Hungary's new government faces first test in local election

Oct 3, 2010, 17:30 GMT

Budapest - Hungarians headed to polls in local elections on Sunday morning as Prime Minister Viktor Orban's centre-right Fidesz party faced the voters for the first time since taking office in the spring.

Although Hungarian election law forbids the publication of exit poll results while voting is ongoing, earlier opinion polls had suggested that Fidesz was on track to repeat the landslide nationwide victory it won in April's general elections.

The general feeling of inevitability was perhaps reflected in the turnout: with nine hours of voting over and only four to go, only just over 31 per cent of the electorate had turned out to cast a vote.

The country of 10 million must elect mayors and local councils in 3,176 municipalities, 19 counties, and the capital Budapest with its 23 districts and an overall city council.

The post of mayor of Budapest is one of the highest profile political jobs in the country, and recent polls indicated that the Fidesz-backed Istvan Tarlos is favourite to replace the outgoing liberal mayor Gabor Demszky.

Demszky, a former anti-communist dissident, has held the position continuously since the first free elections in 1990.

However, he chose not to run for a sixth term amid a nationwide swing to the right which saw his former party, the Alliance of Free Democrats, sink without trace in the general elections.

Budapest, home to almost one in five Hungarians, contains some of the few remaining strongholds of support for the Socialist Party, which secured only 59 out of 386 seats in parliament in April after eight years in government.

The Socialist mayoral candidate, Csaba Horvath, has called on voters to make the capital a 'last bastion of freedom' in a country dominated by Fidesz.

The far-right party Jobbik, which came in a close third in April, winning 47 parliamentary seats, went into the local elections seeking to increase its presence on the Hungarian political scene.

The nationalist party's anti-Roma stance and campaign against what it calls 'Gypsy crime' has earned it considerable support, particularly in the rural north east, which has the highest concentration of Hungary's largest ethnic minority.

A small newcomer green party, LMP, holds 16 seats in parliament and has said that its realistic ambition in Budapest, where its support is strongest, is to prevent the governing Fidesz winning an outright majority on the city council.