The Hungarian prime minister’s grip on power remains firm ahead of an election set for April 2018. Among voters who say they’ve made up their mind already, his Fidesz party regularly tops 50 percent in the polls, around 30 points clear of the far-right Jobbik and even further ahead of the Socialist Party.
But the much smaller Momentum thinks it has identified a weakness in the Hungarian leadership: its love of sport. “Hungary spends more on professional sport than on higher education,” said Momentum’s leader, 28-year-old András Fekete-Győr.
Momentum made news in early 2017 when it attempted to force a referendum on Budapest’s bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. It collected around 266,000 signatures, more than double the number required to trigger a city-wide vote on the plan, by arguing that Hungary wasn’t rich enough to afford the games.
The government’s response was swift. Orbán pulled the bid, not wanting to risk a repeat of 2014 when a planned tax on internet use led to mass street protests and ended with the only major U-turn of his premiership. [...]
Fekete-Győr said he was happy to take his time and accept only the truly committed to the cause. He’s targeting the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian expats in Western Europe, and hoping his compatriots can be persuaded to back a non-traditional party. Momentum believes 80 percent of Hungarians living abroad would return home given the right conditions, without saying how it got to that figure. [...]
“When András Fekete-Győr says to the [Swiss newspaper] Neue Zürcher Zeitung that he supports ‘both gay marriage and border control’ [the border fence erected by Orbán to keep refugees out], he positions his party within the complex status quo — but with a ‘new,’ streamlined ‘hipster patriot’ foundation,” left-wing philosopher and commentator Gáspár Miklós Tamás wrote in a recent critique of the party.
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