Sweet home… but where? “It is good everywhere, but it is the best at home.” goes the Hungarian proverb. It has changed somewhat however in the course of the last tens years of Hungarian politics. Today it sounds more like “It is bad everywhere, but it is the worst at home”. That’s not news, we all know what Hungarians are like…" , the readers can say. Such clichés are best left aside, though - let's turn to the facts instead: e,g, did you know that today more than 280,000 Hungarians are employed abroad? We wanted to know whether they care at all about the general elections scheduled for this weekend in their homeland - a homeland that was not strong enough to get them back one way or another. Well, it seems that they do and they don’t.
sweet or sour?
Gyula (yes that a very Hungarian name!) is a Hungarian social worker, age 37, who has lived in the Netherlands since 2011. He has a pretty negative image of the political parties in Hungary, especially the Socialist Party, (MSZP) who, in his opinion, has not changed at all in reality. It is led now by a young socialist, Attila Mesterházy, who for many symbolizes the rejuvenation of the Hungarian Socialist Party - but the ones behind him are the same ones as those before the Öszöd speech, he says.
His opinion of voters is no better; as he can see it, most Hungarian citizens are more comfortable with a feudal system that requires only a minimum of participation, thinking and responsible decision-making - or none at all.
He says that as he does not live in Hungary anymore and has no intention to go back one day, he feels he does not have a right to intervene, so he will not vote. He did the same during the last Romanian elections, too; by then he had already left the country, where he was born. He was granted Hungarian citizenship and voting rights in 1993. He now has both Hungarian and Romanian citizenships and concomitant voting rights but he does not belong to the group of more than 200,000 transborder Hungarians who signed up to vote for the first time in 2014.
His opinion of voters is no better; as he can see it, most Hungarian citizens are more comfortable with a feudal system that requires only a minimum of participation, thinking and responsible decision-making - or none at all.
There are however many more, about 480,000 ethnic Hungarians who applied for the double citizenship introduced in 2010 by Fidesz-KDNP. They could all vote this Sunday. Starting from 2010, Hungary has granted dual citizenship to people living in, and having ancestors in territories which were annexed from Hungary at the end of World War I, due to the Trianon treaty, provided they can still speak Hungarian. Additionally, there are around 280,000 Hungarians working abroad; yet, less than 10% of them would like to vote this Sunday. Altogether that’s nearly 800,000 Hungarian who could vote beyond the borders. And probably a quarter of them will.
Are we sitting in the same boat on the Blue River, the Danube?