Hungary’s nationalist prime minister Viktor Orbán has suffered his first electoral blow since coming to power in 2010, with an opposition candidate scoring a shock win in the Budapest mayoral race.
The victory was “historic”, said the pro-European centre-left challenger Gergely Karácsony, 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% of the vote ahead of the incumbent Istvan Tarlos on around 44%, with 82% of votes counted.
In office since 2010, the 71-year-old Tarlos, who is backed by Orbán’s right-wing Fidesz party, congratulated the new mayor by phone, Karácsony 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 previous election five years ago. “Budapest will be green and free, we will bring it back to Europe.”
Karácsony had compared the Budapest race to the Istanbul mayoral election in March, in which the candidate of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s party was defeated by the opposition challenger.
“Istanbul voted against an aggressive illiberal power in many ways similar to Orbán’s regime,” Karácsony said before the vote.
Since 2010, Orbán has concentrated power and media organs in his hands, and regularly clashed with Brussels over migration and rule-of-law issues. He has also cruised to consecutive landslide victories at the polls, partly due to electoral rule changes he oversaw.
Fidesz had run a highly negative campaign attacking Karácsony for an allegedly pro-migration stance and his “unsuitability” for the job, and Orbán had threatened to withhold cooperation from municipalities lost by his party.
The favourite in the run-up to the vote, Tarlos and Fidesz, which brands itself as Christian-conservatve, 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,” Orbán told supporters at a rally.
The elections were seen as a rare chance for the beleaguered opposition to roll back the power of Fidesz, which also hold a supermajority in parliament, and Orbán 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. In many municipalities just one opposition challenger lined up against Fidesz.
Polls had still 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, which could offer a route to mount a serious challenge to Orbán at the next general election in 2022.
“The win [in Budapest] was just the first step on the road to changing Hungary,” said Karácsony.
Andras Biro-Nagy, an analyst with Policy Solutions, said: “It proves that the new strategy of opposition cooperation works, it was its best result in years. Budapest is the big prize, but the breakthrough in numerous provincial cities is at least as important.
“It is the first crack in the Orbán system, and it seems guaranteed that the strategy will continue for 2022,” he said.
