Questions Mount Over the Lack of a Budapest Mayor Challenger

In 2019 the candidate of the joint opposition has defeated the ruling mayor of Budapest, István Tarlós in the municipal elections. The victory of the liberal politician was hailed by the opposition and its international allies as the beginning of the end to the governing party, Fidesz’s dominance in the country’s municipalities. This had turned out to be a false assumption, but six months before the municipal elections, those dissatisfied with Gergely Karácsony’s performance are still asking: where is our candidate?

Four year after liberal Gergely Karácsony’s take-over of the Budapest mayor’s post, the governing parties have still not appointed their candidate for the office. The elections are due in June, and it is incomprehensible that the name of his potential challenger, be it from the governing parties or an independent one with government support, is still unknown. How is anyone going to build support withing such a short time-frame among the capital’s very independent-minded citizens in order to successfully challenge the current chief mayor, remains an ever deepening mystery.

Theories are rising among conservative circles dissatisfied with Mayor Karácsony’s increasingly erratic and scandal-ridden rule as to why would the government put itself into a clearly disadvantaged position regarding such a crucial post. The nationalist Our Homeland party (Mi Hazánk) has already presented their candidate, András Grundtner for the post, but he is very unlikely to garner the support of Budapest’s sizeable national-conservative voter base. Although names are circulating in the media about who they think could enter the race in the orange colors of the governing Fidesz, the names are purely speculative, hence we are not going to repeat them here.

In the meantime the current mayor Gergely Karácsony is involved in one scandal after another. The HUF 200 billion surplus (EUR 500 mil.) that his predecessor István Tarlós has left in the capital’s coffers has been turned into a negative balance, and despite record takings from taxes the capital is facing insolvency. His embarrassing lack of knowledge of foreign languages, his massive foreign funding scandal or his pointless war on drivers is setting a comfortable battlefield for a potential challenger, if there was one. Reportedly, Karácsony is determined to run for the office again, and his blunders are unlikely to deter his voter base who see him as a cool anti-government agent provocateur, hitting all the right notes with impressionable young voters keen to see their mayor involved in fashionable causes, such as western style environmental demagogy, gender politics and social virtue-signalling.

Dissatisfaction with the lack of a national-conservative challenger is rising though. This sentiment is exacerbated by the fact, that some of the candidates for the posts of separate Budapest districts are regarded as uncharismatic and in the past four years have been missing in action. In an article in the conservative news portal Mandiner, Milán Constantinovits, a researches from the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) has put it very eloquently: “change is only possible with an early, professionally prepared, serious alternative. Thus, if the government side were to take back the capital, it would be very timely to see a counter-candidate with a program. Otherwise Budapest’s agony is bound to continue”.

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