Szentkirályi appointed her campaign manager, Vitézy also to run for mayor of Budapest

Today, Alexandra Szentkirályi, Fidesz's candidate for mayor, asked me to manage her campaign. I gladly accepted the offer.

With this caption, Balázs Hidvéghi, Fidesz MEP, posted a joint photo with Alexandra Szentkirályi yesterday.

Commenting on his new mandate, the politician said, “We need change not only in Brussels but also in Budapest!” The 53-year-old politician has been a member of Fidesz since 1989, working as an advisor to József Szájer and as the party's communications director.

For a long time, Fidesz was unsure who it would name as its candidate for Budapest's mayor, and it was only 87 days before the election that Szentkirályi's candidacy became official. The government was confident that Szentkirályi was a well-known, experienced candidate, with personal ties to the government's inner circles, who was the spokesperson of the government between 2020 and 2024.

However, she began her campaign in a rather colourless way, both visually and in terms of content, with clichéd texts denouncing the opposition leader Ferenc Gyurcsány.

Szentkirályi said on her Facebook page that she accepts the invitation because she thinks it is time to replace the “outdated record.”

"The nation's capital deserves a mayor who does not fight the government, but works together with the government for the prosperity of the people of Budapest."

– she said on Friday. According to her, the stakes of the June elections are that Budapest should be about the interests of Budapest citizens instead of Gyurcsány's interests.

Szentkirályi's name has been circulating as a possible candidate for many months, but she always replied that she understood the speculation about candidates, and that she herself was concentrating on her job as government spokesperson.

On Tuesday, former Transport Secretary Dávid Vitézy also announced in a video that he will run as a candidate for mayor in the June municipal elections. He said there are five major problems facing Budapest.

• There is not enough affordable housing and rents are expensive.
  
• Public transport from the outer districts and the agglomeration is not good enough, which is why there is so much congestion and why the air is bad.
  
• The quality of health care is getting worse, hospitals are outdated and run-down, there are long waiting times and entire wards are closing due to a lack of staff.
  
• Public spaces are not cosy enough, there is not enough green space and pedestrian streets.
  
• Budapest beyond the ring road, where three-quarters of Budapest residents live, has been abandoned, with all development resources going to the touristic downtown.

According to Vitézy, the problems have not been solved so far because the capital has become a party-political battlefield, where every issue is permeated by the war between the two political sides.

“While the government is stopping important developments in Budapest and diverting resources, the city government is playing the role of victim and hesitating even when it has every opportunity to move forward decisively” – he said in his video. He said that the stakes of the mayoral election are whether there will be real urban development in Budapest instead of party-political battles.

He added that:

"We have concrete plans for further development of the city, new parks and public spaces, renewal of the suburban trains and railways, new tram lines, and affordable housing to replace brownfield sites."

Last summer and autumn, Vitézy's name was first circulated as a possible Fidesz candidate for mayor, but he said at the time that he had not considered such a possibility and was not thinking about becoming mayor. He told Telex in January this year that Fidesz had not approached him, even informally.

Vitézy has been hinting at his candidacy for months, saying in all his interviews that although he had been persuaded by many, he had not yet made up his mind and was asking for time. But in the meantime, he went on a media tour, fired up his Facebook page and took a swipe at the current mayor, Gergely Karácsony.

Besides Szentkirályi, the candidate of the ruling party Fidesz, Vitézy will have to face Gergely Karácsony, whose re-election is supported by the opposition parties DK-Momentum-MSZP-Párbeszéd. Meanwhile, Jobbik-Conservatives are backing Koloman Brenner and far-right Mi Hazánk is backing András Grundtner.