Two sets of by-elections were held in the past two weeks, some of which had unexpected results. The elections were held in small villages or towns where one “independent” candidate stood against another “independent.” In these smaller communities few people are ready to run as a representative of a party, but everybody in the place knows which “independent” candidate is supported by Fidesz and which is considered to be somewhat critical of the Orbán government.
A quick glance at the results of the January 12th by-elections in four communities doesn’t tell us much. Those who are familiar with local conditions, however, can distinguish between the “independent” candidates and tease out what might be the early signs of a larger trend.
One such case was the by-election held in the town of Cserépfalva (Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén), where Zoltán Dávid won against Tamás Tóth, both independent candidates. The election had to be repeated because Dávid and Tóth received exactly the same number of votes on October 13th. This time, Dávid won with 168 votes, while Tóth, who was supported by Fidesz, received only 132 votes. Fidesz support for Tóth was clear to everyone because, before the election, András Tállai, an important Fidesz member of parliament, campaigned on his behalf.
Another surprise occurred in Esztergályhorváti (Zala County), a village that voted against letting immigrants rent a house in the community back in 2015. Once again, the election was mandated because the two contenders received the same number of votes in October. With high participation (69% of the eligible voters), the village voted for a left-wing independent, allegedly for the first time in 30 years.
Even more important was the by-election in the heavily Fidesz Orosháza (Békés County), a city of 30,000 inhabitants where in one of the electoral districts Mrs. Zoltán Tóth (Fidesz) and János Raffai (opposition candidate) received the same number of votes (417). This time, Raffai got 351 votes and Mrs. Tóth, 301. According to the locals, “Fidesz took this election very seriously. The party’s county chairman and its member of parliament both visited Orosháza and campaigned all through to the last day.”
Yesterday, another seven by-elections were held, of which the one in Törökszentmiklós in Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County was the most significant. In 2014 the town was one of the few that elected a Jobbik mayor and a Jobbik-majority town council. This time all of the non-Fidesz forces united in a civic group called “Szentmiklós, Our Home” and received a majority of the seats on the town council. In the October election, a Fidesz and an opposition candidate for the town council received the same number of votes, but this time the opposition candidate won 57% to 43%. With this victory, the opposition forces in Törökszentmiklós have a qualified majority, which comes in handy when voting on certain issues.
Mandiner, a pro-government publication, reported today that a by-election in Budapest’s XXII District resulted in a stunning victory for the Fidesz candidate, resulting in a Fidesz majority on the district council. I checked the pre-election composition of the 16-member district council at least three times and can find only six Fidesz members, including the mayor though excluding the current winner, Zsuzsanna Csiszár, as opposed to ten opposition candidates. It doesn’t matter how you slice it, even with a Fidesz win yesterday, this is not a Fidesz majority.
Fidesz faced another loss in Sajószentpéter, a town in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County, although that was more expected. In October Tibor Kocsi, Party of the Greens (Zöldek Pártja), and István Oláh (DK-MSZP) both received 158 votes. Yesterday eight candidates, including Mrs. Attila Flopp (Fidesz-KDNP), ran for the seat. Kocsi won with 162 votes, Oláh received 87 votes. The Fidesz candidate got only 59.
Collapse usually follows
I cataloged the results of some of the more significant by-elections in order to illustrate the erosion of Fidesz strength even in the countryside, and we are nowhere close to the end of the process. Jobbik will almost certainly be victorious, with the full support of all opposition parties, in Fejér County’s fourth electoral district for a seat in parliament. And I wouldn’t take it for granted that the long-standing Fidesz potentate, Csaba András Dézsi, will win the mayoral election in the Fidesz stronghold of Győr this Sunday.
According to the latest information, Dr. Dézsi has no intention of looking into the past wrongdoings of the Borkai administration, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. After all, ever since 2006, when Borkai became mayor, Dézsi has been an influential man on the city council. I watched an interview with him today where he arrogantly declared that, although he was part of the administration, he saw nothing that would have indicated any corruption whatsoever in city hall.
I have the feeling that the electorate in Győr might just have had enough of the Fidesz management that led to the Borkai scandal. Judging from these recent by-elections, Dr. Dézsi will not have an easy time of it, since apparently he has a strong “independent” opponent in addition to the official candidate of the opposition party.
http://www.q-service.hu/assets/img/mapa_4.jpg
FLOPP FLOPPED ··· I admire your willpower, Éva, passing on an obvious (but deliciously cheap) yuck at the expense of ‘poor’ Mrs. Attila Flopp, the local Fidesz/KDNP candidate in Sajnosszentpéter, BAZ megye.
