nagy expects the candidate of the opposition alliance to win in the 12th electoral district of Újpest on Sunday, but he is sure that it will be a close result. The Óbuda election in September was a warning sign, where a very similar panel district was at the front of the opposition. However, the representative of the LMP sees that the motivation of the opposition voters is coming back week by week, and there is a kind of defiance in many of them after the defeats, that they will show in Újpest: Fidesz can be defeated.
According to Zsolt Molnár of the MSZP, this will not happen overnight. “The fourth two-thirds is such a trauma for the opposition voters that it is a longer process to digest and process,” said the president of the Socialist Party in Budapest, who, like his opposition allies, has seen disappointment and weakness in the opposition voters since April.
2. Inaction
Another reason for the defeats, according to Molnár, is that, with the exception of District I, the by-elections in Budapest had no real stake. In none of the districts did a single lost mandate threaten the board majority, and it is more difficult to mobilize voters without stakes.
Márton Illyés also talks about the fact that he cannot convince the voters of his stake in an interim local government, regardless of the result and date in April. In the 1st district, the campaign of the momentous Borbála Korsós was built on the fact that the majority of the coalition led by Márta V. Naszály in the representative body depends on it. The result, however, shows: the message did not get through, or at least it was not enough to mobilize. Here too, far fewer people went to vote than in 2019.
3. Low participation rate
The participation rate in the by-elections is always much higher than in the regular local government elections every five years. This is especially true when there is an interval in the summer, when many people are on vacation, are not at home on Sundays, and are less concerned with the village anyway.
It is clear from the participation data of the by-elections that far fewer people went to vote in June and July than in September:
- VII. district 4. vk. (26/06): 17.79 percent
- ARC. district 2. vk. (26/06): 18.52 percent
- VIII. district 5. vk. (26/06): 20.03 percent
- V. district 3. vk. (26/06): 23.1 percent
- XVI. district 2. vk. (10/07): 25.4 percent
- XXII. district 6. vk. (31/07): 28.66 percent
- III. district 2. vk. (04/09): 24.21 percent
- I. district 5. vk. (11/09): 36.93 percent
- XI. district 5. vk. (18/09): 29.83 percent
- XI. district 14. vk. (18/09): 34.87 percent
- XIV. district 9. vk. (18/09): 30.67 percent
By-elections had to be called in several places in the capital because the municipal representatives who won in 2019 won a parliamentary mandate in April, and at that time they have to resign from their municipal positions. They have thirty days to do so after taking the oath.
Márton Illyés talks about how the temporary representatives (Dávid Bedő, Ferenc Gelencsér, Anna Orosz, Endre Tóth) tried to postpone the legal deadline for the resignation in order to announce the date of the by-election as soon as possible.
“We expected that these districts would be winnable in September”
Illyés explained. In the end, they were able to retain their mandate in only one of the districts of the four temporary parliamentary representatives in the capital, Újbuda.
4. Lack of cooperation
“In several districts, the cooperation was either not realized, or rather it was only apparent,” states Zsolt Molnár as the fourth reason for the series of defeats. According to the MSZP politician, in 2019, the opposition parties fought shoulder to shoulder for victory in every district.
“Now there is a more careful distance between the parties.”
On paper, in most places, with the exception of Jobbik (for administrative reasons they could not officially be a candidate organization) there is the logo of each opposition party next to the names of the candidates. However, this does not mean that all five parties are putting their mothers and fathers into the campaign.
According to Molnár and Illyés, it was more difficult to mobilize party activists in favor of another party’s candidate, but they also admitted that they did not strive for this party everywhere. Since the April election, the opposition coalition has basically broken up, and the parties are competing against each other for the remaining opposition voters.
The by-election in Zugló once again showed what happens when a joint candidate against Fidesz is not successful – a victory for the ruling party in an opposition stronghold. According to Rebeka Szabó, the co-president of Párbeszéd, in addition to the disillusionment of opposition voters, her party’s candidate from Zugló won because a local NGO, the Civil Zugló Egyesület, launched a candidate who won 21 percent of the votes. Although there were initiatives for the parties to launch a joint candidate with László Várnai’s NGO, no agreement was reached. And the two parties point at each other after the election.
László Varna according to their candidate, the opposition would have voted for the local general practitioner, but it would not have worked the other way around, because “our voters and especially the doctor’s voters, who went because of personal acquaintance, would not have voted for the opposition candidate”. Rebeka Szabó, on the other hand, read out that the Párbeszéd candidate had a better chance of defeating Fidesz, since he came second with 36.6 percent of the votes. “This shows that Dalma was indeed the candidate who had a serious chance of defeating Fidesz”, but
“it also turns out that there is a chance against the mobilizing power of Fidesz if the opposition candidate does not weaken the chances of other candidates”
Szabó evaluated the result on his Facebook page.
5. Fidesz was thirsty for success in Budapest
While a by-election in Budapest was apparently important to the opposition parties when their own candidate ran, Fidesz-KDNP everywhere mobilized significant resources for victory.
Nothing shows how hungry the governing parties were for successes in Budapest after April, than the fact that Viktor Orbán personally congratulated Csilla Fazekas, the winner in the 1st district. Csilla Fezkas a To the Hungarian Nation and in the given interview, he talked about how his victory overturned the myth that Budapest was lost to Fidesz, and that it is also not true that the governing parties are supported by fewer young people.
According to Balázs Fürjes, this was clearly a message to Karácsony and Márta V. Naszály, mayor of the 1st district, and he called on V. Naszály to resign. The mayor does not resign because he believes that the by-election is not representative of the district as a whole, and the district leadership was elected in 2019 with a high turnout. V. Naszály told Telex that “the by-election does not express an opinion on the work of the district administration, it cannot be said in this form.”
According to the mayor of the 1st district, by-elections are best about mobilization, and Fidesz is “quite strong because of Kubatovlista” in this regard.
Several other opposition actors told our paper that the ruling parties did everything to win, their activists went from house to house with their tablets to take the voters to the polls. There are places where they went even further. According to the 24.hu article, the vice president of Fidelitas and about twenty people connected to Fidelitas moved into the address of a private clinic on Ostrom Street a few weeks before the by-election in Budapest. In response to Momentum’s objection, the Local Electoral Office (HVI) admitted that the number of voters living at Ostrom utca 16 increased significantly before the election, but they do not have the right or authority to examine the legality of address declarations.
It is no coincidence that Fidesz is thirsty for success in Budapest, as they suffered significant losses in the capital in 2019. Not only István Tarlós is out, but the opposition has also conquered quite a few (District VIII several times), Fidesz was considered the towering contender.
In the April parliamentary election, Fidesz lost 17 of the 18 individual constituencies in the capital.
Now, with each victory, they are telling their voters that they will not give up Budapest completely to the opposition either.
According to Zsolt Molnár, the opposition’s defeats have no special consequences in the short term, but it is a fact that the opposition is using the handhold. Regardless of this, in his opinion, far-reaching conclusions for 2024 should not be drawn from the interim elections. There will be real stakes for everyone in the regular local government election, according to him, the parties and candidates are fighting for their political future.
Another thing is that the recently voted amendment of Fidesz will seriously complicate the opposition’s joint campaign. On the proposal of Máté Kocsis, the Parliament accepted that the European Parliament and municipal elections be held on the same day in the spring of 2024.
This does not pose a particular problem for Fidesz, it teaches the opposition parties a lesson. Since the April election, all opposition parties have been talking about running separately in the EP elections, and the municipality again in an alliance in 2024. However, it will be impossible for them to show this duality if the two elections are held on the same day, because they would have to campaign against and alongside each other at the same time.