Will there be any debates, surprises, or scandalous videos? – What to expect – in five points

The campaign officially kicked off this past Saturday, February 12th, so what better way to start than by discussing the most important details to look out for in the coming weeks? Of course, the central question of the election is whether Fidesz–KDNP or the united opposition will win the election, whether Viktor Orbán or Péter Márki-Zay will be the next prime minister – obviously, this is what the campaigns of the two big coalitions will focus on. (Smaller parties such as Mi Hazánk [Our Homeland Movement] or the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party are not considered by the polls to have a realistic chance of winning the election.) With that said, countless factors can influence or modify the campaigns that the parties plan and implement. Let's take a look at said factors.

1. Will there be any surprising events?

A serious political party's campaign staff plans out its campaign point by point, day by day, and week by week. They select their advantageous issues, build political and communication campaigns around them, devote all their resources to running them and concentrate their political activity on them.

As the focal point of its campaign, Fidesz has put the continuation of what it believes to be a good and prosperous government for all ("Hungary is moving forward, not backward"). The party's communications regularly echo elements of its previous successful campaigns: cuts in utility costs, the struggle against migration, the fight against Brussels, and, of course, Fidesz's tried and true mudslinging against Ferenc Gyurcsány (the "mini Feri" campaign). At the same time, the government has also initiated a referendum on banning gender reassignment for children, but this has been conspicuously absent from Fidesz's campaign so far.

The campaign teams of the opposition coalition started working together a few weeks ago, and they want to project unity to the outside world ("In Unity for Hungary"). The opposition campaign set the ousting of Viktor Orbán as its focal point. Earlier, Péter Márki-Zay had also said that the election is essentially a referendum on whether or not Orbán will be the next prime minister.

The question for the coming weeks is, "with this backdrop in mind, will there be any surprises?" We'll be looking at each day's news from this perspective. We are thinking of such turns of events that a campaign staff or a candidate has to react to, but which do not fit into the logic of their campaign. Fidesz, for example, is understandably uncomfortable with the suspicion of corruption surrounding former State Secretary of Justice Pál Völner, because the millions he is suspected to have brought home in bags clearly undermine the message that all money goes to ordinary people. For the opposition, it is the news of their internal squabbles that is unpleasant, since it weakens the image that they are capable of leading this country instead of Fidesz.

In addition to their own campaign building, the political parties are also naturally looking for issues that undermine their opponents. At the beginning of the year, in one of the installments of Telex's Magyarázó video series, we listed such unpleasant topics could be: for Fidesz, it was the Pegasus issue and the Völner-Schadl case, and for the opposition, it was the City Hall issue and any case of internal conflict (list sharing). We'll keep a close eye on what turns of events will be a source of embarrassment for each campaign staff.

2. Will there be any scandalous videos?

During the 2019 municipal elections, the previously taboo topic of sex became a new development in Hungarian politics. Zsolt Borkai's Adriatic Sea sex video made a big splash in the campaign and stalled out Fidesz for days, but so did the sex video of Tamás Wittinghoff, Budaörs's opposition mayor. So the taboo was broken, and there has already been talk in Fidesz- and opposition circles that from now on, political campaigns would include discussion of politicians' scandalous sex lives.

This conclusion has only been reinforced by the fact that DK's Zsolt Gréczy resigned from his parliamentary seat at the end of 2019 after his intimate photos were made public, and then in the autumn of 2020, former Fidesz MEP József Szájer resigned before his gay sex orgy adventure was uncovered.

The question is whether such videos will surface during the present campaigns. There are several reasons why it can't be ruled out: a Facebook page titled The Devil's Advocate published an unsubstantiated insinuation about Judit Varga's private life in a December post, for which the Minister of Justice pressed charges. But whether or not promises were made, nothing was found in January. Another case: in January, RTL Klub reported that compromising footage had been found in the safe of György Schadl, a key figure in the Völner case. "A man and a woman engage in a sexual act on a bed next to a mirrored sliding-door wardrobe. The act is being photographed by another person, who is also visible in the recording. They are all naked." – was what was shown in the photos, according to the prosecution's summary. Apart from the pictures, the safe also contained printed messages and two DVDs on which the surname of a public figure was written.

The question is whether we will ever see these recordings, or whether they will be Simicska-like nuclear bombs that the opposition waited for with such anticipation but which never dropped. There's also the question of how such scandalous videos would now influence the election, assuming that they are capable of doing so.

