no MMA!

BUDAPEST — THE most visible poster on the streets here is not the one advertising the Deep Purple concert at the Papp Laszlo Sportarena. And it’s not the one for “Balkan Kobra,” a theatrical comedy featuring a stubbly hero sporting tight jeans and a Kalashnikov. And it’s definitely not the one for the Budapest Dance Festival.

Instead, it’s the one that shows three or four guys wearing neckties standing in a police lineup, alongside a clown. In one of the more ubiquitous versions of the poster, two of the men are former left-wing prime ministers of Hungary. A third is Attila Mesterhazy, president of the country’s Socialist Party and a current candidate for prime minister in the coming election in April. The fourth is Miklos Hagyo, the former left-wing deputy mayor of Budapest, who is currently the subject of a corruption trial.

The men, and the clown, appear above the slogan “They Don’t Deserve Another Chance.”

Given that political advertising has been sharply and abruptly curtailed by Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz Party, the pre-eminence of a political ad — on billboards, lampposts and the sides of buses — might seem surprising. But Fidesz, which has been widely criticized as taking Hungary in an autocratic direction since taking power in 2010, has become adept at controlling the message. It has rewritten the state’s Constitution, come to dominate all branches of government and held increasing sway over the news media. Meanwhile, according to the International Monetary Fund, Hungary’s economic output is not expected to return to 2008 levels until 2017.

Fidesz has reshaped the country’s rules for political advertising. Commercial television stations are barred from charging money for political advertising, which has largely driven political ads off commercial TV. That leaves state-owned stations, which are restricted to eight hours of political advertising over the 50 days of the official campaign. In Budapest, outdoor advertising on billboards, lampposts and other areas has also been sharply restricted.

The outdoor-advertising restriction, however, does not apply to “independent” groups, notably the pro-Orban Civil Union Forum, which has been partly funded in the past by a Fidesz foundation and is behind the clown ad. The group has plastered the ad all over the capital and throughout the country.

more: TheNewYorkTimes

This is the first of a five-part series from my Princeton colleague Kim Lane Scheppele, head of the Law and Public Affairs Program.

Hungary: An Election in Question
Part I: The Political Landscape

Kim Lane Scheppele
Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton
24 February 2014

Hungary’s parliamentary elections will be held on 6 April. And it is already clear who will win.

Unless something truly surprising occurs, the governing party Fidesz is headed to victory. The only uncertainty is whether it will again win two-thirds of the parliamentary seats, a result that would continue to allow it to change the constitution at will.

Fidesz won the last elections in 2010 fair and square. But this time the election is unlikely to be judged so favorably. The whole election framework – the laws, the institutions and even the new electorate – favors Fidesz because the governing party has used its four years in office with its two-thirds majority in the parliament to redesign every aspect of the electoral system to its advantage.

Fidesz also overwhelmingly dominates the offline media and has closed off almost all avenues through which opposition parties can reach the electorate. New decrees from local Fidesz-affiliated officials around the country and misleading instructions from election officials are creating last-minute campaign obstacles that put the opposition even more on the wrong foot.

Under the new election framework, the allied opposition parties cannot win a parliamentary majority, even if they gain more votes than the governing party. Simultaneously, the changes also make it nearly inevitable that the governing party will keep its two-thirds parliamentary majority even if it gets less than half of the overall vote.

Róbert László of the Political Capital think tank in Budapest shows how Fidesz can win a two-thirds majority with less than half of the party-list vote. His model also predicts that a united center-left opposition would need about 6% more votes than Fidesz to win a simple majority in the parliament.

Central European University Professor Gábor Tóka estimates that, under the new system, a united center-left opposition might get 8% fewer parliamentary seats than Fidesz if both got an equal share of the votes.

Political Capital’s “mandate calculator” permits everyone to try out different models and different assumptions. We tried it here in Princeton and, depending on the assumptions one makes about the nature and shape of the opposition, Fidesz could get its two-thirds majority in parliament pretty easily with only 48% of the vote if the other parties perform as polls indicate they would if the election were held now. If the foreign votes split 85/15 for Fidesz (not unreasonable for reasons I will explain), Fidesz could get its two-thirds with only 44%. If Fidesz wins by the same margin it won last time, with 53% of the party-list vote, it would get 76% of the seats in the parliament instead of the 68% it won under the old system.

In short, Fidesz has designed the election to allow itself to win big, even without majority support. Or, to put it differently, Fidesz has designed the election so that the opposition loses even if it wins.

more: Krugman.blog.nytimes

The Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party, or MKKP, is doggedly seeking to enter the upcoming parliamentary elections. It wants the constitutional court to overrule the refusal of the lower courts to recognize it as an official political party.

MKKP is campaigning with promises of eternal life and free beer for everyone. Hungary is mired in the election campaign season and parties are seeking activists. Not MKKP — it is looking for ‘passivists.’

While the governing Fidesz party is comfortably leading the opinion polls just five weeks ahead of the elections on the back of its cuts to household utility prices, the MKKP says it would raise them. When Hungary recently signed an agreement with Moscow about Russia expanding the country’s only nuclear plant while also providing a massive loan for Hungary, the MKKP said Hungary should adopt the Russian ruble–instead of the euro.

If the MKKP wins, Hungary will exit the European Union and then start negotiations with the bloc about the EU joining Hungary, the MKKP said, poking fun at Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s frequent clashes with Brussels over his often out-of-the-ordinary policies.

The aim of MKKP’s absurd election promises is to call voters’ attention to that the tail–in this case: politicians are wagging the dog–the voters.

more: Wall Street Journal blog