The New York Times,
April 21, 2002 p8(L) col 04 (18 col in)
Hungary Votes, Weighing Europe and Its Past.
(Foreign Desk)
Ian Fisher.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 The New York Times Company
Some families are not speaking these days. Co-workers sidestep the subject of politics. People are making extraordinary efforts to get here to cast their votes on Sunday, in the second and final round of Hungary's elections.
Akos Szilagyi, a dental technician who lives in Astoria, Queens and is a once-a-week host for a Hungarian-language cable program, packed his bag and flew here in a last-minute effort to help re-elect the nation's young, conservative prime minister, even though he knows it is probably hopeless.
''I want to contribute with my one vote,'' said Mr. Szilagyi, 37, who moved to New York eight years ago. ''It's not much, but it's all I can do.''
The race has stoked strong passions and probed the soft spots felt around the region's new democracies. It evokes the legacy of Communism and unease with nationalism, what it means to be Hungarian, the deep desire to join Europe against the worry of being swallowed whole inside it.
The passions here were fueled by a surprise. In the first round of elections two weeks ago, Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his center-right party, Fidesz, which has held power since 1998, narrowly lost an election they were expected to win against the Hungarian Socialist Party and its candidate for prime minister, Peter Medgyessy.
Fidesz came out only one percentage point behind, but experts say that the complicated arithmetic of Hungary's election law means that the Socialists and their ally, the liberal Free Democrats, are almost sure winners of a majority in Parliament. Experts say that to stay in power, Fidesz would have to win 80 to 85 of the 131 remaining contests for seats in Parliament.
But Mr. Orban, 38, the most charismatic politician of the post-Communist era, has not conceded defeat. Saying re-election is not impossible, he has barnstormed the countryside to pick up rural votes, and in Budapest, the capital, he staged a rally last week that was huge, if perhaps not the 1.5 million people that his party claimed.
''There is only one way we can win these elections, and I mean it,'' Mr. Orban told a smaller, lunchtime crowd in the small town of Kalosca, 90 miles south of Budapest, on a swing through rural areas this week. ''We can win only if you bring one more person'' to the polls. He repeated what has become his new slogan: ''Bring one more person!''
Mr. Orban has cast the voters' decision as stark: between his vision of a future Hungary built on the middle class and the ''values'' of church, family and patriotism and a return to the leaders of the hated Communist era, embodied, he says, by the Communists' heir, the Socialist Party.
But critics say that he has divided Hungarians by strong nationalist appeals and a flirtation with the nation's far right. In the last two weeks, Mr. Orban -- who has supported integration into the European Union -- has borrowed another appeal from the far right as he talks about the danger of ''big capital.'' It is a clear appeal to small farmers worried that joining Europe means that rich foreigners will sweep up their land.
This new tack has worried some Western governments, which see this approach as inflammatory and possibly harmful to Hungary's reputation as a safe place to invest.
''There is a campaign going on, but the last thing they want to do is to be scaring foreign capital away,'' one Western diplomat said. ''And that is what they are doing right now.''
The Socialists seem thrilled that Mr. Orban kept up the oratorical volume through the second round. Sensing an opportunity in a backlash against Mr. Orban, they portray him as a dangerous right-winger who has pulled the nation apart to stay in power -- a strategy that Fidesz supporters say is the Socialists' own brand of fear-mongering.
In a rally on Friday night, Mr. Medgyssey, a low-key politician who is not well known, used words that implied ''calm'' a dozen or more times.
''We've had enough of four years of trench digging,'' he told a crowd of tens of thousand at the city park in Budapest. ''Politics have moved into our homes, our schools, into our offices and workplaces, into our friendships.
''We are fed up with that,'' he said. ''Let there be peace at last, and let's find a way to reconciliation.''
The remaining question of this race, to be decided after the polls in this nation of 10 million people open on Sunday morning, is turnout. Fidesz has been hoping that Socialists and Free Democrats feel assured of victory and will stay home, while it has been working to pull out rural voters who stayed home two weeks ago.
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