Orban’s FIDEZ party has been in power for 12 years – an era the Hungarian opposition wants to end with a unified list on April 3. Since the Orban party won a two-thirds majority twelve years ago, the country’s small left, green, liberal and right-wing parties have been completely fragmented and thus have not been able to threaten the ruling party’s hold on for long. – until the first signs of success emerged in 2019.
In Budapest’s local elections, the opposition, united for the first time, managed to bring Gergely Karacsony to the presidency of the capital as mayor. With the opposition primaries in the fall of 2021, the foundation should be laid for more success in parliamentary elections. To the surprise of the FIDEZ party, non-partisan conservative Peter Marki-Zay, mayor of the southeastern Hungarian town of Hodmezövasarhely, was elected the leading joint candidate of the six parties.
Media on the side of the FIDEZ party
As Orban has gradually brought the national media under his control since taking office, according to remarks by Reporters Without Borders, the election campaign for the alliance behind Marki-Zay is proving difficult. It cannot keep up with the financial means of the FIDEZ party, and Orban has rejected a direct TV showdown with Marki-Zay.
APA/AFP/Attila Kisbenedek On posters in Budapest, the FIDEZ party portrays the main opposition candidate, Peter Marki-Zay, as “Mr. Evil”.
Hungarian state broadcaster M1 recently fulfilled its legal obligation by allowing opposition politicians a minimum of five minutes of airtime to present their election programme. At 8 am, before the news, Marki-Zay also presented the main points of the Allianz electoral program, such as tax-free minimum wage, independent courts, introduction of the euro, reduction of waiting lists in hospitals and cancellation of mandatory vaccination against coronavirus. .
War calls for reorientation in election campaign
However, the war in Ukraine is forcing the parties involved to completely reassess their campaign messages and strategies. The opposition had already campaigned against corruption and for higher teachers’ salaries. The fact that Orban was one of the last EU politicians to pay a state visit to Russia shortly before the invasion prompted her to once again speak publicly about the close relationship between Orban and the Russian president in early March.
The government and its media are constantly spreading lies about the opposition, Marki-Zay criticized during his appearance on state television and denied media claims that the alliance wanted to send weapons and soldiers to Ukraine. “Orban and Putin or the West and Europe – that’s the mission,” he wrote on the social network Facebook. “A choice between the dark side or the good side of the story.”
AP/Yuri Kochetkov Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban during a state visit to Russia February 1, 2022, a few weeks before the invasion
Orban: Must defend its own interests
Orban himself is trying a balancing act. While he officially condemns Russian aggression, supports EU sanctions and takes in refugees from Ukraine, he is at the same time trying to keep his country out of the neighborhood war as much as possible. He did not join the Polish, Czech and Slovenian heads of government’s visit to Kiev last week. Instead, the incumbent prime minister wants to act as a guarantor of peace and stability.
“Our interest is not to end up as a pawn in a foreign war. In this war, we have nothing to gain and everything to lose,” Orban said in his national holiday speech to tens of thousands of FIDEZ party supporters in Budapest on March 15. “We must stay out of this war! Not a single Hungarian must be trapped between the Ukrainian anvil and the Russian sledgehammer.”
The Russian president’s name did not appear in the speech, despite the war being discussed several times. Instead, Orban warned against the “strongest countries” Germany, Russia, Turkey and the US. “Neither the US nor Brussels will think with a Hungarian head or feel a Hungarian heart”, the prime minister also referred to the tense relationship with the EU. “We must defend our own interests – bravely and calmly.”
Russia as a model of “illiberal democracy”
From the beginning of his career as prime minister, Orban announced that he wanted to open up his country to the East – and from 2014 onwards he openly flirted with the model of “illiberal democracy”, a form of government based on the Russian model, which follows principles basic democratic principles such as the rule of law, freedom of the media and a functioning opposition, and must sustain and lead to unfettered government.
For years, Putin has considered Orban an important ally when it comes to asserting interests that are often unpopular within the EU – and vice versa. Poland, too, under the leader of the Eurosceptic ruling PiS party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has recently shown increasingly autocratic traits. The fact that Poland is strongly anti-Russian is currently causing a rupture with Hungary, with which it recently appeared united in the fight against the EU’s rule of law.
Hungary as the EU’s problem child
Hungary has been a member of NATO since 1999 and a member of the EU since 2004 – but Orban’s government repeatedly causes conflict when it comes to the rule of law, freedom of the judiciary, human rights of asylum seekers and freedom of the media. These include convictions by the European Court of Justice (CJ), various infringement proceedings by the EU Commission and even an EU rule of law case.
Orban wants to avoid EU sanctions that include a possible exit from Russian energy supplies at all costs: Hungary gets almost 100 percent of its gas from Russia – Orban signed a 15-year supply contract last year. Two new nuclear reactors worth ten billion euros are also planned with financial support from Russia. In its staging as a guarantee of stability, the war comes at the worst possible time for Orban.
Seven billion euros in EU funds are still outstanding
It has always been part of Orban’s political strategy to portray Brussels in his speeches as a bureaucratic superstate that would like to subject Hungary to regulation against the will of the population. Hungary is one of the countries that particularly benefits financially from membership: in 2020, it was among the top four net beneficiaries with €4.8 billion and, unlike Germany and Austria, received more funding than it paid for.
However, EU CoV reconstruction aid worth nearly seven billion euros has yet to be paid. The EU’s recently adopted Rule of Law Mechanism allows the Union to sanction member states that flout the rule of law with a funding freeze – a tactic the EU is now using to try to get Orban to do things like LGBTIQ rights – infiltrate the people in Hungary even further and use the funding according to the guidelines.
Experts predict economic crisis from autumn
That could pose the biggest challenge for the future government, predicts Botond Feledy, an expert on foreign affairs at the Center for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Development in Brussels. “I expect a major economic crisis by the fall. That will be the real game-changing impact no matter which government is elected,” Feledy said. According to the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, inflation hit a 15-year high of 8.3% in February.
“The new government will have to ask itself above all what double-digit inflation and restrictions on public funds mean for the general population, which could become unemployed.” The Hungarian Ministry of Finance is virtually bankrupt – until EU development fund funds arrive, it could take months at best. And the mortgage loan moratorium will also expire in the summer.
Head-to-head confrontations are emerging in polls
“It remains to be seen whether Orban’s peace and security narrative or the opposition’s West-East approach will win over voters more,” Andreas Biro-Nagy of Policy Solutions think tank told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN). “But what poses big challenges for Orban is that he has no control over what is happening in Ukraine or even the economy – he can only control the damage.”
Despite Orban’s media scrutiny, the ruling party and the opposition alliance are essentially side by side. Furthermore, the proportion of undecided people in Hungary is traditionally high – most recently it was around 25%. However, the electoral system, a combination of list and personality elections, tends to favor the winning party. 106 of the 199 parliamentary seats are allocated to constituencies, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Here FIDEZ still seems to show a clear dominance.