Hungary Political Briefing: in the AFTERMATH of the MARCH DECISION of the EUROPEAN PEOPLE’S PARTY Csaba Moldicz

ISSN: 2560-1601

Vol. 17, No. 1 (HU)

April 2019

Hungary political briefing: IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE MARCH DECISION OF THE EUROPEAN PEOPLE’S PARTY Csaba Moldicz

1052 Budapest Petőfi Sándor utca 11.

+36 1 5858 690 Kiadó: Kína-KKE Intézet Nonprofit Kft. [email protected] Szerkesztésért felelős személy: Chen Xin

Kiadásért felelős személy: Huang Ping china-cee.eu 2017/01

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE MARCH DECISION OF THE EUROPEAN PEOPLE’S PARTY

This political briefing focuses on the European Parliamentary election campaign of the Hungarian parties. This briefing starts with surveys that were completed after the decision of the European People’s Party on the Fidesz-KDNP’s membership in the party, and it later discusses the distinguishable campaign elements of the parties.

(1) The aftermath of the decision

The political debate in Hungary still revolves around the forthcoming European Parliament election and the motion to expel the Fidesz-KDNP from the European People’s Party. This latter story is obviously an integral part of the election campaign, as the rumors are about a new political formation in the EP, where political parties would have a tougher stand on migration. Though there are several assumptions in the media that the Fidesz-KDNP is set to join this group, however, the leadership of the Fidesz-KDNP reflected on the idea and said that the party still plans its future in the European People’s Party’s fraction. (At this point, it is worth adding, that the Fidesz-KDNP has time and maneuvering room to change its mind since the investigation into the party’s alleged infringement on democratic standards is supposed to be made public after the elections.)

The political briefing in the last months focused on the discussion around the motion that aimed at expelling the Fidesz-KDNP from the European People’s Party. The compromise made on the summit on 20 March was that the Fidesz-KDNP voluntarily suspended its membership in the European People’s Party, while they also agreed to appoint three elder statesmen to look into the question whether Hungary infringed the EPP’s democratic standards or not. Later, the three statesmen are going to prepare a report after May’s EP elections on this question. At this point, it was truly questionable what the effects will be on the political support of the party. The Nézőpont Institute carried out a survey in the last week of March. Based on the results, the Fidesz-KDNP improved its public political support by 2 percentage points, while the largest loss (since the last year's elections) is to be found at the Jobbik party, which lost 8 percentage points in the group of likely voters. It must be also added, that the political support of other opposition parties has been stagnating over the course of the last months. (See the results in Table 1).

Table 1. The number of seats in the European Parliament Parties Fidesz- Jobbik MSZP- DK LMP KDNP Párbeszéd The number of forecasted seats in the 14 3 2 1 1 European Parliament Percentages of the likely voters (%) 56 12 11 6 5 Source: Nézőpont Institute, March 2019 survey

These results corroborate our earlier statement, that the strategy to use foreign views on the state of the Hungarian democracy or the ruling party, usually backfires. This is not the strategy able to convince Hungarian voters to support opposition parties. Other ways, other strategies must be found if they wanted to attract new layers of voters.

Not only the Nézőpont Institute published its forecast on the European Parliament elections, but other pollsters did the same in March as well. The analysis of the Závecz Research is based on the point of reference that in recent weeks, broad layers of the voters started hesitating as for their choice in the elections since the percentage of irresolute voters grew to 36 percent in the entire population (March 2019). There is another difference regarding the forecasted public support of the parties: the Fidesz-KDNP has significantly (56-50 percent) lower shares here in this survey and the Jobbik’s and MSZP’s support was measured to be substantially higher.

Table 2. The number of seats in the European Parliament Parties Fidesz-KDNP Jobbik MSZP- DK Momentum Párbeszéd The number of 12 3 3 2 1 forecasted seats in the European Parliament Percentages of 50 14 13 9 5 the likely voters (%) Source: Závecz Research

(2) The European Parliamentary election campaign in Hungary.

