Socialist Party prime ministerial candidate Laszlo Botka resigned on October 2 after failing to forge a cooperation between fragmented leftwing opposition parties. 

With just six months to go before the general election, Hungary’s opposition parties are now in complete disarray and their failure to cooperate is likely to result in another landslide victory for the governing parties, the third since sweeping into power in 2010. The radical nationalist Jobbik party has also sought to capitalise on Botka's failure to unite the opposition. 

“The political mafia wove a net around the democratic opposition including regrettably my own party as well. I had arrived to unseat this regime and accepted the prime ministerial candidacy for this goal,” Botka wrote in his resignation statement.

“Regrettably, others, considerable opposition – and to me particularly painfully – Socialist forces, do not want to unseat the present regime but live with it. A fragmented and disunited democratic opposition cannot unseat the regime.”

The ruling Fidesz party changed the electoral system prior to the 2014 elections, reducing the number of seats in the one-chamber legislature from 386 to 199 and replacing a two-round with a one-round system. 

The majority of seats, 106, are elected as single-member districts, while the remaining 93 are distributed proportionally by regional list vote with a national threshold of 5%. Opposition parties only stand a chance against the government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban if they unite behind a single candidate in the 106 districts, political scientists have said.

The Socialists, as the biggest opposition party on the left, took up the role of unifying the fragmented opposition landscape and would have given up on 49% of the spaces on the party’s list to another six opposition parties.

Botka, whose candidacy was unanimously supported by a party congress vote in May, set out the goal to forge a coalition of half a dozen parties but most of them rejected his latest offer.

Fellow opposition leaders criticised Botka after the news of his resignation broke. A Democratic Coalition spokesperson told a press conference that the Socialists were wrong to cause “such a disruption” so soon before the election, and accused Botka of failing to communicate with other opposition parties or win over voters. 

The latest polls by Median showed that support for the Socialists fell to a 25-year low in September, at just 9% among decided voters and 7% among all voters. Fidesz has increased its support compared to the previous poll prepared in June, standing at 36% among all voters and 55% among decided voters.

Support for radical nationalist Jobbik remained almost unchanged from June at 12% among all voters and dropped from 21% to 16% among decided voters.

Responding to Botka’s resignation, Jobbik leader Gábor Vona claimed his party was now the only alternative to Orban in the upcoming election. “If you want a change in government, Jobbik is your choice. Votes cast for any other party will be lost and ultimately help Orbán,” he said.