Out of nowhere: Viktor Orbán’s new challenger

Hungarian politics has a lot to offer: sex tapes, offshore bank accounts, police-dodging MEPs hanging off drainpipes, supposedly left-wing parties cheerfully backing anti-Semitic parliamentary candidates. Nevertheless, most observers would admit that there has been stagnation in the past few years. Hungary’s politics have become a stale exchange of insults between familiar faces.

Thank goodness, then, for Péter Márki-Zay, who has opened a window and let in some fresh air. He has been chosen by the opposition to the government as their candidate for prime minister in next year’s general election. And that means practically all the opposition parties in the Hungarian parliament working together. It’s like the Labour party teaming up with the Liberals, Ukip, the Greens, the SNP and the Official Monster Raving Loony Party to unseat Boris.

The crushing two-thirds majority that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party has enjoyed in parliament for nearly 12 years has created some unusual bedfellows. You have former communists in league with the far-right (although the far-right party is led by someone whose relatives were in Auschwitz — you just can’t top Hungarian politics for the peculiar).

It can’t be emphasised enough the extent to which Márki–Zay has come out of nowhere, politically and geographically. In 2018, he decided to stand for mayor in his home town of Hódmezóvásárhely, as an independent. Hódmezóvásárhely is a small place (under 50,000 inhabitants), a satellite of the big southern city Szeged. Jokingly (I assume) referred to in the past as the ‘peasant Paris’, the town was seen as the fiefdom of one of Fidesz’s big beasts, János Lázár. It had been under Fidesz control since the first democratic elections in 1990.

What happened in Hódmezóvásárhelyis very instructive. Márki-Zay portrayed himself as a concerned local citizen rather than as a politician — a word that in Hungary has generally become synonymous with ‘thief’.