The chaotic mayoral campaign of Gergely Karácsony

• Gergely Karácsony won the mayoral election for the second time on June 9, after first winning in 2019.
• Although receiving nearly 18,000 more votes than five years ago, Karácsony’s success—and perhaps his entire political career—was decided by fewer than 300 votes.
• The tight race was only partly due to Dávid Vitézy’s strong campaign and Alexandra Szentkirályi’s withdrawal. Internal conflicts within the opposition campaign also reduced the Mayor’s previously comfortable lead. According to one member of his staff, Karácsony’s campaign was like “refuelling an airplane mid-air.”
• In recent weeks, we spoke with dozens of participants in the Budapest campaign to draw a more accurate picture of what led to Karácsony almost losing an election that seemed to be a certain victory. The list led by the incumbent Mayor performed far below expectations, and creating a majority in the city assembly now appears to be a serious challenge.
• In a surprisingly uniform fashion, our sources pointed out the campaign’s main mistakes, drawing similar conclusions. Karácsony had paid the price for constantly making compromises and taking on issues he didn’t believe in — as several participants would attest. “You can’t do politics without a support base. You’ll be exposed and vulnerable” – said one of Karácsony’s confidants.
• The Mayor himself also speaks in our article.

In April 2024, increasingly heated negotiations were taking place between opposition staffs over an election billboard that was actually intended to promote unity. “They were yelling at us. They were very tense about the issue” – says a member of Karácsony’s campaign team.

“I’m not proud of it, but over the course of the arguments, I called Zoltán Gál J., Gergő’s campaign manager, and raised my voice. Maybe I even shouted at him: “Zoltán believe me, this won’t hurt Karácsony” recounts a parliamentary representative.

Behind the scenes of the opposition cooperation, the Kunhalmi-Dobrev-Karácsony posters were only referred to as the “holy trinity”.

These advertisements, still visible in Budapest in July, created tension within campaign teams despite the featured politicians supposedly being allies. However, while some of them genuinely wanted this alliance, the rest only grudgingly settled for it in the absence of a better alternative. The poster controversy expressed the fundamental problem with the forced marriage of DK, MSZP, and Párbeszéd, Hungary’s main left-wing parties. “We didn’t want this. We knew it wouldn’t benefit Gergő, and we soon began to feel it would harm his chances. The damage caused by this advertisement – also poorly designed in terms of appearance – could be measured in percentage points. Gyurcsány’s proximity was toxic when the craze around Péter Magyar had already erupted” – says one member of Karácsony’s team.

Therefore, the Mayor’s team asked that the posters produced by the Democratic Coalition should not be displayed in Budapest. However, DK did not comply with the request, as ex-PM Ferenc Gyurcsány’s party felt it was necessary to flood not only the countryside, but also the capital with the posters due to the EP campaign, as they were also threatened by the quick rise of Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party. DK politicians argued that since Klára Dobrev was the most popular female, while Gergely Karácsony was the most popular male opposition politician, it was impossible for these ads not to bring success.

That’s what all the yelling was about. That we should accept Klára’s face, that it wouldn’t harm us

– reports one of our sources.

The main fear of Karácsony’s campaign team was that while the Mayor was both organisationally and personally connected to the political world of DK and MSZP, he also enjoys support from elsewhere (MKKP, Momentum, various civil and student organisations), and many of these supporters would be put off by these parties, and especially by DK’s president, ex-PM Ferenc Gyurcsány.

Eventually, the parties agreed that the posters would not be displayed on the capital’s Buda side and the inner city districts, and DK’s activists would only distribute them throughout the outer areas. “This is what we agreed on; this is what we considered to be acceptable for us. A few days later, they flooded the entire city with these ads, including the inner districts. They screwed us over, and properly at that” – says our source from the City Hall.

Gergely Karácsony, however, downplays the story. The Mayor told 24.hu that such a scenario had indeed taken place, but he would give in in the end:

I really didn’t want that poster. Then so many people called me, some in tears, that I said okay, fine.

