“We are happy with the unexpectedly good result, we were excited throughout. What seems to have worked is that over the last five years, I’ve connected with a thousand or two thousand people because they helped us, or we helped them, or they brought a local case that we worked on. This will work,” Gergely Kovács told Telex about winning the opposition primary in Hegyvidék on Sunday.
The president of the Hungarian Kétfarkú Kutya Party received 61.11 percent, i.e. a total of 3,829 votes. Behind her, the civilian Piroska Visi came in second place with 1,276 votes, and the immediate candidate, Csaba Farkas, came in third with 1,161 votes.
According to the preliminary agreement, Kovács will be the challenger to the Fidesz-KDNP candidate, Krisztina Fonti, and the Kutyapár can field a candidate in 8 of the 12 individual self-governing constituencies. Apart from them, only Mi Hazánk has its own candidate, Csaba Binder. The LMP candidate, who did not run in the primary election, withdrew from the candidacy after Kovács’s victory, in favor of Gergely Kovács.
Kovács also said that he “wasn’t sure that the victory would be so smooth” because the others in the district also “campaigned strongly”: in addition to Kovács, Piroska Visi also accused Momentum of thatto call the opposition voters in the highlands using some previous petition database, and then he also bombards them with letters addressed to their names. The Dog Party also posted the internal briefing document intended for urgent activists, in which they ask those participating in the mobilization to spread the word about Gergely Kovács that they can arrest him before the June elections, so it is a shame to vote for him. Although Momentum said about the latter, they are not running a discrediting campaign, but “the undoubted fact – which can come up at any time in a conversation, if the XII. district primaries are discussed – that Gergely Kovács had already been taken away by the police in handcuffs”.
Kovács said about this now: “Yesterday I saw a wanted policeman, I was afraid to go there. Although I already know the district police pretty well, several of them said that they would vote for me.” Otherwise, he expects a cultured campaign, because he has seen in recent years that Fidesz in the mountains “doesn’t operate like Rogán”: according to him, they don’t write disparaging material about him in the district newspaper, at most they don’t give him space, and there is no serialization in it.
He was not surprised that the LMP candidate, János Kendernay, withdrew in his favor, because he “didn’t see exactly what he wanted here, he wouldn’t have had much of a chance, just as the LMP didn’t excel here in the district.” He was more surprised by the fact that Kendernay applied for the position of mayor in the first place, without having previously worked in the district – in the 2021 opposition primary election, he ran as a representative candidate in the Szigetszentmiklós (Pest county 8th) electoral district, but did not win.
Kovács also said that although he was still an LMP candidate, Kendernay registered as a passivist with the Dog Party a few days ago. When asked whether they would count on him at work from now on, Kovács said he had not thought about it yet.
Recently, it was revealed that the candidate for mayor of the LMP, Dávid Vitézy, also voted for Gergely Kovács in the primary election. They also discussed that Vitézy would help him in developing the district transport program in more detail, because he is also a XII. district resident, who by the way already voted for Gergely Kovács before. Now Kovács said that it is an exaggeration to call this joint campaigning. “I didn’t say anything about it, he took a photo of us.” According to the president of the Dog Party, he will thank Vitézy if he can help him professionally, because he considers him a good traffic specialist.
The Dog Party holds the view that they do not cooperate with the opposition. We asked Kovács if it was now okay for the membership that the candidate for mayor of the LMP helps him develop his program, and he said that there was never a problem with this in professional matters. But “I don’t need Vitézy to tell them to vote for me”.
He would “not force” cooperation with the parliamentary representative of the constituency, the momentous Miklós Hajnal, because “I don’t see what kind of professional work I could channel from him”. And although Péter Magyar once told him that he would like to have coffee with him, so far this has not happened either. “Until now, I have met any person from the district who has approached me,” said Kovács.
The XII. The district was difficult for the opposition to win during the time of Zoltán Pokorni, who has been re-elected four times since 2006. In the last election, he won with 59.57 percent of the vote. Pokorni, on the other hand, will not run again this year, instead Fidesz will run its deputy mayor, Krisztina Fonti. However, it is expected that Pokorni will campaign alongside Fonti in the coming weeks.
According to Kovács, “it will be a lot of work to defeat” Fonti. According to him, in the coming weeks, his job will be to help the Dog Party nationally, he should also go to other districts and settlements, and only in the last party week would he really focus on Hegyvidék. To the question of whether he is harming his own chances by neglecting his district, he replied that he has a local passivist team of hundreds of people, “he doesn’t have to do everything for him”. But in the meantime, “defeating Fidesz in Budapest is no longer very difficult”.
At first, the majority of the members of the Dog Party did not support Gergely Kovács running in the primary election in the highlands, because on the one hand, they were afraid that they would be in a situation suitable for fraud, and on the other hand, if they went into a primary election, they would be going against their own views, since so far that has clearly been the central saying that they do not collaborate with the opposition. Because of this, Gergely Kovács and the other co-chairman, Zsuzsanna Döme, resigned from the co-chairmanship, but after the membership gave them a vote of confidence and they also voted that Kovács could run in the primary election, they remained in their positions.
We then conducted an interview with Gergelly Kovács.
