Europe | No spoils for Viktor

Why Hungary’s ruling party lost Budapest

Not all the capital’s media are owned by the prime minister’s cronies

|BUDAPEST

IN MARCH TURKEY’S authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suffered the huge embarrassment of losing control at municipal elections of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city and commercial centre, as well as Ankara, the capital, and a clutch of other big cities. Now in Hungary something similar has happened to someone similar. On October 13th Gergely Karacsony, the 44-year-old candidate of the (mostly) united opposition, won the mayor’s race in Budapest, the capital, by 51% to 44%, over a 71-year-old incumbent backed by the ruling party, Fidesz. In the provinces, the opposition won ten out of 23 main cities, up from just three last time round. Most smaller towns and villages remain in ruling-party hands, just as they do in Turkey.

Listen to this story.
Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

Mr Erdogan annulled the Istanbul vote, though much good it did him: his man lost even more heavily at a re-run in June. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, is unlikely to try anything so crass. But the loss of Budapest is a major blow for him, puncturing his image as an invincible and almost unopposed leader for the past decade.

“The power people”, said Mr Karacsony in his victory speech on the night of October 13th, “have been defeated by the power of the people.” The quip was not lost on those in the cheering crowd old enough to remember the Communist era. “The power” was a synonym for the one-party system before 1990 and all who profited from it. Today it means the nearly-one-party system Mr Orban has created by changing the constitution and electoral laws (admittedly through perfectly legal means), and by filling important posts throughout Hungary with his loyalists. What Mr Orban calls “the Fidesz community” and his opponents term “the Fidesz mafia” is held together by a mixture of blind loyalty, the personality cult which Mr Orban has built around himself, and not least by the economic prosperity and low taxes that many Hungarians have experienced under him (heavily subsidised by the European Union). But in Budapest, that is not enough.

The arrogance of many in his entourage, and the playboy lifestyle of some of the elite, seem to have alienated traditional conservative Hungarian voters. In the last week of campaigning, videos of the married Fidesz mayor of the western city of Gyor taking part in an orgy on a yacht in the Adriatic undermined Fidesz support—but only in urban districts where the independent media are still widely consumed. With Mr Orban himself out of the country on a European jaunt, the party failed to appreciate the impact of the scandal.

The result is likely to be felt far beyond the capital. It shows both that Mr Orban can be defeated, and how it can be done: most of the main opposition parties held a primary in Budapest to select a single candidate to contest the election. Elsewhere, though without primaries, parties that did not expect to win sometimes stood down.

“Fidesz has to face a very different kind of country today,” says Andrea Virag of Republikon, a liberal think-tank. “Their power until now was based both on control of local councils and the media. Now the opposition will have more opportunities to communicate with the voters.”

The result presents Mr Orban with a dilemma. If he punishes the cities that spurned him, for instance by withholding cash from them, he risks alienating the remaining Fidesz voters there, still a substantial number. But if central government co-operates with them, as the prime minister suggested in the aftermath of the vote, that might undermine his combative style, which has done so much to cement his hold over Hungary since 2010.

Under Mr Orban Hungary has become a workshop for illiberal nationalists in Europe, with a constant stream of visits from his admirers. Now Budapest may become something of a meeting place for those seeking an antidote to his brand of populism. But Fidesz supporters can take consolation from the fact that their party is still the strongest in most of Hungary, holding two-thirds of the seats in parliament. A lot would have to change for it to lose nationally in 2022.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "Orban gets the Erdogan treatment"

Who can trust Trump’s America?

From the October 19th 2019 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

Vladimir Putin blames an Islamist attack on Ukraine and America

How to use a disastrous security failure to bolster dictatorship

Why the French are drinking less wine

A younger generation is rejecting old Mediterranean habits