This story not only illustrates the contradictory feelings and interests among the parties jointly managing several city governments and the City Hall since 2019, but also points out that Budapest was ultimately plastered with the Mayor’s image in a way that he didn’t originally want, yet couldn’t prevent, and the most he could do was to agree to it in the end. Had he “banned” his image from appearing next to Dobrev in the EP campaign, he would have risked not getting the poster spaces from DK for his own mayoral campaign. His campaign’s visibility depended on whether he would come to terms with the ‘holy trinity’ ads, which he considered harmful to his own agenda.

Once again, Karácsony made a compromise, as there was no Plan B by then. He was exposed and vulnerable.

But the Mayor had been working behind the scenes for years to avoid this situation. Unsuccessfully so, however, which cast a shadow over the entire campaign. This article presents the process ending with Karácsony barely on his feet.

The association of sympathetic district mayors

Eight months after the parliamentary elections – that brought devastating results for the united opposition – a Signal group comprised of a few Budapest district mayors received a new message between the holidays. It was from Gergely Karácsony. It was then that he first introduced the idea later dubbed ‘Wildflower Budapest’. The essence was that the “progressive” mayors of the capital, including Krisztina Baranyi, Gergely Őrsi, András Pikó, and Tamás Soproni, would run in the colours of a common organisation in the municipal election due in a year and a half. Why was it these mayors exactly that were in this Signal group, then titled “Food Savers”?

The mentioned mayors started working together at the Budapest City Hall after the 2019 municipal elections—since the majority of the general assembly members were district mayors—and after a while, the group not only discussed professional matters but would also meet up regularly. “A little bit of professional discussion, a little bit of venting”, sometimes they even had a few beers together. “Everyone came from different backgrounds, also representing different generations, but there was something common in our approach and attitude. We got to know each other in the city assembly, got a feeling for whom we could talk to and trust” – explains Momentum’s Tamás Soproni. Among others, this circle organised food saving events, and also held joint public discussions.

It was within this group that the idea emerged not to run in the municipal election in the same structure as in 2019, when opposition parties were the nominating organisations. There were several reasons behind this.

• Firstly, Fidesz scheduled the municipal and EP elections to be held on the same day, and while the former meant cooperation for the opposition, the latter meant competition. This could potentially confuse voters – Karácsony and his team thought. However, if the municipal campaign was distanced from the parties, both district mayors and Karácsony could benefit—only the structure had to be figured out.
• Moreover, opposition parties were so damaged by the 2022 defeat that many felt something new had to be introduced to make their offer attractive to opposition voters. “The voters have abandoned the opposition parties; one would be blind to deny this. Even in 2021, with Péter Márki-Zay’s success in the intra-opposition primary election, it was evident that opposition voters wanted nothing to do with the parties. But the 2022 result sealed this situation. And we also wanted to push back DK, we didn’t want them to dominate and demand even more in the capital” – says Krisztina Baranyi.

It was not the first time that Karácsony attempted moving against Gyurcsány’s party. As our newspaper was the first to report in the spring of 2021, Budapest’s mayor tried to form an anti-DK coalition in the primaries, which was ultimately thwarted by the tug-of-war between MSZP and Jobbik. The failed operation to politically isolate DK in the spring of 2021 was followed by open action a few months later. In the fall of 2021, Karácsony torpedoed DK’s expansion by withdrawing in favour of Márki-Zay in the second round of the preliminary to prevent Klára Dobrev’s nomination as the opposition’s prime ministerial candidate. A year later, in the fall of 2022, our sources reported that the bout between Karácsony and Gyurcsány had reached the point where DK informally circulated that they would run Dobrev against the Mayor – the articles of pro-government media were not without basis.

Was Karácsony too soft? Or was it Momentum to misjudge?

It was after these events that the alliance of “new wave” mayors would be formed, which Karácsony would have announced under the name Republic of Budapest at the March 15 commemoration of 2023. However, this did not happen.

Those involved have differing accounts regarding who is responsible for this.

• Some believe Karácsony “wasn’t decisive enough to push this through the parties. He started something and left it unfinished again.” Another mayor believes that this is a fundamental problem with Karácsony’s nature that he doesn’t engage in political projects that could involve conflict. “And here, there would definitely have been conflict”.
• From the Budapest mayor’s surroundings we also heard interpretations blaming district leaders for the failure, as they slipped out of the project, missing meetings and being more occupied with their own interests in their respective districts, where everyone would rather focus on working out the most efficient forms of cooperation.
• While Karácsony himself says: “Momentum’s leadership outright rejected the idea of starting with a political strategy that wouldn’t feature their party logo on the ballot. When the new electoral system was introduced at the end of 2023, which required us to create a city list, I revisited this idea, but I was rejected again. I think Momentum made several bad decisions leading up to the election, such as not running a Budapest campaign, even though they set up a city list. All this resulted in them not getting into the Budapest Assembly.”

