A Hungarian village with some 1,600 inhabitants has again made headlines in the national press due to the landslide mayoral election victory of István László Mészáros, candidate of the ruling Hungarian Fidesz-KDNP coalition.
Origo.hu reports that normally municipal by-elections only make headlines if they are held in swing cities, but Felcsút garners special attention because this is the village where prime minister Viktor Orbán (born May 31, 1963 in the nearby city of Székesfehérvár) grew up and for a long time had a property there.
The by-election was triggered by the April resignation of the previous mayor, Lőrinc Mészáros, also of the ruling coalition. If the fact that the previous mayor and the ultimately winning candidate’s surnames were identical wasn’t baffling enough for the voters, joke political party the Hungarian Two-tailed Dog Party also ran a candidate with the same surname.
The vote tally showed that Fidesz’s Mészáros received 535 of the 615 valid votes while the “two-tailed” Mészáros won 66.
There were two other municipal by-elections on the same Sunday, in the small northeast Hungarian town of Balmazújváros and in the western Hungarian village of Sorkikápolna, near the Austrian border. Both were won by independent candidates.
