The European Parliamentary elections will be held this weekend, 9 June in Hungary. While Fidesz is poised to win again, there are important questions about the margins, as well as the performance of newcomer Péter Magyar still on the table. However, an important development has already occurred: one political figure, once thought to be the defining face of the opposition, has already endured a crushing defeat.
Péter Jakab and his party On the People’s Side (A Nép Pártján) have failed to collect the number of signatures required to qualify for the ballot for the European Parliamentary elections.
To be exact, they did collect 20,300 signatures, above the 20,000-threshold needed, but 400 were invalidated by the National Election Office. This ‘margin of error,’ the two per cent that was tossed out, is quite usual even for major political parties, so Jakab would have been well advised to submit a couple thousand more signatures, as per custom.
With that, we can safely assume we have seen the end of a political career that has always somewhat fascinated me, and for all the wrong reasons.
Péter Jakab was elected as President of the Jobbik party, a party generally considered as further right to Fidesz at the time, in January 2020. Jobbik finished second in the 2018 Hungarian parliamentary election, getting 20.22 per cent of the popular vote, and winning 23 seats. After the election result, then-party president Gábor Vona thus could confidently declare that Jobbik was ‘the power that could deliver the change of government’ in Hungary, before resigning from his post. Tamás Sneider took over the helm, but since the party saw a disappointing result in the 2019 EP elections (getting only 6.34 per cent this time), he too stepped down, giving way to a young, ambitious young man named Péter Jakab.
Within a year of taking over leadership, he made a decision that doomed his party to eventual irrelevance.
In December 2020, under Jakab’s watch, Jobbik joined the six-party opposition alliance that sought to unseat PM Viktor Orbán in 2022. Jobbik’s voter base primarily consisted of people who thought Fidesz did not go far enough right on certain issues. They were now asked to throw their support behind five liberal-progressive parties—which included the Democratic Coalition (DK), the party of former Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, despised by all Jobbik voters. In fact, Jobbik’s declaration of establishment states that their primary mission is to get the ‘communist successor parties and the extreme liberals innately associated with them’ out of power.
It did not take much political savvy to recognize that joining the opposition alliance would not end well for Jobbik.
One of the only people who could not see that was Péter Jakab.
He proudly smiled at times when some polls showed him leading the opposition primary election. He got especially excited when other polls even showed the new coalition beating Fidesz in the general election—to him, seeing himself as the next Prime Minister of Hungary did not seem far-fetched at all.
And he carried himself with a certain bravado that clearly indicated that. He would often wear leather jackets to the parliamentary sessions, like a real James Dean of the National Assembly, and would often berate members of the Fidesz-KDNP coalition in a plain-spoken style. It did seem to work for him in the social media department, as he was the opposition figure with the strongest social media engagement for a long time.
In these speeches and outbursts, it was quite clear that he does not have much of a sophisticated grasp of the philosophy of government.
Jakab’s policies, at least based on his rhetoric, were much akin to that of Koko the High Executioner from the British comic opera The Mikado: that is, naming people whom he dislikes and vowing to imprison them once he gets in power.
On multiple occasions, on camera, Jakab was explained that he is currently part of the legislative branch of the government, and he is in the running to lead the executive, thus he has no business giving out prison sentences, because that is under the purview of the judicial branch. It is unclear how much of it sank in with our friend Péter, but he kept going with his simplistic shtick.
Then, in the fall of 2021, the results of the opposition primary election came. It was not good for Jakab—he came in fourth out of five candidates with just 14.1 per cent of the popular vote. Despite the expectations, he did not even make it in the second round of the three highest finishing candidates. He was beat out by Péter Márki-Zay, the then relatively unknown independent mayor of the small town of Hódmezővásárhely.
Then, in the spring of 2022, the results of the general election came in. It was not good for Jakab, or the opposition—Fidesz-KDNP won their fourth consecutive election with a constitutional supermajority. Jakab and the alliance only got 36.9 per cent of the popular vote. Meanwhile, a new far-right formation, Jobbik splinter party Our Homeland Movement (Mi Hazánk Mozgalom), getting 5.71 per cent of the vote, took Jobbik’s place in the Hungarian political arena.
Between the two election results devastating for Jakab, he also got caught in an extramarital affair scandal. In November 2021, the Hungarian tabloid Bors reported that Jakab, married with three children, had been spending his weekend nights at the apartment of his chief of staff, a woman named Enikő Molnár. Jakab told the press, and expected his voters to believe, that he was having cabinet meetings with Molnár in her private apartment on late Saturday nights. Well, one person who surely did not believe him was his wife, who changed her relationship status to ‘single’ on her social media account about a month after the scandal broke…
All this should be enough for any sane, reasonable human being to look for a career away from politics and the public eye. Not for Jakab though,
who, just a few months into the fifth Orbán administration’s tenure, made public statements that the opposition should be ready to take over governance any time soon, for when ‘the anger of the people’ ousts them at last. Based on other statements he made, including blaming Péter Márki-Zay for the election loss, it seemed he had a clear idea of who should lead that new (and fictitious) opposition government—he was probably thinking of himself. In August 2022, he quit the Jobbik party to form a political group of his own.
However, again, as foreseen by anyone but Jakab, the Fidesz government never resigned. And that takes us the the EP elections this Sunday, where Jakab and his On the People’s Side party (which, by the way, had a stylized drawing of him as the logo, in a bold move…) will not be on the national ballot—and that is something no person, conservative or liberal, pro-government or pro-opposition, feels sad about. Meanwhile, Jobbik, in large part due to Jakab’s leadership of two and a half years, has no real chance of clearing the 5-per-cent parliamentary threshold either. RIP.
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