Hungary’s opposition parties will join forces to try to defeat Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party at the next general election. In a statement released on Thursday night, the parties said they had “heard the voice of the electorate and have started consultations on preparations for the 2022 parliamentary elections.”

“I think it was high time the opposition parties declared their intention to join forces, this was actually long expected by the voting public. It is an important and reassuring message to the voters,” political scientist Zoltan Lakner told BIRN.

The presidents of the opposition parties – including the liberal Democratic Coalition, the Socialists, the young emerging Momentum, the leftist-liberal Dialogue, the greenish LMP and the former radical rightist Jobbik – have agreed to nominate only one candidate in each of the 106 individual constituencies. According to Hungarian electoral law, 106 of the 199 MPs are elected directly, while 93 are delegated from party lists. It is the individual constituencies that have been key to Fidesz’s landslide victories since 2010.

If the opposition parties do manage to defeat Fidesz in 2022, they would govern together on the basis of a previously agreed programme and principles, the statement laid out. The parties said they would work out the details later, but Lakner pointed out it might not be as big a challenge as it first appears, as the 2018 election programmes of most of the opposition parties were little different.

First test, mixed history

The newfound coalition will soon face its first test: on October 11, an early election will be held in a rural constituency in north-east Hungary, where Fidesz unexpectedly lost its MP because of a motorbike accident during the summer. The stakes are high: if the opposition manages to win this seat, Fidesz would be stripped of its two-thirds majority in the parliament. The joint candidate this time comes from the former radical party Jobbik, which used to be strong in the countryside due to its law-and-order program.

Looking at last year’s municipal elections gives a taste of what might be possible if the opposition can successfully join forces. In some bigger cities and in Budapest, they managed to defeat the government candidate – but in rural communities they had much less success.

“After the municipal elections, it has become crystal clear to everybody that the only chance to change the government in Hungary is if the whole opposition joins forces,” Lakner explained, though added that the current statement still falls short of an agreement about a joint party list and a joint prime ministerial candidate, so there is still some way to go for the opposition.

Experience shows that governing in a very ‘colourful’ coalition is rarely smooth: the case of Göd, a city of 18,000 close to Budapest, is the government’s trump card in its bid to convince the electorate such an opposition coalition would be a disaster.

From last October, Göd was governed by a rainbow coalition of the liberal Democratic Coalition, greenish LMP and Momentum, led by the 34-year-old mayor, Csaba Balogh, from the Momentum party. But things quickly got out of hand: the city council accused the mayor of not cooperating with other members, taking decisions on his own, and finally the city council disintegrated just eight months after being elected. The party presidents of the Democratic Coalition and Momentum personally tried to smooth over relations, but the picture is not very reassuring.

Göd awful

The story hit the headlines because Göd is a prime investment zone in Hungary. The South Korean company Samsung is constructing a 1.4-billion-euro factory to manufacture electric car batteries on the outskirts of the city. Mayor Balogh was elected on a ticket of challenging the investment and demanding clear environmental guarantees from Samsung. The public of Göd had also voiced concerns about the noise and the dirt from the construction and storing of hazardous material.

The government feared losing the investment and jumped in, declaring the site to be a special economic zone, thus stripping the city council of any right to intervene in the construction of Central Europe’s largest electric battery factory. Consequently, Göd lost one-third of its tax revenues as taxes were all redirected to the county level, but must bear the consequences of the investment. The debate was instrumental in dividing the city council – a divide-and-rule tactic Fidesz will surely try emulate in an election against a united opposition.

“I think Göd is really an extreme case and should not be taken as a typical scenario,” Lakner explained. “Obviously there are political differences and clashes in some municipalities, but this is not a problem. We have simply got used to living in a centrally controlled and managed system over the last ten years. For a democracy, this a toxic situation. Political parties and their voters must learn to accept political debates as part of the political culture. This is also the price to be paid for a coalition government.”