3. Will there be any debates?

Quite early on, Péter Márki-Zay organized a campaign to challenge Viktor Orbán (whom he regularly refers to on his posters as the candidate for prime minister) to a debate. And in response, Fidesz came up with their billboard slogan rather promptly: according to Fidesz, it is Ferenc Gyurcsány calling the shots, and there is no point for Orbán to debate Péter Márki-Zay. Of course, there will be no Orbán-Gyurcsány debate for several reasons, as the DK president made this clear recently after quoting a Dakota proverb, but even from the other side, it is unthinkable that Orbán would sit down again with Gyurcsány under any circumstances. Debates between prime ministerial candidates were held between 1998 and 2006, and we are less likely to see such a one-on-one debate in this campaign because, practically speaking, Viktor Orbán can only lose from it. As such, one can hardly imagine a scenario in which he would want to engage in such a verbal duel.

With that said, the debate question should also be looked at in a broader sense: whether there will be public debates between candidates in a particular policy area or at the constituency level, where differing political visions openly clash and are challenged. It's cliché to say that these debates are good for democracy because they allow voters to see and hear first-hand what the candidates' policies are – and they can tell straight away if a given claim is false (the opponent would be the first to point it out).

As of now, at the start of the campaign, there is no sign that there will be public debates on public policy issues that affect us all, such as taxation, foreign relations, education, healthcare, energy policy, globalization, or even climate change. Yet (okay, I'll play naive) it would be worthwhile to know the pros and cons of each position. The reason why there is little chance of this is that when Telex asked Fidesz about their program, the party curtly referred back to Viktor Orbán's speech at the autumn congress.

Constituency debates are more likely, since in a swing constituency it may be easier for both sides to see a public debate as a way to win votes or at least unsettle the opposing party's voters. For example, in the Budapest constituency of Hegyvidék, both Fidesz's Balázs Fürjes and opposition's Miklós Hajnal have expressed their openness to it, and even Gergő Kovács of the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party could join in.

4. Will there be any fake political parties?

Since the new electoral law came into force in 2013, a question that keeps coming up is to what extent so-called "fake parties" can influence outcomes. This is the term used to describe parties that are running in the election for reasons other than political ones, such as to help themselves to hefty campaign subsidies or simply to cause confusion. The existence of fake parties has been made possible by the introduction of the multiple nomination system, which means that a voter can offer their signature to more than one candidate. Thus, all that fake parties had to do was obtain or simply buy signatures in order to put up a candidate – meanwhile, voter signatures were being forged without their knowledge. (Back in 2018, I spoke to a man who organized several fake parties, and he said the going rate was 1000 forints [~ 3 euros] for eight names.)

You may recall that in both the 2014 and 2018 elections, the ballot paper was full of party names that even politically informed people hadn't seen before or since.

The rules have been tightened since then, but the question is to what extent this will keep profiteers at bay. And, of course, political parties à la Krisztián Berki also fall into this category of fake parties, i.e. running as an opposition candidate in order to hurt the opposition. We have seen countless examples of the opposition being divided. The phenomenon has been named after the celebrity-turned mayoral candidate, Krisztián Berki, who challenged Gergely Karácsony in particular during the campaign and subsequently failed to get even enough votes that he needed to be nominated in the first place. During the campaign, it will be worth keeping an eye out for what kinds of activists there will be in the streets and stairwells. From this point of view, one big question mark is the activity and politics of György Gattyán's party.

5. Will any influence be exerted from abroad?

In my analysis earlier this year, I already mentioned the need to pay attention to foreign influences in this domestic political event. Viktor Orbán himself has repeatedly said that he fears foreign interference in Hungary's elections, and most recently this week Gergely Gulyás stated that he does not rule out the possibility of foreign interference in the outcome of the April parliamentary elections. No specific details of this have been shared yet, nor have we seen any examples of it firsthand.
At the same time, in the coming weeks, it will be worth watching to see whether there will be any international developments that could have an impact on the decisions and behavior of Hungarian voters. Next week, the Court of Justice of the European Union will decide on the rule of law mechanism – a decision predicted to be negative for Orbán's party based on the current prognosis – and this could lead to an EU trial. The question is whether this will affect anyone's vote.

But to take another example, Hungary's elections would certainly be affected if war broke out in neighboring Ukraine. After all, in times of war, there is automatically a greater desire for security and stability, which usually favors those in power.

So, as we've outlined above, these are the questions to keep an eye on while browsing the news in the coming period. In our next installment, a week from now, we will report back on the key takeaways from the campaign launch.