Steven N.
The Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party (MKKP) may now be more willing to cooperate with the united political opposition in next year’s Parliamentary elections.
In an interview with the periodical Jelen, chair Gergely Kovács (pictured) told host Rita Benyó that the party may “let go” of certain swing districts where their presence could be the difference in whether the joint opposition wins or not. In cases where they feel they will have to run a candidate in order to meet a specific candidate threshold, the party could tell people that it would not “be infinitely important” to vote for them.
Believe me, everyone, I would feel terrible if I contributed even a minimal amount to keeping things the way they are now
-said Gergely Kovács.
Kovács said that he would be willing to withdraw MKKP candidates in around 20 districts where the outcome of next year’s election is in question, meaning that they would not run anyone in these districts against the pro-government and opposition candidates. However, he stressed that he was just speaking on his own behalf and had not come to an agreement on this with party leadership yet.
Kovács also said that MKKP would have to run in at least 71 seats to be able to draw up their own party list, but if any of these turn out to be in swing districts, they will “say that it’s not infinitely important to vote for these individual candidates to avoid anything bad from happening.”
The party head claimed that there is definitely “a few percent” of voters who would not vote at all if it weren’t for their party, and if MKKP can scrape together even just 5% of the vote, this will result in “three fewer Fidesz MPs sitting in Parliament.”
On the issue of taking part in the primary elections as the seventh opposition party, Kovács said that they were not approached by any of the participants in the coalition, but he didn’t mind as they didn’t really want to be a part of it anyway.
The MKKP chair also talked about the rhetoric of the joint opposition prime ministerial candidate, Péter Márki-Zay. Kovács feels that “the opposition will lose many liberal voters” because of the way that Márki-Zay has spoken about the rumored sexual orientation of Viktor Orbán’s son and the migrant issue, even if Márki-Zay is in fact only just turning Fidesz’s words against itself.
[HVG]
