Nobody in Miskolc can say with certainty that they have ever seen a migrant or a refugee in the city. A few residents think they might have seen one or two people in 2015, but cannot be sure. Others have said their friends have seen refugees in the streets, but admit they have not seen any themselves.
And yet, in this city of 160,000 inhabitants in northeast Hungary, a fierce election campaign is under way in which there is one overriding issue being discussed ahead of the vote on April 8.
It is not a recent series of corruption scandals involving government officials and vast sums of money. Nor is it the depressing state of local healthcare or low wages. It is migration.
Illustration: Mountain people
The tone for the election in Miskolc — as across well as the country — has been set by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is seeking to win a third consecutive term on a far-right platform of sealing Hungary’s borders to refugees.
Orban said that if Miskolc is not to be a place of “ghettos and no-go zones,” it is necessary to vote for Fidesz, his conservative party.
“There are two paths ahead for Hungary to choose from,” Orban said. “We will either have a national government, in which case we will not become an immigrant country, or the people of George Soros form a government and Hungary will become an immigrant country.”
Orban has tried to portray opposition parties as puppets of Soros, the Hungarian-born US financier and philanthropist who has spent billions on developing civil society in post-communist countries.
Posters plastered across Hungary portray Soros as a grinning, evil puppet master, desperate to flood Hungary with refugees and destroy the country in cahoots with the opposition.
Each day brings new salvos in the government messaging on migration.
Janos Lazar, Orban’s chief of staff, earlier this month posted on Facebook a video shot in Vienna, in which he accuses Muslim migrants of ruining the city and says that if Hungary also allowed them in, the consequences would be “crime, impoverishment, dirt, filth.”
Tamas Deutsch, a Fidesz member of the European Parliament and long-time associate of Orban, made a similar video in the Molenbeek district of Brussels.
“This is not a question about the next two or three years,” Deutsch said in an interview at an upmarket Budapest cafe. “It’s a question of the next half-century. What will Europe be?”
Many of Orban’s critics have said the endless migration rhetoric is merely a device to distract attention from the numerous corruption scandals in the prime minister’s circle.
Media outlets belonging to Lajos Simicska, an oligarch who fell out with Orban, have been running exposes about offshore accounts and criminal schemes linked to top officials.
However, the opposition is divided and much of the population apathetic about politics.
Opinion polls have shown that the migration rhetoric is probably working well enough among Orban’s base to win him another term.
Changes that the government has made to electoral law over the past eight years are also likely to help him win.
Recent polls in Miskolc suggest Fidesz and its candidates are polling at between 35 percent and 40 percent, figures that are likely to be enough to win Orban a parliamentary majority, if opposition candidates do not unite.
Even when there were hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees passing through Hungary in 2015, few if any of them made it to Miskolc. The city has struggled to integrate its large Roma population, and tensions were inflamed when Orban compared potential migrants to the local Roma community.
However, the only real migration crisis in the city is that locals are trying to leave, either for Budapest or for other EU countries. It is estimated that more than 20,000 residents have left over the past decade.
In Miskolc’s Avas public housing area, known as one of the worst in the country, locals complained of government corruption, economic hardship and expressed frustration at the state of healthcare.
And yet, migration kept coming up in conversations with local residents as the decisive factor.
“I haven’t seen any migrants myself, but people who come into the shop have,” said a 47-year-old shop assistant who did not give her name. “I have a young daughter, so I’m pretty worried about it.”
Jobbik, a far-right party that has recently moved its messaging further to the center and is placed second in most polls, is campaigning on corruption, but is also attacking Orban for being not harsh enough on refugees.
Peter Jakab, the local Jobbik candidate, admitted that migration was not a huge issue in Miskolc.
However, the campaign pamphlets stacked in his office, ready for distribution, have the headline: “Orban has already let in 2,300 migrants.”
The leaflets incorrectly allege that these people were given Hungarian citizenship, voting rights and cash.
Orban has shown no signs of toning down the rhetoric prior to the election, and has said he plans to take the fight to Brussels after the vote, if he wins another term, to prevent the EU from imposing redistribution quotas on member states.
“Migration and the attitude towards migration is basically determining all other aspects of our lives,” said Zoltan Kovacs, Orban’s spokesman.
In recent years, figures close to the government have taken control of much of the country’s media landscape, especially local newspapers and radio stations, which critics have said has helped Orban to base the entire political agenda around migration.
“Hungarians are bombarded by fabricated news about migration and shameless xenophobic propaganda on a daily basis,” said Kornel Klopstein, who helped set up the Nyomtassteis movement, which prints its own newsletters containing information to counter government propaganda.
On a chilly morning last week, volunteers from movement handed out bundles of leaflets to passengers at Budapest Keleti railway station, hoping they in turn would distribute the materials more widely in other regions.
“Bringing objective news about migration to people can help them to make better decisions in the upcoming elections,” Klopstein said.
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