CentreRight

As predicted, Fidesz - the Hungarian Civic Union - have won the country's parliamentary elections. 

Commenting on Fidesz's victory in the early hours of this morning, President Laszlo Solyom rightly noted that it was "unprecedented for a winning party to secure such a clear and broad-based mandate" and that their victory "signals fundamental shift in Hungarian politics".  He's right.

While counting is still going on, the party have secured an outright first-round victory in 119 of 176 constituencies and appear to have secured more than half of the 152 proportional representation top-up seats.  In power since 2002, the Socialists have been reduced to a rump of only 28 seats - two ahead of the ultra-nationalist Jobbik Party who secured 26 mandates.  It was a painful night for the once-powerful Hungary Democratic Union, our party's allies in the European Parliament, who failed to clear the 5% electoral threshold for representation in the Országház.
 
The challenge for Fidesz in recent months has never been winning the election - but rather about articulating a convincing plan to pull Hungary out of its current malaise.  Preferring platitudes and outlining only the vaguest of policies, this is something Prime Minister-elect Orbán and his party have sadly failed to do. 

Fidesz inherit a shattered - even bankrupt - country.

As a result of his own electoral strategy, Viktor Orbán is likely to quickly find himself a victim of what can loosely described as an "expectations/delivery deficit". 

At present, Hungary is bound by more than €20 billion of loan obligations to the European Union, World Bank and International Monetary Fund - loans conditionalised on the basis of the country committing to a austerity programme which has been implemented by outgoing Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai and his predecessor Ferenc Gyurcsany. 

Publicly, Orbán has denounced the current loan agreement which limits the country's targeted deficit to 3.8% per annum, pledging to negotiate international agreement to increase this figure to 5.5%.   Public spending programmes, Fidesz has promised the Hungarian public, will be ring fenced.  Even if - and it is far from likely - Orbán obtains permission for such a deficit increase, economic realities will leave his government with no option other than to renege on their manifesto commitment not to implement savage public spending cuts.  Their hands are tied.

Hungary's economic problem are matched only by the scale of social problems manifesting themselves in an increasingly ugly fashion on the streets of Budapest, Debrecen and Szeged.

There can be no better illustration of these social problems than the 17% vote for the Jobbik Movement for a Better Hungary yesterday.  Jobbik, with their anti-Roma, anti-Semitic, xenophobia rhetoric, fits every possible stereotype of a far-right Eastern European party.  

While weak in the liberal urban centres, Jobbik came from nowhere to secure a strong second-place finish in the largely impoverished rural areas along the country's eastern borders with Romania and the Ukraine.

Support for Jobbik, just as with support for all other far-right nationalist movements in Europe, has little to do with racism and far more to do with frustration with the political process and established politics.  The party has successfully skewered both the ruling Socialists and Fidesz for perceived corruption, the vagaries of their public spending policies and their failure to offer solid commitments on job creation.

Jobbik are thugs.  For starters, their leader Gábor Vona has already vowed to wear the sinister uniform of the outlawed Hungarian Guard to Parliament.  

In the Országház Jobbik will care little for the niceties of parliamentary democracy, instead preferring to focus "salty" personal attacks on Orbán and his supporters.  If, as expected, Orbán is forced to slash public spending and fails to speedily turn around the economy, we can only expect Jobbik's cancerous influence on the Hungarian political process to continue to grow.

Fidesz have been handed a powerful mandate for change and enter office with a burden of expectation entirely disproportionate to what they are likely or able to achieve.   For now, Orbán’s challenge must be to manage those expectations.

Fidesz face an unhappy challenge in the months ahead for which I can only wish them the very best of luck.

Amid the clamour of the start of the British general election campaign, Sunday will see Hungary’s ten million citizens go to the polls to vote in the country’s general election. The incumbent Socialist Party government has trailed in the polls for more than three years – sometimes by margins of more than 30% - and is certain to be defeated by the populist opposition party Fidesz.

Certainty of a Fidesz victory aside, there’s only one party worthy of the support of British Conservatives: the Magyar Demokrata Fórum (Hungarian Democratic Forum).

The MDF’s Prime Ministerial nominee is Central European University economics professor and former Chairman of the Budapest Stock Exchange Lajos Bokros who sits with our party’s MEPs in the European Conservatives and Reformists Group.

Bokros' decision to withdraw his party from the EPP in favour of the ECR was a major coup for the group; bringing with him a legendary reputation as the Finance Minister whose mid-1990s ‘Bokros Plan’ “attacked head-on the thankless job of dismantling the socialist welfare state, radically downsized the public sector, cutting expenditures, and increased revenues”.

• Focuses on supporting small and medium-sized businesses.
• Offers a ten point “clean hands” anti-corruption plan introducing transparency in party funding, public contract bid tendering and judicial decisions.
• Advocates deep cuts in public spending in order to increase economic growth by more than 3% per annum.
• States a commitment to keep the budget deficit below 3% of GDP during the party’s term in office.
• Implements a long term plan to reduce Hungary’s debt to less than 40% of GDP.

During the course of the campaign, Fidesz leader and former Prime Minister Viktor Orban has struck a sharply protectionist note not dissimilar to that deployed by the theoretically right-leaning Nicolas Sarkozy.

On the issue of Hungary’s ban on the foreign purchase of agricultural land (which will become illegal under EU law from 2011) Obran declared that "foreigners will never buy arable land in Hungary" and that "every Austrian farmer who bought land in Hungary should feel pleased to have got away with it". When it comes to government procurement programmes, Fidesz promise to impose quotas to ensure a ‘closed shop’ for Hungarian companies on 70% of public tenders. The core of the party’s economic policy is based around persuading the IMF to accept an increase in the country’s targeted deficit from 3.8% to 5.5%.

The left-leaning, anti-market policies offered by Fidesz in this election are nothing new. Indeed, at the time of the 2006 general election, one witnessed the bizarre spectacle of then-Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s Socialist Party advocating PFI initiatives, Atlanticism and improved conditions for foreign investment while the supposedly centre-right Fidesz advocated price controls on energy and a programme of renationalisation of former state assets.

It's no secret that this is a difficult election for the MDF who have seen their support base eroded by the vapid promises of Viktor Orban and Fidesz - but they are fighting a innovative and eye-catching campaign (see the poster to the right!) designed to maintain their representation in the Hungarian Parliament.

Polls conducted over the past three weeks show Fidesz to be in a commanding lead with more than 50% of the vote while the ruling Socialists and far-right Jobbik are scrapping it out for second place with roughly a fifth of the vote apiece.

At present, the MDF is hovering just below the threshold required for parliamentary representation.

“There is little daylight between Fidesz and Jobbik ideologically. They are both inheritors of a right-wing tradition that, lacking the possibility of open debate for decades, has improved precious little since the 1930s. They are both characterized by strong anti-liberal and anti-capitalist impulses, stuck in an old-fashioned, blood-based nationalism that is suspicious of most things foreign, and with a strong ethos of authoritarianism.”

With the growth of populist political rhetoric in the form of Fidesz and the bigoted extremism of Jobbik on the far-right, it’s more important than ever that Lajos Bokros and the MDF have a seat at the table.

Good luck to our friends and colleagues in the MDF on Sunday!

Csak az ország!