The Betrayal of the New Frontier
Tibor Dessewffy*
On 13 June 37% of eligible voters in Hungary cast their vote. It was no surprise that here, as everywhere else in Europe, the opposition (in our case FIDESZ, the conservative party) beat the government parties: FIDESZ took 47%, the Socialists 34%, Liberals (the other government party) 7%, and MDF (a small, more moderate conservative party, also in opposition) 5%. The parties therefore took, of the 24 Hungarian Euro MPs, respectively 13, 9, 2, and 1 seat.
What is more interesting, though, is that now when I wanted to look up the exact percentages I could not find them on any major website. Sic transit...The European election as such was not important at all. In actual fact, it was not an election. An election is a legal act which is about putting a party into power. But there was no real power here. To be honest, no one, except a very few specialists, really knows what the European Parliament does.
On the national level this election was therefore treated by the electorate as a poll – just one with an extremely large sample. Though the conservatives won, during the campaign Viktor Orban, a close associate of Berlusconi, and the undisputed leader of the right wing, said many times, "Those who stay home would vote for the socialists". In response, one bitterly disappointed socialist jokingly remarked that, with 63% of absentees, the Socialists had actually won the election.
Although parts of the Hungarian intelligentsia have been ready to lay the blame for the results with the "indifferent masses", the fact is the 37% turnout was quite high amongst the recently joined, post-communist countries (where the average was much closer to 20%). Therefore, seen as a high turnout, this was the result of the move made by the right wing to define the European elections as protest vote against the government. Seen as a low turnout, it resulted from the fact that the European Parliament in its present form, and in the recent structures, is not that important after all.
Budapest, June 25th 2004
*Tibor Dessewffy is a Hungarian public intellectual and professor of Sociology at Eotvos Lorànd University (ELTE) in Budapest where he previously obtained his M.A. degrees in Law, and Sociology. He was a visiting fellow of Boston University and The New School for Social Research. He is a member of the board of the ELTE-UNESCO Ethnic and Minority Studies and the leader of the Hungarian section of the World Internet Project, initiated by UCLA. He is co-author of “The Democratic Papers” collection (British Council, Vision et al. 2004).
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