For the full picture, we must also consider that the concept would have raised many questions that the parties had no or only partial answers to. Should the organisation in question be a party or a ’real’ association engaged in public activities? Or perhaps an umbrella organisation? Whom to nominate in districts with Fidesz mayors? Who was to fund all this? What would happen to party-affiliated mayors, like those from DK, if they opted out of the association? What if Gyurcsány was to dig in his heels?

These questions, however, never got past being questions; Karácsony did not provide any systemic answers – consequentially, the idea was dead by the summer of 2023.

One mayor recounts:

I went up to Karácsony and told him: Look, these people from the past, MSZP and DK, are dragging you down, they are practically living off you. Make a move already to quit being dependent on them! But the Mayor is a safety player. He lives without a real party behind him, but can only prevail with a larger organisation. For an election, however, you need money, a logo, and infrastructure. Karácsony went for the path of least resistance, looking for the most stable background, and didn’t start a pilot project with an uncertain outcome.

Fidesz’s gambit and the failure to convince Donáth

In the following months, the opposition camp saw several events that would significantly influence the 2024 election. For example, green-liberal LMP – which had previously supported Karácsony – began their withdrawal from the opposition cooperation (only to later team up with Dávid Vitézy), Momentum’s Anna Donáth made wild attacks against Gyurcsány, while at the end of the year, Fidesz shook up the game with a few changes to the electoral system.

Among the changes, the most important was the reintroduction of the list system. This meant that seats in the city assembly were not automatically given to district mayors but were determined proportionally by the list results. This raised numerous questions regarding the nature and number of potential lists and the best-case-scenarios for each party. This only added to the confusion in an opposition space already frustrated by the simultaneous municipal and EP campaigns.

Regarding what happened between December 2023 and March 2024, our sources told us different stories. Some say the Mayor was keeping several irons in the fire, telling one thing to one party and something else to another. Karácsony remembers as follows:

I considered two scenarios to be good. Either the four-party (DK–MSZP–Párbeszéd–Momentum) joint list, or an umbrella organisation involving mayors and civil associations. But the latter would have made no sense without Momentum, who refused to cooperate on this issue as well. I met Anna Donáth because of this, but she said the umbrella organisation and the four-party list were basically the same thing.

The rest is history: neither the four-party list, nor an umbrella organisation came into being. As a matter of fact, Karácsony was still trying to put together the broadest possible coalition behind him in the winter of 2023, as in December, even LMP was still present at the General Assembly when the parties came together to discuss the situation and constraints created by the list-based electoral system. In our January article, we reported that the reason behind the short negotiations had been that the parties couldn’t even reach consensus on the most fundamental issues like who should have an independent list and who should run together. At the meeting, both LMP and Momentum indicated that they had been considering setting up their own lists. During the session, Karácsony was faced with the question of what list he intended to lead and whether he would agree to head a “mini-coalition”, meaning a DK–MSZP–Párbeszéd joint list. But – as our source says – “Gergő skillfully dodged the question and left it hanging.” This was the exact scenario the incumbent Mayor wanted to avoid. To do that, Karácsony aimed to rely on Momentum, but he couldn’t come to an agreement with the liberal party, whether under Ferenc Gelencsér or Anna Donáth’s leadership a bit later. As for Donáth, several of our sources claim that she and Karácsony particularly dislike each other.

Karácsony confirms that there really is some tension, but in his view it’s due to the negotiations before the 2022 elections, where he says Momentum was not playing fair.

Returning to Momentum: Donáth publicly attacked Ferenc Gyurcsány in the fall of 2023, just a few months before the changes to Budapest’s election system, claiming that he represents the “culture of lies”, which makes any cooperation with him impossible. This, and Donáth’s later insistence on her idea, is why Momentum ultimately didn’t join the joint list. As far as we know, many tried to convince her of the necessity of cooperation in the early months of 2024, but she remained adamant, making it clear that it was either her or a joint list for Momentum. On the other hand, the party would later set up a list for Budapest without backing it up with a campaign, all while cooperating with DK in several districts.