It is very clear that the European Parliamentary election campaign is about to intensify, the real campaign is only to come. The ruling party is to hold this campaign opening event in Budapest this weekend. According to the information of the newspaper Magyar Nemzet, the Fidesz-KDNP campaign is to be built around the topics: national sovereignty, Christian culture, the reform of the EU institutions and the migration policy.

This week, the leader of the MSZP, Mr. Tóth told the media, that they’ll send a campaign bus on a round tour in the country. The bus tour is to cover 6.000-7.000 kilometers and visit more than 100 places to promote their EP program “Homeland, Love, Europe”. The program includes the following goals: 236.000 HUF minimum wage, 93.000 HUF minimum pension, and 47.000 HUF minimum family allowance1. The reaction of the Fidesz-KDNP was to remind the voters that these parties always voted for migration friendly measures and they will continue this programme in the European Parliament.

The DK will open its EP election campaign end of next week. The top candidate of the DK told the press the main points of their programme. The 3 points include the following proposed steps:

- The introduction of the European family allowance. According to the plans of the party, the EU family allowance would complement the already existing national family allowances and not replace them. The candidate argues that the ruling party in Hungary betrayed Hungarian families. - The introduction of the European minimum wage and minimum pension. She argued, that not a European. but human minimum can be achieved this way. - The introduction of a new EU level tax levied upon the multinational companies. The candidate underlined these revenues could finance the two former proposals. She added the EU could have larger leverage on these firms when negotiating the terms of the new tax form.

Though these ideas are alluring, they are flawed in many ways. As for the European family allowance, it must be clear that though the Hungarian family allowance has not been raised but other forms of family support have been created since 2010. Ultimately the public spending on family benefits (in terms of GDP) is significantly higher in Hungary (2.96 percent in 2015) than the group of OECD countries (1.97 percent in 2015). 2 The European minimum wage and minimum pension is again a very attractive idea, though there are many questions around that. But the most significant contra-argument is that wage difference between Hungary and the West European countries are still one of the key competitiveness factors of the Hungarian economy. The minimum pension might be financed by the proposed tax, but not the minimum wages. If the Hungarian firms are not able to generate the profits to pay these wages, those businesses will go bankrupt and lay off the employees. Giving up on competitiveness

1 The HUF/EURO exchange was around 320 April 5 2019. 2 These are the latest data of the OECD, since then the Hungarian spending in family benefits grew significantly.

3 factors cannot serve the interests of the Hungarian economy. The same argument is true for the EU tax on multinational companies since the question remains how the revenues of this tax would be redistributed and whether Hungary would be able to protect its interests in the negotiation process.

As we covered it earlier, the campaign goals of the Jobbik also include the establishment of a wage union in the European Union, and thus it seems to be clear that the opposition parties make an attempt to attack the ruling party from a left-leaning and liberal position and make inroads among the hesitant voters. The only exception is the LMP, that centers on ‘green values’. The party’s campaign programme underlines the significance of sustainable development. The campaign focuses on three ideas: the promotion of sustainable development, European values (such as human dignity, human rights, the rule of law, freedom of speech, the protection of minorities) and the principle of subsidiarity. This principle was originally created and introduced in the European Union in the 1990s, it basically underlines that decisions must be always taken on the level (EU, country, region, or community) where

- the most information is available, to ensure proper decisions - and the decision’s impact will be significant, to ensure the inclusive nature of the decision making.

Initially, the principle was pushed by the British and utilized in the regional policy, however, it later was accepted as one of the key principles of the EU’s functioning. And nowadays, subsidiarity is often referred to by political forces favoring the idea ‘Europe of nation-states’ rather than the ‘United States of Europe’ (The latter idea is explicit in the campaign goals of the DK.)

To summarize the conclusions, it can be argued that there are clear dividing lines among the parties in this campaign, the one camp argues for more EU (Jobbik, MSZP, and the DK) while the other political camp is for a European Union that is based in the assumption on strong nation-states. At the same time, it is important to underline, that the LMP doesn’t intend to make the impression of supporting the ruling party, it clearly tries to distinguish itself from the Fidesz-KDNP, but it worth acknowledging this crucial difference between the LMP and other opposition parties, since this fault-line can be in the way of cross-opposition party cooperation later.