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Hungary’s Opposition Sees Hope After Orban’s Candidate Falls

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary dismissed the opposition in a speech last week, but then his party’s candidate lost a local election.Credit...Attila Kisbenedek/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

LONDON — Just over a week ago, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, painted a sorry picture of the opposition he is about to face in general elections in April.

“Today our political opponents in Hungary are in a hopeless situation,” Mr. Orban told a crowd of supporters in his annual state of the nation address. He described them as hapless, hateful and isolated people who refused to support policies in the national interest and were letting the country down.

Opinion polls suggested that Mr. Orban was right on one score: no candidate in the country’s fragmented opposition had a realistic chance of challenging him and his brand of governing, which many say has eroded democracy, with policies increasingly seen to be threatening other parts of the European Union.

But a surprise election result on Sunday has given the opposition at least a glimmer of hope. Mr. Orban’s governing Fidesz party suffered a defeat in the southern city of Hodmezovasarhely (pronounced HOD-may-zur-vash-ar-hay), the hometown of the prime minister’s chief of staff and a traditional Fidesz stronghold, when the candidate supported by an alliance of opposition parties was elected mayor.

The opposition victory “gave hope not just to locals but the entire country,” the winning candidate, Peter Marki-Zay, said in a speech on Sunday night. “The hope that contrary to the lies, Fidesz can be defeated.”

Mr. Marki-Zay directed his speech well beyond his closest supporters crowded into a small restaurant. He spoke to people holding up cellphones and to television cameras broadcasting live to the rest of the country.

“There’s a mood like there was in 1989, in Hodmezovasarhely,” he said, “and there’s a mood for a change of regime in the country.”

Commentators on Monday portrayed the result as a game-changing moment that showed that by uniting behind candidates, the opposition could win even in the most government-friendly areas.

Even before the election, the conservative weekly newsmagazine Heti Valasz ran a cover story with pictures of Mr. Marki-Zay and Janos Lazar, Mr. Orban’s chief of staff (not the defeated candidate), with the headline “Dress Rehearsal.”

Balint Ablonczy, who followed the election for the magazine, said that the opposition had grown used to a long string of Fidesz victories in the past decade, and that this victory was a cause for optimism for it.

Hodmezovasarhely in many ways stands for both the successes and failures of nearly eight years of governments led by Mr. Orban. The city, widely seen as loyal to prime minister, has benefited under the tutelage of Mr. Lazar, the chief of staff and a former mayor, who continued to sit in on town hall meetings. Its infrastructure was improved and planning started on a light-rail line to connect Hodmezovasarhely to the nearby city of Szeged, where many residents commute to work.

But the local Fidesz leadership faced accusations of cronyism, often in the distribution of European Union funding, that, as in the rest of the country, have grown louder.

Earlier this year the European Anti-Fraud Office announced that it was investigating almost three dozen public lighting projects in Hungary run by a company once controlled by Mr. Orban’s son-in-law. The first such project was completed in Hodmezovasarhely, and news reports, which have suggested that the project was a pilot for later ones, described some of the practices involved as comparable to those used by organized crime.

Such accusations, which the leadership denied, appeared to have helped the winning candidate, who mobilized new voters to go to the ballots.

“Corruption is like slow poison,” said Robert Laszlo, a researcher who specializes in elections at Political Capital, an independent think tank in Budapest, the capital. “People go along with it for a while, but there is a level beyond which people have had enough, when it’s really obvious.”

Winning in a place like Hodmezovasarhely could be a catalyst for the opposition. Although the restructuring of Hungary’s election system has helped Mr. Orban remain in power, Mr. Laszlo pointed out that Fidesz and the Christian Democratic People’s Party, its coalition partner, received a smaller share of the vote than the opposition in the last general election in 2014.

On Monday, the news media began to speculate about what deals a reinvigorated opposition could make. But analysts warned that a victory in one city did not guarantee success in nationwide elections.

“This candidate fit the city very well,” said Mr. Ablonczy, the Heti Valasz journalist. “This is a conservative Catholic with seven children, who had the support of the entire opposition — well there certainly won’t be another candidate like this.”

Asked about the result on Monday, Mr. Orban told the hvg.hu news website that “we have to work with doubled energy.”

“This is the lesson, and we will work on this,” he said.

Mr. Orban repeated his commitment to combat what his government has called the “Soros Plan,” under which, Mr. Orban contends, the Hungarian-American financier George Soros is trying to persuade European Union leaders to open up their borders to accept millions of more migrants.

“For me the stakes of the election have not changed,” Mr. Orban said. “It’s about one thing: whether we become a country of immigration as a result of the election or not.”

To Mr. Laszlo, the analyst, the opposition’s challenge is to offer a compelling agenda, not just a promise to oust Mr. Orban.

“It would be important for them to offer an alternative and not just communicate about electoral strategy,” he said.

Follow Palko Karasz on Twitter: @karaszpalko.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Victory in a Mayor’s Race in Hungary Gives Opposition Parties a Glimmer of Hope. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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