Orban Loses Budapest as Hungary’s Opposition Breaks His Hegemony
Zoltan Simon
(Bloomberg) -- Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party lost control of Budapest and four of the country’s biggest cities, in a major rebuke to his rule after a video of one of his allies at an orgy handed a last-minute gift to a galvanized opposition.
The unexpectedly strong showing in local elections across Hungary gave opposition parties, which united behind joint candidates for the first time, momentum to build on their alliance against the self-styled opponent of liberal democracy. Gergely Karacsony, a former district mayor in Budapest, claimed the most important victory on Sunday.
“This election was about how the power of the people is always stronger than the men of power,” Karacsony said after Istvan Tarlos, the two-term Orban-backed mayor of Budapest, conceded defeat to him.
For Orban, one of the European Union’s most high-profile populist leaders, the loss of Budapest is the biggest electoral disappointment of the past decade after seven consecutive victories in nationwide ballots by his ruling Fidesz party. It’s also a signal that after crushing civil society and controlling much of the national media, a significant share of Hungarians nevertheless opposes his rule -- which, to be sure, remains stable.
The development underscores a trend in which nationalists from Turkey to Poland are encountering headwinds in major cities, which tend to lean more liberal and be less receptive to hard-line nativist rhetoric. Opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan scored a shock victory in the Istanbul mayoral race earlier this year and the Polish opposition swept most big cities in local elections in 2018. The nationalist incumbents won Poland’s parliamentary poll on Sunday.
In Hungary, opposition parties fielded joint candidates in the capital and other cities to improve their electoral chances. The tactic worked, helping them win 10 of the country’s 23 biggest cities outside of Budapest, tripling their previous result. Still, Fidesz retained a solid power base and unchallenged control over large swathes of the country, especially outside major urban areas.
A political gift fell in the opposition’s laps in the final week of the campaign, when a video emerged showing the ruling-party mayor of Gyor, western Hungary’s largest city, taking part in a sex party on a yacht.