Long election season ends with Fidesz-KDNP's victory at the nationwide local elections yesterday

HUNGARY - In Brief 13 Oct 2014 by Istvan Racz

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Fact: The governing Fidesz-KDNP won nationwide local elections with a convincing margin yesterday. This vote was a mirror image of the parliamentary election in April, in so far as in both cases, Fidesz-KDNP's results were moderately worse than four years ago, but only compared to their very strong results in 2010. In Budapest, Fidesz won 49% of the vote for the general mayor's position (53.5% in 2010), against 36% collected by the centre-left opposition's common candidate (29.5% in 2010). In addition, Fidesz won mayoral votes in 17 out of the total 23 districts of Budapest (19 in 2010) and the mayoral votes in 20 out of the total 23 major cities outside Budapest (22 in 2010). Finally, Fidesz won the majority in the local governments of all 19 regions (the same as in 2010). Significance: The local elections came out largely as expected, but it still removed a limited amount of uncertainty that Fidesz-KDNP's dominance in domestic politics could be broken, even if only partially. An almost year-long political campaign period (for the parliamentary, the EU and the local elections) has now ended. This increases the government's freedom of policy formulation for a longer while, given that there are no scheduled popular votes coming up in the next 3.5 years. In addition, Fidesz has got a strong electoral approval at all three elections this year, further raising the party's self-confidence. In terms of upcoming policy signals, the next scheduled event will be the delivery by the government of its draft 2015 budget by 31 October. The big question around the draft is how much it will reflect economy minister Varga's recent claim about government plans to cut the general govern...