Encouraging antiFidesz results. Let’s hope that they are signs of a wide Orbán disaffection, not merely local issues getting in the way.
MAGYARKOZÓ
Well, I was tempted.
Let’s hope that the opposition will learn from these successes and work together now. It’s time!!
**It’s Time**
A good slogan that. It has been a successful rallying cry in the past in getting rid of a long entrenched and moribund (though not corrupt) government; works well in Hungarian an’ all.
The jingle from 1972;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jykIqQxEOw
Just need a clever Hungarian lyricist to write some lyrics; could even just translate the original with a few modifications.
Itt az ideje a szabadságnak,
Ideje cselekedni, ideje elkezdeni,
Igen, igen, itt az ideje
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Time_(Australian_campaign)
Then to find a Magyar Gough ….
👍👍👍
And a ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ oldie group lyric made me of think of all the Fidesz elections…’It was the worst that could happen’.
Sorry about your fire troubles there ‘down under’. Incredible devastation to the land and wildlife. Smarty pants’ Trump et al should go sit in it. We’ll see how long they can stare at it and say it’s just a lil brushfire.
‘Work together?!!’
You’re very young.
Hungarians work together’ only so long until one of them turns his back, and the other(s) can sink the dagger in…
Hajra Hungarok!!
Petofi, there are people like this everywhere, not only in Hungary. But over my more than 20 years visiting here I have met quite a few people who I can rely on totally. Of course my wife and her family are included there – and about half of our neighbours. We have some very nice people there – oda vissza!
But we also have a “szar szomszéd” and a “hülye szomszéd” …
Re: ‘Hungarians work together’ only so long until one of them turns his back, and the other(s) can sink the dagger in’…
Once upon a few times when two magyars met one saw a tombstone already on the other guy’s head….same here too. I have seen the hulyeseg es bolondseg. 😎
And the ‘szomszeds’. Time to get them, the sleepy towns and the villages taking their part in the 21st century. It’s a great big wide world out there. Fidesz fences have had their time. Their fences just made ornery neighbors.
The current government uses this method of silent killing of its people. The next generation no longer has daggers in their hands, but smartphones – with spotlights. And it gets brighter in the dark.
Hajra Demokrácia
Thanks for the summary, good news.
Eva, thanks for this positive news!
We never should give up – there’s always hope!
These signs of discontent are the basis of my hope that an opposition victory or the prospect of imminent such may trigger “a spontaneous revolt” which would be instrumental in the uprooting of the Orbàn regime everywhere, a necessary condition for the return to democracy.
Fidesz is getting nervous about youth and urban voter support, so they reversed their stance on climate change and give it a “Christian Democratic” branding.
https://kafkadesk.org/2020/01/21/hungary-orban-goes-green-on-climate-change-as-long-as-it-remains-christian-democratic/?fbclid=IwAR09x3bGoRWJVSlRDoXMYXOno0_B6qLwl9FbTFQXRdy4ANnPrenMUtWbvsY
A little bit of Greta speaking at Davos to brighten your day.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=489158628452949
Kafkadesk is a very good site (not only because they link to HS …) and that article says it clearly:
For Orban, climate change is about getting money
That’s the general Fidesz idea re NATO, the UN, the EU and you name it:
We’re only in it for the money!
OT:
Magyar democrats should be very sad today as the impeachment trial of the President gets underway. They may wonder how well it might follow a Fidesz political playbook as Republicans appear as if they have read the book cover to cover. It has infected their minds.
The United States unfortunately will not be the shining example of the best democracy can offer but rather its worst courtesy of the obsequious enablers who appear to be blindly protecting a wayward king.
Welcome ‘trial by night’. Shady shady things going on in the great Trumpian cover up underway. If it goes through there will be hell to pay after this rigged rigamarole.
I think the Hungarians should do themselves the favor of not complicating their own domestic problems by irrelevant comparing.
We are talking about a population of responsible adults – yes or no??
I was an undergraduate political science major and have a Masters degree also in political science in addition to a military studies Masters degree. I would have not given the very limited underlying data in the by-elections felt comfortable making predictions of a trend against Fidesz in the rural areas of Hungary that Eva has done today. I see Eva’s presentation as an inspirational argument for the opposition. Today in the USA we are regularly seeing supporters of the Democrats trying to build a trend against the possible reelection of President Trump based on many different electoral results across the county. It is a momentum tactic, the same was the case in 2016, when the trend for Ms. Clinton proved largely incorrect. I am not a supporter of Trump, nor an ally of Fidesz, but this approach always worries me. Eva makes no claim to be a completely objective observer of politics in Hungary, she is definitively opposed to the rule of Orban and I admire that. But building trends on very limited data is a reach and can have a very demoralizing impact on the supporters of democratic change in Hungary. Indeed it is completely possible that the electoral… Read more »
Istvan (Chi) – I’m sure you have a qualified view on the deeper logic of the American civil-armament culture. By that I don’t mean a technical political interpretation.