The Mayor’s plan met its ultimate end in February, when opposition leaders gathered once again at the City Hall, and Donáth announced that she would have to leave early but made it certain that Momentum would run independently.

Two more ideas: Karácsony’s own list or a Momentum–Párbeszéd cooperation

There were also plans for cooperation between Momentum and Párbeszéd, inspired by the idea of avoiding the “Gyurcsány problem.” The reasons this didn’t materialise are seen completely differently by the parties involved.

Regarding Momentum, Karácsony’s vision was to make it the opposition camp’s “DK-free magnet”, gathering all “acceptable” figures around it. “That could have included even Gergely Őrsi” – says a City Hall source about the District 2 mayor intending to quit MSZP. “However, Momentum couldn’t be dissuaded from running independently. They believed firmly that they would change the world on their own, and didn’t want to negotiate with the old political world. Moreover, Donáth maintained that she would quit Momentum in case a deal was to be made” – as a Párbeszéd politician recalls. (Anna Donáth did not want to comment on the campaign.)

On the other hand, Momentum has other ideas as to why the negotiations with Párbeszéd – lasting from December 2023 to March 2024 – ended in failure. “We gave them a clear offer. They get a third of the city list, as well as the third spot on the EP list. We think this was a fair, even generous offer” – says Dávid Bedő, the leader of the party’s parliamentary faction. About this issue, Karácsony says: “The Momentum-Párbeszéd joint list wouldn’t have been good for anyone. I saw no potential in it. An offer from Momentum came unrealistically late, but by then it was already unfeasible.”

Momentum believes Karácsony was simply afraid. “We made other offers too, but Gergő didn’t agree to them. I’m angry with him; he could have left this old world but in the end chose to stay in it. He did so because he was afraid of what would happen with DK, and didn’t want to or couldn’t break his ties with the Socialists, either. We were sending offers even in the days leading up to the announcement of the DK–MSZP–Párbeszéd list, still leaving the option open.”

To this, Karácsony’s staff replied: “Even in the very last moments we begged Momentum to reconsider and have a campaign together, trying to deter them from this half-measure of supporting Karácsony but having a separate list with no campaign for Budapest. It was impossible to convince them, and now five per cent’s worth of votes ended up in the trash.”

Bence Tordai announced his decision to quit Párbeszéd on the day of the election. “I can’t understand the reason behind an alliance with DK, and I couldn’t understand it earlier, either. There is no feasible explanation” – says the politician who still remains at the helm of Párbeszéd’s parliamentary faction.

With the DK-MSZP-Párbeszéd list, Karácsony and his team were precisely where they didn’t want to be by early March. Moreover, the Péter Magyar-phenomenon was becoming increasingly dangerous in the first weeks of March. This prompted another idea. “We said, let this be Karácsony’s list, forget about the parties. Let the ads feature Párbeszéd’s people, Sándor Bardóczi (Budapest’s chief landscape architect), Samu Balogh (the Mayor’s chief of staff), some civilians, maybe mayors, and let’s go for it, let’s have a city policy-focused campaign. We wanted to avoid the toxicity of DK” – says our source. However, this concept only lived for a few discussions’ time at the City Hall. The same questions arose again: which organisation should nominate the candidates? Where would all the money come from? How would they get billboard spaces, all of which were already in the hands of DK (and to a lesser extent MSZP)? How would the district mayors react? “Because of these uncertainties, we decided not to go through with it. We were too late for this scenario.”

Low-budget campaign and other problems

When talking to those familiar and involved with Karácsony’s campaign, the number one highlighted issue was the campaigns lateness. “Normally, you build the foundations of a campaign a year before the election. This time, we had two months for everything. And we didn’t start from zero, but from minus ten” – said a member of the campaign staff. Despite this, there was no atmosphere of pessimism at the assembly of the campaign team in early April. Three of Budapest’s mayoral candidates were right-wing, two of whom were linked to Fidesz (Dávid Vitézy to a lesser extent, Alexandra Szentkirályi clearly so), meaning pro-government votes could be expected to be divided in the capital, where the opposition had won in 2022. And where there was only one clearly opposition-aligned candidate vying for anti-government votes: Gergely Karácsony.

