Last night’s televised debate on ATV between MSZP chairman Attila Mesterhazy and LMP co-chair Andras Schiffer was the only public debate among candidates for prime minister to take place this election. The great communicator, Viktor Orban, refused to publicly debate any of the contenders for the job of prime minister. Instead, his party spent hundreds of millions of forints on a country-wide campaign remaining Hungarians that he is the prime minister of Hungary.

Apart from a ten point economic program outlined in a speech delivered by Orban two weeks ago (and promptly forgotten except for the part about further lowering household energy costs), the governing Fidesz-KDNP alliance set forth no program for the next four years other than “continuing” its work of the past four years.

According to parliamentary speaker Laszlo Kover, Fidesz has devoted the past four years to rooting out and destroying every last vestige of “post communism.” According to Kover, liberals and socialists are the spiritual heirs of those who committed crimes against the Hungarian people both before and after the velvet revolution of 1989. Socialists and liberals, therefore, stand accused by Fidesz and its supporterssupporters of looting the country and selling Hungary out to foreign investors.

Of the main democratic parties, Politics Can Be Different (LMP) is the only party to put forth a detailed, comprehensive election program. The liberal party now looks certain to be rewarded for its unwavering commitment to good governance with the loss of all of its seats in parliament.

2014 is not 2010

Hungarians are voting under very different conditions in 2014 than in 2010.

Political parties are now permitted to transport voters to the polls and to actively campaign on election day (although campaigning is not permitted within 150 m of polls).

Hungarians are electing a parliament in 2014 that is considerably smaller (199 MPs) than its predecessor. 106 seats are to be filled with candidates running for office in one of 106 electoral districts. The remaining 93 seats are to be filled from so-called national party lists depending on each parties overall performance in the election.

The elimination of the second round of voting means candidates are no longer required to obtain an absolute majority (50% plus 1) of votes cast to be declared the winnerthe winner. The candidate getting the most votes wins.

A super abundance of parties and candidates

This year there are nearly three times as many parties and hundreds of independent candidates to choose from. In the interest of dividing the political opposition, the Fidesz government modified the election law making it possible for virtually anyone to run for parliament. All they need do is collect 500 signatures in their electoral district, a task greatly simplified by the fact that Hungarians are now allowed to endorse more than one candidate.

An excessively generous public campaign finance law adopted by the Fidesz controlled parliament has resulted in some 18 political parties running national lists of candidates. (So long as parties account for how they used the funds, they are not required to repay hundreds of millions of forints in public campaign funds, even if they fail to obtain a single vote).

The main opposition parties have tried to overcome the governing parties’ “divide and conquer” strategy by running a joint list of candidates headed by a joint candidate for prime minister, MSZP chairman Attila Mesterhazy. It is an awkward marriage, with free-market liberals lying down with dyed-in-the-wool socialists. (Politics truly makes for strange bedfellows).

Failure to put their differences aside until two months before the election has caused irreparable damage to the united opposition’s chances for victory, with many left wing voters opting to stay home on election day.

However, even if the democratic opposition had come together seamlessly, it is doubtful it would have succeeded in overcoming a number of seemingly insurmountable obstacles put in its path by the second Orban government.

The first is the clearly biased manner in which state television news covered the election. What little coverage the political opposition received was highly selective, often truncated or distorted, and often negative. Some 69 percent of Hungarians rely entirely on state television for their information about Hungary and the world. As far as they are concerned for the past four years “Hungary has been doing better” under the capable leadership of Viktor Orban. People watching ATV or listening to Klubradio are likely to have a different understanding of what is going on.

However, the former’s viewership is limited to about five percent of the viewing public and the latter cannot be heard outside of Budapest having been stripped of all but one of its frequencies (which it only managed to retain thanks to a Supreme Court decision in its favor).

In January the Hungarian news service, MTI,was quick to report that MSZP deputy chairman Gabor Simon had failed to declare some HUF 240 million held in a foreign bank account (and subsequent allegations involving bank accounts allegedly opened with a foreign passport). By contrast, it has refused to report recent revelations that Fidesz MP Antal Rogan and other prominent Fidesz politicians failed to report tens of millions worth of real estate when declaring their personal assets.

The second obstacle is the fact that most commercial television and radio stations, newspapers and magazines are now owned by businessmen with close ties to Fidesz. As such, they have been unwilling to publish stories critical of the government or Fidesz, and all too willing to publish stories intended to discredit the political opposition.

The third obstacle is the extent to which various authorities have been willing to cooperate with pro-government newspapers like Magyar Nemzet by leaking information highly damaging to the Hungarian Socialist party (as in the case of the Gabor Simon affair mentioned above) in the weeks and months leading up to the election.

The fourth obstacle is the strict limits the new election law places on campaign advertising. From this year political parties are prohibited from advertising in newspapers and magazines, thus depriving them of the ability to influence the readership of newspapers and other media outlets beholden to the government and Fidesz. While state television is required to run opposition ads free of charge, commercial television is not required to do so and, not surprisingly, has not done so.

The fifth obstacle (related to the fourth) is the fact that most billboards are now owned directly or indirectly by prominent Fidesz businessmen. In addition to an uninterrupted series of massive Fidesz billboard campaigns, opposition parties have been forced to compete for limited billboard space with the Hungarian National Bank, the Hungarian Treasury, and a number of state-owned companies, as well as companies owned by prominent Fidesz supporterssupporters.

The sixth obstacle (related to the third and fourth) is the extent to which Fidesz has used “civil organizations” bankrolled by Fidesz supporterssupporters, as well as the government, to circumvent its own election and campaign finance laws. The use of third party proxies falling outside the purview of the election and campaign finance laws has made it possible for Fidesz to outspend the united opposition by a factor of three to one and to advertise in media outlets and locations off limits to political parties having neither the foresight nor the ability to organize their own super-pacs.

These obstacles have resulted in an election campaign that has been eerily silent but for the declarations of the governing party. The experience is not unlike going for a walk in the woods and hearing nothing but the sound of a single wood-pecker tapping out “vote for Fidesz”. Or going fishing and hearing all the frogs croaking “Fidesz” in unison. In fact, were it not for the occasional opposition billboard or poster, one simply would not know Hungary was in the midsts of holding multi-party parliamentary elections.

Will the real reformer please stand up?

The political left is torn between four main camps, one of which (LMP) refuses to have anything to do with the other three. MSZP, Together 2014, and DK are all led by people claiming to be reformers. The problem is that all of them served Ferenc Gyurcsany in one capacity or another during his disastrous second administration (2006-2009) at the end of which he felt compelled to resign.

Since Ferenc Gyurcsany’s Democratic Coalition (DK) is a member of the opposition alliance, the election basically come down to a referendum on whether “team Gyurcsany” deserves to be given the keys to the family car. Voters’ memories may be short, but few forget the political paralysis that plagued the second Gyurcsany government (2006-2009) after he admitted that his party had “lied and cheated” its way to reelection in 2006. Who can forget the shocking disturbances accompanying the 50th anniversary of the start of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956?

Whatever his merits as a person or a politician, in the public’s mind Gyurcsany was a weak prime minister whose administration was mired in corruption.

Viktor Orban makes Hungarians feel good about themselves, in large part by blaming their problems on the European Union, international capital (i.e. Jews), foreign and domestic political enemies, and. of course. previous socialist governments and their liberal coalition partners. So good, that they are prepared to overlook the fact that Orban often seems out of touch with reality, as well as disregard a growing body of evidence attesting to his government’s incompetence and corruption.

Source: The Budapest Beacon

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