Is it an expression of collective mutual distrust?
Is it the result of abstract fears and paranoia, on a national level?
Surely, people can’t agree on acceptability as a consequence of freedom, when in reality they live in constant and ever-present risk of being held at gunpoint, hit by a stray bullet or accidental fire, and the resulting conflicts, not to mention the constant exposure to sniper-fire.
When the very frequent incidents of civil killing-sprees play out, the question is always the same – Why do they not stop this?
Media in Europe touch upon the subject regularly, but are unable to produce answers that seem reasonable enough to make any sense.
They don’t report on the many daily public gunfights and hostage-dramas that take place across the US – That’s too trivial (!).
I have discussed this issue before on this blog, in part because of one of my own cousins from Esztergom who lived with our family while in her Doctoral program in economics at University of Chicago. She was terrified after watching the local news here in Chicago and asked the same type of questions you have Michael and was stunned that both my wife and I had concealed carry gun permits even though we were rational educated people. Chicago is a violent city, no question about that. But the more money one has here the more secure and less violent your immediate neighborhood is. I gave her two books by Richard Slotkin one was Regeneration Through Violence and the other was Gunfighter Nation. They are dense books but explain how guns are cultural in the USA and linked to what can be called our national myth for white America. These books were a revelation for her, because Europeans do not often study this aspect of American history. For some members of racial minorities in the USA guns are seen as individual defense against a potentially opressive state, for my wife and her family who are native Americans it is based… Read more »
Ok, That is complicated.
I get the impression that the armed civil society reflects a (for the western world) uniquely American, broad overlap of military and civic cultures.
How do you see the level of appreciation for the inevitable direct counterpart to the ” slippery slope” – the corresponding drop in shots fired outside shooting ranges and hunting grounds and a subsequent drop in bullet wounds and fatalities? Is that of less significance in the American self-image?
OT but relevant re Fidesz and the EPP:
Seems that the three wise men have left open a “kis kapu” for O1G.
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/evp-chef-tusk-muss-ueber-den-umgang-mit-orban-entscheiden-16593796.html
Marty seems to be right concerning the weakness of the EPP “leaders”.
Maybe this is also available in English somewhere?
What I am saying is not a secret, everybody who deals with Western people of supposed power knows this. Orban just dares to act on this reality, the rest of the Hungarian political establishment is – like their Western counterpart – weak, inhibited, terrified of conflicts etc. No wonder Orban always wins, not because if his genius, but because his opponents are lighter than lightweight. That’s the sad reality.
Marty – you have a totalitarian view on life.
Marty
The “weak” westerners have created a very nice, polite rule of law societies, reaching the highest standards of living. Co-operation, compromise, team work are essential to the functioning and progress of complex societies.
Of course there are also “great … strong leaders” like the Kims, the Alievs, the Asads, Milosevic, Lukashenka, etc.. but it is another world.
And if the weak westerners should fail economically – then what will the strongmen of the East tell their people when the money runs out? We might (have to …) reestablish the Iron Curtain (even if it’s a rainbow curtain …) just as the UK is planning after Brexit. The bunkó paraszt in Germany will applaud this of course – throw out the Hungarians and Serbs that are stealing our jobs (like 24hour nurses, a job that no German will accept …) and the Poles and Ukrainians who steal our cars. Of course the lazy Greeks and the Italian “Spaghettifresser” might get kicked out too because it is horrible that there are Italian and Greek restaurants at every corner in Germany! And don’t even think about the Yugoslavs with their Cevapcici and the Turks with their Döners. Back to Prussian potatoes! We need no exotic food! And at last we will have German garbage collectors again – or maybe not? PS and rather OT: All this reminds me of my first visit to Turkey with our little camping van more than 40 years ago. I stopped somewhere between Troy and Izmir to have a look at the map and immediately… Read more »
You want civil war like in the Ukraine now in AN UNGAVERNABLE Hungary. But euro will collapse first
UNGOVERNABLE ??? ··· How so, Gyula bácsi? Are you implying that only MOVO [Magyarország Viktor Orbán] can keep the countryside in line? The people out there in the boonies need to know that they should not ingest the fear that Fidesz pushes in its relentless propagandizing. The NEXT government will NOT be Fidesz. And, if the EURO goes tits-up, then Hungary will be badly affected.
MAGYARKOZÓ