However, this is where the good news ended.

For instance, there was barely any money. As one of our sources put it: “We put together this campaign with ridiculously little”. The budget was around 200 million forints – the Mayor confirmed this figure to our paper. Forty per cent came from MSZP, another 40 per cent from Párbeszéd, while donations accounted for the remaining 20 per cent. Karácsony ultimately opened a sub-account on his own bank account (as he mentioned in an interview with our paper, even showing the bank account on his phone) when it became clear that there would be no organisation or association behind his campaign, not unrelated to the investigations related to the funding of his 99 Movement.

But there were other problems as well. “From the very beginning, we were faced with the fact that all printing capacities were booked. In the entire country. All the poster spaces had long been booked. So we had no choice but to ask the parties for ad spaces, mainly DK, a bit from MSZP. DK then told us that they would only give us some if we had accepted the ‘trinity’ posters and if Gergő agreed to tour the countryside with Klára Dobrev. We didn’t want either, but we needed the poster spaces.

By April, the issue was no longer whether we would have a good or bad campaign, but whether Karácsony’s campaign would be visible at all. We could have pushed the issue with DK, but then we may have risked not having any ad spaces.

This is where one of the main conflicts of the mayoral campaign stemmed from. “DK constantly wanted to pull Gergő into their own campaign; we were at the point where they were incessantly calling him to tour the countryside with them. This, however, was harmful to us.” According to one of his colleagues, the Mayor would often emphasise in the mornings: “Only do what’s mandatory with DK, the basics, nothing more. Since from an organisational perspective and for the posters’ sake, we needed them.”

“I told DK from the beginning that I didn’t particularly want to participate in the EP campaign. I told them that I didn’t have time for it, that I would rather focus on the capital. They weren’t happy about this, and you could feel they were a bit offended afterwards” – Karácsony recalls.

Regarding the poster issue, one member of the party’s campaign team says: “The debate was about how many posters to put and where, and who should be on them. What no one talked about was the actual content of our ads – what should be their message? Vote for the joint list? Who does this appeal to? What does it tell you about the world?

Karácsony on the Partizán debate: I was an amateur

There were content issues with Karácsony’s campaign as well. One staff member told us that the slogan “plus five years” (life expectancy in Budapest is five years below the European average, and the program was supposed to balance this with green policies and healthcare development) wasn’t a politically strong statement. Another missed strong outlines and a distinctive character to the campaign. “The whole thing was unfocused. We didn’t decide what we wanted” – said our source. In reality, we didn’t speak to a single team member around Karácsony who was satisfied with the campaign’s contents. MSZP’s Zsolt Molnár outright says:

I didn’t see where this campaign was positioned. Was Gergely Karácsony campaigning with expert urban policy? Or with the fact that he’s the leader of the opposition world? Because it was both. But it wasn’t decided which was more important.

This is how we arrived at the Partizán debate at the end of May, which turned out to be disastrous for the Mayor. Our sources claim that the debate marked a turning point in the campaign – this was the point where Vitézy became a real challenger.

There had long been a disagreement within Karácsony’s team about the necessity of the debate, as at the time the Mayor enjoyed a confident lead according to opinion polls, and by participating he would only risk elevating Vitézy to his own level. “It wasn’t in our interest, as we had nothing to gain with it. But on the other hand we thought it was part of our values, our democratic values, – this was the final argument for the debate.” Karácsony’s team also thought that the debate would be a good opportunity for the Mayor to prove that he actually knows the city well. But in the first five minutes of the debate, they could not believe their eyes.

It’s not like there were no preparations for the debate at the City Hall. “We set up a studio to act out the debate. Márton Gulyás was played by Bálint Misetics, while Samu Balogh took on Vitézy’s role. Gergő didn’t go unprepared. We just didn’t anticipate Vitézy being so aggressive. We prepared for a debate about city management issues, Dávid turned it into a political one. Gergő didn’t respond well to this, he was dull and out of character.” We also heard that Karácsony struggled with a severe headache that day, but he denies this. The Mayor says:

I’m weather-sensitive, but my head didn’t hurt that day. The truth is, even though I’ve been a politician for 14 years, I can be very unprofessional in certain situations; I hate debate preparation and acting. I wasn’t really prepared, and with my mayoral duties, I didn’t have time for it either, while Vitézy arrived with hundreds of pages. He was professional at this, I was an amateur.

