The Dumbest Thing You Can Say During a Campaign

Hungary will be holding its parliamentary elections in just seven and a half months. In the United States, seven and a half months before a general election is prime campaign season, right around Super Tuesday in the primaries. In Hungary, things had been a lot quieter—until some comments from the leading opposition party TISZA Vice Chair Zoltán Tarr cast a stone into the pond.

Tarr spoke at a campaign event in Etyek, Hungary on Wednesday, 27 August. At the time, news had just broken of a supposed leaked plan by TISZA to raise the income tax if they were to get into power next year. However, given that it was nothing but a supposed leak reported on by the Hungarian news site Index, it did not have all that great an impact on the campaign. At least that was the case initially, but Vice Chair Tarr made sure to pour some fuel on the fledgling fire. At the campaign event, he said:

‘I don’t know who is recording this. If I say something now, it can be sliced together in a way that leads to our failure in the election. I’ll say it anyway, because it is educational—but I won’t tell you everything, because if I did, we would fail…This is a question that needs to be discussed. We cannot discuss it right now. Although now, among us, we naturally can. And if this gets out to the public, I will have to explain myself. So, we can discuss this among ourselves, but otherwise we cannot talk about this. There are countless other things that we cannot talk about. That is why we very firmly say that even though there are a lot of things that we could or should do, we need to win the election first, and then we can do anything.’

So, if we just focus on the meatiest bit of that quote—‘I won’t tell you everything, because if I did, we would fail’—this is the Vice Chair of a party admitting that he has information about his party’s plan that, if the public knew about it, would cause such a loss of support that it would make sure they lose the election.

There is no context that would rationalize that statement. It is essentially a high representative of a party saying: ‘Boy, if you guys knew what we are planning to do, you wouldn’t vote for us. So let’s not reveal it before the election.’ And the funny thing is, this was not a leaked audio. This was clipped from a video of a public panel discussion, posted by the TISZA campaign event’s official YouTube channel, and it is still up.

Understandably, Tarr was nowhere to be found after the Hungarian news media picked up his bizarre statements. He did not even attend the session for the Committee on Culture and Education in the European Parliament, despite being a sitting MEP, as some Hungarian reporters were waiting for him even in Brussels, Belgium to ask him about his scandal.

The Prime Ministerial candidate for TISZA, Péter Magyar, has commented on the scandal. However, he could not avoid putting his foot in his mouth either. Talking to 24.hu, he complained that the infamous clip of his Vice Chair is deceptively edited, and urged journalists to listen till the end for proper context. When asked what those statements made by Tarr at the end of the discussion were that gave proper context, Magyar immediately admitted that he himself never saw the full video…

We don’t really know how serious the TISZA party is about winning the election in 2026. After all, when two by-elections were held early this year for vacant parliamentary seats, they did not even bother fielding a candidate in either. At other times, on the other hand, their surrogates speak of an election victory with a certainty that is no way guaranteed, given that they lost the EP election to Fidesz by 15 points in June 2024.

This new scandal about Vice Chair Tarr’s statements at a campaign event certainly did not help their case. It is reminiscent of the time when the opposition coalition’s Prime Ministerial candidate in 2022, Péter Márki-Zay, boasted that his coalition was so diverse it had all people from fascists to communists. The Fidesz campaign made great use of that clip leading up to the election.

Although not solely because of that clip, the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election results turned out to be a lot better than expected for the long-reigning Fidesz–KDNP coalition. They won the popular vote by 19 points, and secured their fourth consecutive constitutional supermajority in the National Assembly.

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