Actually, I have to say a bit more about the Hungarian elections. Even tho I know the hype is mostly died down now. Many people posted about it, about how it's just about going out and voting and it's all just kumbaya from there (also including my post from the night of the election) but that is not actually true.
There were many factors that played into this landslide victory, that would probably be hard to replicate in other countries, but I will still lay it out, in case this is useful to anyone in countries in similar situations.
Péter Magyar was an insider
He was a Fidesz (Orbán's party) insider, he is actually the ex-husband of a former minister, though he didn't hold any prominent positions before. This is important, because it made it a lot harder for the government to get an angle on him. They couldn't really say that he's a buffoon or corrupt or any other shit they smeared the 'traditional' opposition with, because that would all come back to them.
And this means that you can't let someone's background cloud your vision. You have to listen, even if you don't like where they came from.
2. He was extremely tight lipped about important issues during the campaign
Hungary is a relatively conservative country. That doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people with leftist values, but - especially after 16 years of constant conservative propaganda poisoning society against progressive values - you just can't get wide support if you get caught up in hot-button issues. Let's take Pride for example. Orbán tried to ban Budapest Pride after a long anti-LGBT campaign, and Magyar got a lot of criticism from opposition media for not taking a stand on the issue, even after the Pride was held despite the ban - and was the largest Pride in my country's history.
LGBT issues are important to me, and they are important to a lot of left leaning people, but the reality is that it's not important to (or are even negatively viewed by) a large part of the population.
In most countries - ESPECIALLY when people in power turned LGBT rights into a poisoned pill - you can't win an election if you get 'branded' with being a SJW. And yeah, it made my hackles rise that he didn't give a clear answer about it, only that under his leadership everyone in the country would have the right to protest and right to assembly.
Was that enough? No. Was that more than what we got from Orbán? Yes.
It was only an incrementally better stance than Orbán's, but it WAS better.
3. Magyar put huge emphasis on rural voters and on getting national symbols back from the far right
The opposition of most authoritarians is concentrated in urban areas. It's much easier to develop more progressive leaning values if you are constantly exposed to people of different cultures and lifestyles than your own, but that is not the case in rural areas, especially if the government has huge media presence that feeds more isolated people fear and propaganda.
Péter Magyar went on a giant campaign, holding civic meetings in sometimes bigger, sometimes tiny towns. He wasn't afraid to get close to people. Much of his first such campaigns was largely spent with him talking to people from the back of a pickup (hastily spraypainted our national colors) and answering their questions directly.
He met hundreds of thousands of voters face-to-face.
By the end of his campaign, he held up to four or five such meetings a day all over the country. He'd been in bigger cities multiple times, he'd been in every voting district. His last tour had more than 500 stops. And this is a tiny country.
What I want to say with this is that, you can't do this without a) putting in the fucking work, and b) leaving the population centers, where your supporters already are.
He and his team also had a very good sense for marketing shit. In pretty much every country I know of, the far right is always fucking appropriating national/folk symbolism, and they'd been great about claiming them back, and giving people a common ground. Like his party's theme song is a very popular Hungarian folk song. That sort of shit.
4. Top notch investigative journalism
Péter Magyar's whole bid for power started with a scandal that came from investigative journalists. The details are not important now, but one of the 'pawns' that Orbán decided to sacrifice to calm the public was Magyar's ex-wife. That was what started this whole thing, what made him turn against his former community. And during the last years - and especially during the last weeks before the election - the remaining independent media kept coming out with more and more major scandals. You have to keep supporting independent media, or the opportunity may never come to change your government.
I could go on for a lot longer, but tumblr is telling me that this post is getting too long lol. Anyway.
My general point still stands. If your house is on fire, you can’t be like ‘well that’s not the fireman I imagined’. Even if it's a bit more complex than that.
