On August 19 I wrote a post in which I described the Orbán government’s outrage over a sentence in a lengthy interview about the lack of rule of law in Poland and Hungary. Ten days later, Magyar Nemzet picked up the topic again in an opinion piece titled “Bad news about the anti-Semitic opposition.” According to the article, it is not Fidesz that is tainted with anti-Semitic sentiments but members of the opposition parties. The examples, he claimed, are endless.
It is true that Jobbik, which today is part of the united opposition, was at its inception and for several years thereafter an anti-Semitic party, but it is certainly not true about the other opposition parties. As far as today’s Jobbik is concerned, it made a sharp ideological turn, and the party got rid of most of its bad apples. But the past is impossible to erase. Time and again, newly discovered old or not so terribly old anti-Semitic comments keep surfacing. This is exactly what happened to László Bíró, a member of Jobbik, who had been put forth as the joint candidate of the opposition in Borsod County’s 6th electoral district, around Tiszaújváros and Szerencs.
This a crucial election. Fidesz’s two-thirds majority in parliament depends on its outcome. On July 10, Ferenc Koncz, the Fidesz representative of the district, had a fatal motorcycle accident. If Koncz’s district is won by the opposition, the number of Fidesz MPs will be only 132 instead of the “133 brave men,” as Orbán called his voting machine.
The opposition parties agreed that in this particular district Jobbik had the best chance of winning against Fidesz’s new candidate, Zsófia Koncz, the daughter of the deceased MP, who was enticed to return from Washington where, for the last three years, she has been “political adviser” at the Hungarian Embassy.
Then came the first bombshell, when Magyar Nemzet found that Bíró had made some ugly anti-Semitic remarks on Facebook. And, if that weren’t enough, Jenő Setét, a Roma community activist, said in an interview on Klub Rádió that Bíró had also made several anti-Roma comments as well. Setét warned that he will inform the Roma organizations about Bíró’s racist views and expressed his hope that Roma voters will not cast their votes for him.
Although Bíró apologized, the damage had been done. Even some of the commentators who are full-fledged supporters of the democratic opposition, like TGM, Tamás Bauer, and Zoltán Somogyi, raised their voices against the candidate. Still, it looked as if, for a chance to upend Fidesz’s supermajority, the opposition was ready to go ahead with a very unpopular choice.
But soon enough it became clear that undermining the credibility of the candidate wasn’t quite enough for Viktor Orbán, despite analysts’ predictions of a relatively easy Fidesz win. It seemed that they wanted to prevent the opposition from entering the race altogether. Now, you have to bear with me because I have to explain a complex legal trick that Fidesz, with the help of the huge Fidesz majority in the National Electoral Commission, used to preclude Jobbik from appearing on the ballot.
The claim is that Márton Gyöngyösi, deputy chairman of Jobbik, who asked the National Electoral Commission to place his party on the ballot, was not eligible to do so. Gyöngyösi was deputy chairman of the party even before Péter Jakab was elected chairman at the end of January. Gyöngyösi was reelected at the same time as deputy chairman. However, according to Jobbik’s bylaws, the old leadership would remain in office until May 12. This date happened to fall in the midst of the state of emergency, which declared that those officeholders whose terms of office expired during this period would remain in office for 90 days after the end of the state of emergency.
To my mind, Gyöngyösi was and still is deputy chairman of the party, but Fidesz challenged this interpretation, and the National Electoral Commission ruled in Fidesz’s favor. The argument is that Jobbik submitted its request to register the new leadership shortly after the January elections, but no decision had yet been made on the matter by the authorities. The delay may well have been intentional. In brief, Gyöngyösi as a member of the old leadership can no longer act on behalf of his party and as a member of the new leadership cannot yet perform any official duties. Perfect nonsense. Jobbik appealed, but the Kúria ruled in favor of the National Electoral Commission.
The opposition parties’ international press conference
While his case was pending, Bíró couldn’t campaign. By contrast, Fidesz’s candidate, Zsófia Koncz, has been campaigning fast and furious since August 15. It was under these circumstances that the other opposition parties opted to put up the Jobbik candidate as their own, despite Bíró’s very checkered political career. Yesterday, representatives of Jobbik, MSZP, DK, LMP, Momentum, and Párbeszéd held an English-language press conference in which they stood by the candidate and emphasized the need for unity. The democratic parties obviously find breaking the stronghold of Fidesz in parliament so important that they are ready to take on the odium of nominating an anti-Roma and anti-Semitic candidate.
The opposition politicians seem sanguine about Bíró’s chances, and I suspect they might be right. As we know, Fidesz’s pollsters are incredibly active, and, given the importance of this parliamentary seat, I suspect they have learned that the election might be tight. The opposition might even hope for a repeat of the reaction in Borsod County that happened during the municipal elections, where the Fidesz candidate for mayor of Jászberény, after losing by 14 votes to a Jobbik candidate, insisted on repeating the election. What happened? In the second round of voting, the Jobbik candidate received 62.9% of the votes. The voters punished the incumbent Fidesz candidate by going out in hordes to show their dissatisfaction with Fidesz’s crude manipulation.
I suppose that what prompted the democratic opposition to endorse Bíró, despite his checkered past, was the fear that their abandonment of unity would do irreparable harm to their chances in 2022. Anti-Fidesz voters, almost across the board, want total unity: one list and one candidate for prime minister. If they fail, Viktor Orbán can be the dictator of Hungary for decades to come. Standing behind Bíró was a distressing choice. Only time will tell whether it was a wise one.