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Hungary's new government faces first test in local election
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 03 - 10 - 2010


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, according to dpa.
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.


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