Written by Rainer Ackermann
Fidesz-KDNP was outvoted in the Budapest City Assembly in its attempt to put the scandal surrounding the Capital Development Council (FKT) on the agenda.
The Fidesz-KDNP parliamentary group had requested the extraordinary session of the City Assembly after the FKT concluded several agreements between the government and the capital earlier this month, which met with little enthusiasm among the district mayors.
The opposition parties, holding just over a third of the seats in the City Assembly, sought to compel Mayor Gergely Karácsony to support only decisions in the FKT that had previously been approved by the City Assembly. The left-liberal was also called upon to grant district mayors the right to attend FKT sessions in an advisory capacity, in the interest of transparency and the flow of information.
During the vote on the agenda, Fidesz-KDNP was unable to win additional votes from other factions for their motion. The motion was rejected by 17 votes to 10, with 2 abstentions, whereupon the Mayor remarked with a smug air that without an approved agenda, he could not hold the extraordinary session of the City Assembly. The debate was therefore limited to brief statements from the floor.
The Fidesz-KDNP parliamentary group leader, Anna Szepesfalvy, lamented the undignified situation and the accusation that they were trying to torpedo every agreement: “We do not want to ‘gag’ the Lord Mayor, but the city assembly has the right and the duty to set the direction in which Budapest should develop.” She said the dispute over the new parking fee collection system was not about the supremacy of the capital or standardisation, but about the distribution of revenue between the city and its districts.
Although this demand was initially formulated by eight district mayors from the left-liberal camp, Krisztina Baranyi (11th district) now made clear that it should have been the Lord Mayor who convened this extraordinary session. Nonetheless, she reiterated her firm position that it was undemocratic for the Budapest General Assembly not to have been informed about the development council’s proposals, let alone been able to deliberate on them. She then presented Karácsony with a bottle of Unicum as a symbol of the poor agreement reached with the government. (In 2014, a left-wing alliance admitted the DK of former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány into its ranks in order to unseat the Orbán government — something Karácsony described at the time as an uncomfortable political compromise that required him to swallow “a few Unicum bitters” to stomach the embarrassment.) The current Lord Mayor retorted that he had not needed to reach for a single Unicum since 2014.
Karácsony naturally defended the decision made in the FKT. In doing so, he pointed to the fact that the city assembly can send four members to the revived body (previously, the mayor held the prerogative over these personnel matters). The displacement of district mayors from the city assembly, he noted, was brought about by Fidesz through its electoral reform, which the city’s leader had sharply criticised from the outset. He promised to find the final decision on the implementation of the agreement reached in the development council with the involvement of the district mayors. The specific proposal will be put to a vote by the Budapest city assembly.
The faction leaders of Tisza and the Podmaniczky Movement commented on their rejection of the Fidesz-KDNP initiative by saying that the proposal was simply unlawful. Speaking on behalf of the smaller partner in the Tisza government, its Budapest faction leader József Gál said: “This proposal was nothing other than a continuation of the Orbán government’s policies by other means.”
Artificial intelligence was used for the translation of parts of the original German text.