- Hungarian Fidesz expects extremely close parliamentary elections in April and is stepping up communication.
- The ruling party considers the final pre-election weeks to be crucial for maintaining power.
- Fidesz uses security and foreign policy issues to mobilize its voters.
- Péter Magyar purposefully moves the campaign to domestic political issues and avoids pitfalls.
From the actions of the Hungarian government party Fidesz, it can be read that it is aware that the parliamentary elections in April will be very close and heated. Therefore, he considers it necessary to take radical communication steps that have not been necessary so far. In an interview with the Budapest correspondent TASR, the director of the Institute Vision Politics Budapest stated this, political scientist Gábor Török.
According to him, all the actions of the ruling party, such as the seizure of two Ukrainian vehicles carrying millions in cash and gold, harsh messages from Kyiv regarding the blocking of the Druzhba oil pipeline, the extension of the state of crisis for migration, the visit of the head of Hungarian diplomacy, Péter Szijjártó, to Moscow and many others, they testify that Fidesz perceives the remaining time until the parliamentary elections as crucial from the point of view of maintaining power after the elections.
The analyst does not consider the fact that the chairman of the non-parliamentary opposition party, Péter Magyar, took the side of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán after the recent statements of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi against him.
“Magyar has his own strategy, he tries to use his own topics in the campaign, he goes around the regions of the country and talks about internal political issues and tries to avoid the traps prepared for him by Fidesz. It is clear that he is not comfortable when foreign policy topics are brought up, he prefers to focus on his own topics, to which he tries to direct political communication, and he does it very purposefully.” Turkish by const.
As the political scientist underlined, the bigger surprise for him is the fact that the chairman of the TISZA party was able to intensively build a political force “from scratch” in two years, which has a chance of electoral success.
Society is quite upset in this election campaign, at the same time thanks to the politics of the past years (TASR note: Fidesz has been in power for 16 years) a strongly polarized Hungarian society can be perceived, in which there is a very weak sensitivity to perceive the messages of the opposite party, Török portrayed the situation 33 days before the elections
“This is also why I believe that there is no chance of radical change in the coming weeks before the elections, because simply the overwhelming majority of society has already decided who they will vote for and there is no penetration between the ‘bubbles’ of political camps. There will still be all kinds of ‘fireworks’ in the coming five weeks, because they are necessary, but their impact will be very limited, because the majority of voters have already decided who they will vote for a long time ago, and no event will change that.” concluded the director of the Institute Vision Politics Budapest.
