This weekend the joint open primary election of six parties of the Hungarian opposition ended. They are facing what may be their last chance against Viktor Orbán, who has ruled Hungary as Prime Minister for eleven years and has fundamentally changed both politically and socially.
The man on whom the collective opposition, from the right-wing Jobbik party to the liberal “Momentum” movement to the left-green “Dialogue for Hungary”, are placing their hopes in the parliamentary elections in April 2022 is called Péter Márki-Zay. On Sunday evening he won the runoff election with 56.7 percent of the vote. His opponent, the social democratic candidate Klára Dobrev, came to 43.3 percent according to the official final result.
Márki-Zay, 49 years old, has a PhD in economics and has lived in Canada for a long time. But he is not only seen as a political newcomer abroad. Since 2018 he has been mayor of the southern Hungarian city of Hódmezövásárhely, for a long time a Fidesz stronghold, where he was also able to win thanks to an all-opposition alliance.
Together with his “Movement for a Hungary for All” he represents positions that are to be located right of center. Márki-Zay speaks of his Christian faith, has seven children and market-liberal ideas for a Hungarian after Orbán.
But many left-wing voters have rediscovered a belief in change in Hungarian politics through him: Márki-Zay represents the departure from the polarized ping-pong between the right-wing Viktor Orbán and the left-wing Ferenc Gyurcsány, the last two decades of the Hungarian determined political discourse.
After the first pre-election round in September, Márki-Zay landed in third place with around 20 percent of the vote, behind the left-green Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony (27 percent). This was one of the reasons why the left-wing opposition camp was hit unexpectedly when Karácsony announced that he would be giving up his place in the runoff election in favor of Márki-Zay.
EP Vice-President congratulates the provisional winner
His opponent in the second round of the primary, Klára Dobrev, also 49, congratulated him at her press conference on Sunday evening. She is Vice President of the European Parliament and stood for the “Democratic Coalition” (DK) of Ferenc Gyurcsány. The party leader is also Dobrev’s husband.
Although Dobrev emerged victorious in the first round of the primaries with 35 percent of the vote, many voters did not trust her to fight Orbán.
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For many Dobrev also represents Gyurcsány, who ruled Hungary from 2004 to 2009, when he was Prime Minister of the socialist party MSZP, and who is seen by many as a synonym for corruption and lies. A recording of an internal parliamentary group meeting in the summer of 2006 is particularly detrimental to Gyurcsány: In it he admitted that he had lied to the voters for years.
The character of “Gyurcsány the liar” is a leading actor in Fidesz’s government propaganda. Even now, during the primary campaign, candidates like Karácsony and Dobrev were portrayed as Gyurcsány’s puppets on giant posters, and signatures for a “Stop Gyurcsány” campaign were collected next to the polling tents.
These campaigns show the power and financial resources of the Fidesz party even in the primaries. The opposition alliance must arm itself against this; Orbán will also give everything in the election campaign to be re-elected.
Differences were already open at the end of the second preliminary round, disagreements were named more clearly, taunts and attacks were not lacking in TV duels between Márki-Zay and Dobrev last week. But on Sunday evening the various politicians emphasize how important it is to continue to show strong unity. Klára Dobrev also stands behind Márki-Zay, who defeated her.
Successful mobilization and a strengthened culture of political debate
At the same time, the last few months of the primary campaign offered the opposition parties in Hungary an unprecedented platform for democratic debate. The audience rating in the TV duel of the top candidates on the TV channel RTL Klub was as high as the last time the Hungarian national soccer team took part in the European Championship. When participating in the second round of the pre-election, the organizers report new records every day.
A non-party platform for online petitions, ahang.hu, organized the online registrations and processing by volunteers. In the polling tents and on the street, activists from all parties mobilized almost 600,000 voters in the first round alone, and another hundred thousand voted online. Over 660,000 voters took part in the second round.
Unity is their only chance
These figures can be seen as a sign that the Hungarian democratic opposition, which under Orbán was only able to act to a very limited extent in the last decade, is getting new impetus. The nationwide pre-election campaign, a first for Hungary, is attracting opposition candidates months before the actual election campaign, especially in independent and anti-government media. The reporting in the state and Fidesz-affiliated media, which have a large monopoly in the press, was, on the other hand, little or no visible.
The media superiority of Fidesz leads to very unequal starting positions for parties of the opposition in the election campaign. In addition, the electoral law was reformed in 2011. The number of MPs has been halved to 199 seats, direct seats now have more weight in the two-vote system. Winner compensation was also introduced, which strengthens larger parties. The opposition parties have a chance against the powerful Fidesz-KDNP coalition only as an alliance.
The opposition alliance can therefore rate the primary as a success, both in terms of voter mobilization and the substantive debates, which were largely silent under Orbán. But that’s only the first step: The six very different parties have to hold out until April 2022 and beyond and maintain unity.
In any case, the chances of an opposition election victory would be very slim. In the week of the runoff election, most polling institutes showed that if there were parliamentary elections this Sunday, the Prime Minister of Hungary would be Viktor Orbán.
