Hungary’s opposition on Sunday scored a shock win in the Budapest mayoral election, the first electoral blow for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban since he came to power in 2010.
The win was “historic” said pro-European center-left challenger Gergely Karacsony, 44, who was backed by a wide range of opposition parties from across the political spectrum.
The mild-mannered former political scientist led by 51 percent of the vote ahead of incumbent Istvan Tarlos at 44 percent, with 82 percent of votes counted.
Photo: EPA-EFE
In office since 2010, the 71-year-old Tarlos, backed by Orban’s right-wing Fidesz party, congratulated the new mayor by phone, Karacsony told cheering supporters.
“We will take the city from the 20th century to the 21st,” said the pro-EU Karacsony, who was one of the few opposition politicians to win a district in the last election five years ago.
“Budapest will be green and free, we will bring it back to Europe,” he said.
Karacsony had compared the Budapest race to the Istanbul mayoral election in March, in which the candidate for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party was defeated by the opposition challenger.
“Istanbul voted against an aggressive illiberal power in many ways similar to Orban’s regime,” Karacsony told reporters before the vote.
Since 2010, Orban has reformed Hungary’s institutions and concentrated power and media in his hands, and regularly clashed with Brussels over migration and rule-of-law issues.
He also cruised to consecutive landslide victories at the polls, partly due to electoral rule changes he oversaw.
Fidesz ran a highly negative campaign attacking Karacsony for an allegedly pro-migration stance and his “unsuitability” for the job, while Orban threatened to withhold cooperation from municipalities lost by his party.
Before the vote, favorite Tarlos and Fidesz, which brands itself as Christian-conservative, were damaged by a sex scandal involving a Fidesz mayor in the western city of Gyor that erupted last week.
“We acknowledge this decision in Budapest and stand ready to cooperate,” Orban told supporters at a rally.
The elections were seen as a rare chance for the beleaguered opposition to roll back the power of Fidesz, who also hold a supermajority in parliament, and Orban, who has boasted about building an “illiberal state.”
Parties from left to right joined forces in an effort to wrest control of Fidesz-held municipalities and prevent an electoral rout for the first time in almost a decade.
Polls had forecast only slight gains nationwide for the opposition outside the capital, but in another surprise it won 10 of 23 of Hungary’s main cities.
The vote was seen as a litmus test for its new strategy of cooperation.
“The win [in Budapest] was just the first step on the road to changing Hungary,” Karacsony said.
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