BUDAPEST, Hungary — The liberal mayor of Hungary’s capital announced Saturday that he will enter a primary race that will decide a candidate to face nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban in elections next year.
In a video posted on Face-book, Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony said he would accept the nomination of his party and run in a two-round primary in September and October as part of a six-party opposition coalition that seeks to unseat the governing Fidesz party.
Karacsony, 45, was elected mayor of Budapest in 2019 as part of an effort by the six opposition parties to join forces against Orban’s right-wing Fidesz, which has governed Hungary with a two-thirds parliamentary majority since 2010.
Those municipal elections led to major losses for Fidesz in many of Hungary’s cities, and the same six parties plan a repeat of their unity strategy in national elections next spring.
The opposition coalition contains Greens, Socialists and centrist liberals, but it has also found common cause with the right-wing Jobbik party, which since 2018 has sought to break ties with its radical, antisemitic past and become a center-right people’s party.
Critics of Hungary’s government accuse Orban of clamping down on media and judicial freedom, unilaterally writing a new constitution and making unfair changes to election laws. But Orban asserts that Hungary is pursuing an innovative experiment in what he calls “illiberal democracy,” based on Christian conservatism and a firm rejection of immigration.
An election monitoring delegation from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe found in 2018 that “intimidating and xenophobic rhetoric, media bias and opaque campaign financing” had made elections that year unfair, but it still characterized the voting process as free.
Hungary’s opposition parties argue that electoral changes have meant that coordinating their efforts into a single bloc against Fidesz is the only means to unseat the party.