“I am very happy. I didn’t expect anything else, based on the fact that I really ran as an independent candidate with the support of parties. There was no party negotiation behind me, people saw that with my person it was possible to guarantee that we would replace the local Rogán man,” Péter Juhász told Telex about the fact that on Thursday won the primary election in the capital’s V. district.
The chairman of the former Együtt party received 58 percent, i.e. 711 votes, while his opponent, the supporter of the district opposition representatives, Alex Gábor Kovács, received 42 percent, i.e. 516 votes.
Thus, Juhász will be the opposition challenger of Fidesz’s Péter Szentgyörgyvölgyi in the local elections in June. Apart from him, Mi Hazánk also has its own candidate, István Szikora. By the way, Belváros is a difficult area for the opposition: Szentgyörgyvölgyi has been mayor since 2014, and Antal Rogán led the district for two terms before that. In 2019, the Fidesz mayoral candidate won with 52.49 percent of the votes, while his opponent, Kata Tüttő from the MSZP, collected 42.47 percent.
In the current primary election, however, the turnout was quite low: a total of 1,227 people voted validly. There are slightly more than 20,000 voters in the district electoral register (about five thousand of them are foreign citizens). So about 6 percent of the electorate of the district. How does Juhász want to convince people to vote in June?
To this, he said that he originally expected less than a thousand voters. According to him, Belváros is a special district because many of those who are registered there do not even live there. Besides, “obviously, this is not an opposition stronghold. A strong fight is expected. It is very important that the people living here get their independence. A mayor dependent on government parties leads the district like a poster boy under the direction of Antal Rogán. But everyone knows that the Rogán system works in the background”. According to Juhász, welfare cannot be increased only by handing out apples, but by “not letting them steal. Because then it will be a great resource for creating a truly livable district”.
Juhász already tried once in District V: he also ran for mayor in the City Center in 2014, but fell short with 30 percent support, and Szentgyörgyvölgy won with 54 percent. Juhász got into the district representative body from the compensation list, so he became a municipal representative, but then he resigned from the district representative office and did not fulfill his mandate, because he wanted to concentrate on the duties of the president of the Együtt party, which still existed at the time, and on national politics.
The question arises that if he has already lost to Szentgyörgyvölgyi, what makes him think that it can be different in the current election. To this, Juhász said, “she was not inferior to Kata Tüttő”. In addition, according to him, the atmosphere and political climate were different then, Fidesz leadership was in almost every district of Budapest, and “a lot of people’s eyes have been opened since then”. in 2014 with that too was accused in the campaign that he is a drug addict, but according to him, people can now see that he “lives an exemplary life”, for example, a person who lives with drugs has a smaller belly and his clothes are less tidy. Even now, he is preparing for a disqualification campaign.
Regarding his opponent, Alex Kovács, he said that he respects the work done with the Tiéc a Belváros faction, although “he is not satisfied with the result, but it is not an irreconcilable conflict”. He will also call Kovács and the other district opposition representatives to offer them cooperation in the future.
We also asked Alex Kovács if he was willing to cooperate with Juhás. He replied that the pre-election agreement was that the loser would support the winner. And in the V. district, Fidesz should be replaced, according to him.
He previously said that if he loses the primary, it “shows that they’re doing something bloody wrong.” Now he added to this that according to them, they must have done something wrong, but it will take a few more days for the result to sink in and for them to start looking for reasons.
“Moving around the district, I had the impression that we were going to win. But the fact that they support you is not enough in itself, because this must also be expressed in votes,” he said about the result.
Regarding the low turnout, Kovács doesn’t think that people didn’t know about the primary election, “they simply don’t think it’s important to choose between two opposition candidates. This had to be explained to countless people. This is probably due to political disillusionment and depressed mood. But it is certainly our responsibility that we were not able to convey the importance normally”.
Kovács has been a representative in District V since 2006, but in the next local government cycle he will no longer be a representative or mayor, because “he is closing this era in his head”. But he has plans for the future.