Overconfidence and misjudgement

Two days before the June 9 election, Fidesz candidate Alexandra Szentkirályi withdrew in favour of Dávid Vitézy, changing the landscape of the election, as now voters of the governing party and those critical of Karácsony would no longer be divided, but a good portion of them could unite behind the former Fidesz state secretary.

However, Karácsony became more energised towards the end of the campaign. Among other things, because – as one of his close associates says – “Gergő gets good when he’s hit, when he’s riled up.” By then, the Mayor could passionately represent what he had indeed said countless times before, that Vitézy’s candidacy was a trick on Fidesz’s part. “Gergő is good when he believes in what he says. It’s very obvious when he doesn’t believe in something, he can’t argue for that. But he strongly believed that Vitézy’s candidacy was a Fidesz trick. And he was right, he was proven right.”

A staff member says: “On the morning of Szentkirályi’s withdrawal, Gergő came in happy, almost ecstatic. I told you, I told you! – he kept repeating. He was liberated. He was in his element.”

As a result, both the Mayor and his staff were sure that Fidesz’s endorsement would deter many Vitézy sympathisers, who would thus return to Karácsony on election day. Comment threads were full of people claiming that while they originally wanted to vote for Vitézy, they would not do so anymore. That’s why they thought at the City Hall that Karácsony would comfortably win the mayoral election with at least a 4–5 per cent lead.

That’s not what happened.

“On election night, in those few hours when Vitézy had the lead, there was everything at the City Hall. Crying, nervous breakdowns, many of us would just sit there with a blank stare.”

Karácsony eventually defeated Dávid Vitézy by less than three hundred votes after multiple recounts, but his DK–MSZP–Párbeszéd list was outperformed by both Fidesz and Tisza, so it’s still unclear how the Mayor will form a majority in the fall.

It was by a thin thread that Karácsony did not end up as a political corpse.

But what and who could be the cause of this? – we asked at the City Hall.

No support base, no resources

Samu Balogh, Karácsony’s chief of staff, says: “Despite the billions of forints Fidesz had spent on Karácsony’s political destruction, despite pulling together two different elections and introducing the list-based system, and despite the complementary campaigns of Szentkirályi and Vitézy and the former’s withdrawal, Gergő’s victory was a miracle. And at the same time, it’s also true that this razor-thin victory from an incumbent position is, to put it mildly, not brilliant.”

Another source adds that

this wasn’t a campaign, but a chaos run. It’s a miracle we sometimes resembled a campaign. We were refuelling the plane mid-flight.

An opposition MP says:

There was no community building, no activist recruitment, no people in the campaign. There was no such thing as Gergő’s activists. A campaign without people is a dead campaign, a media campaign at most. And around Gergő, they thought this would be enough. That it would suffice. This Russian roulette was brought about by Gergő and his team.

We discussed the campaign and its lessons with Karácsony at the City Hall. The Mayor, who interrupted his vacation to meet us, sitting in a t-shirt and shorts, did not dispute the notion that his dependence on the parties and a lack of an independent support base had a significant impact on the election results. All things considered, he states:

This campaign was indeed delayed, but it was not ad hoc. I’ve participated in many campaigns and have even worked as campaign manager, so I say this with experience. However, we had an incredibly small budget. Despite all the chaos, we won this campaign because we considered Vitézy to be Fidesz’s real candidate from the very beginning. I admit, though, that I reacted late to the changes regarding the list-based electoral system, and for many months we couldn’t decide in what setup or on what list we would run. My personal mistake was that, although I sensed early on that Fidesz would step back in favour of Vitézy, I should have taken this more seriously.

A source from MSZP says: “Compulsory cooperation or not, the issue goes beyond the City Hall that the opposition side has still not established institutional foundations for cooperation despite half a decade of working together. The parties and the campaign teams could not solve the challenge of having to run two separate campaigns simultaneously.”

And as one of Karácsony’s confidants summed up:

It was a devastating campaign. I never want to participate in something like this again.