HUNGARY'S ELECTIONS: SOMOGY COUNTY (C-RE6-00145)

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 BUDAPEST 000543

SIPDIS

SENSITIVE
SIPDIS

STATE PASS EUR/NCE MICHELLE LABONTE

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: KDEM PGOV PREL SOCI HU
SUBJECT: HUNGARY'S ELECTIONS: SOMOGY COUNTY (C-RE6-00145)

REF: STATE 22644

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Summary
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1. (U) This cable continues Embassy's pre-election coverage
from the provinces in the run-up to the April contest. On a
March 10 trip to Kaposvar, Somogy County, local contacts
described the city's electorate as inured to partisan
politics and somewhat anxious about bread-and-butter issues
such as job security and wages. With the election one month
away, Emboffs visited this small city of 70,000 to meet with
a range of local figures: a business leader, the local MSZP
party chief, a high-school principal, two FIDESZ
representives, and a clergyman.

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Background
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2. (U) Somogy County lies east of Zala County. Via the
newly-reopened Sarmellek airport, the county hopes to further
Lake Balaton's status as a tourist destination. Somogy
County is also home to the Taszar air base, used by NATO
during the Balkan wars. Local government covets Taszar for
its development potential, but the GOH is looking to
international investors for a capital infusion. Of Hungary's
8.1 million currently-registered voters, only 267,459 live in
Somogy County (2002 figure). Turnout in 2002 was 67.96
percent in the first round, somewhat below the national
average of 70.5 percent. Somogy will have eleven races:
five party-list constituencies and six individual
constituencies (Siofok, Balatonboglar, Marcali, Nagyatad and
two in Kaposvar). In one of Kaposvar's
individual-constituency races, voters gave MSZP Interior
Minister Monika Lamperth 44.22 percent of the vote, against
45.52 percent for her rival, FIDESZ's Karoly Szita. However,
Szita took the mayor's seat in Kaposvar, and Lamperth .
Szita has since been fingered as a communist-era case worker
who recruited agents for the secret police. In a February
2005 press conference in Kaposvar, top figures from the local
FIDESZ organization, including county party-list MP Dr. Marta
Matrai (Social and Family Affairs Committee Chair),declaring
their belief in "the power of love," threw their support
behind Szita, who is running once again for mayor. Of Somogy
County's eleven parliamentary seats, FIDESZ holds five, MSZP
three and MDF two (one seat remains vacant). (Note: In
Hungary's election system, parliamentary candidates may run
head-to-head against each other in individual constituencies;
run on a party's county list, or on a party's national list.
Together, the 176 individual constituencies, the 210
party-list constituencies in the counties and the 58 national
party-list slots return 376 members to Hungary's national
parliament.)

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Business Leader: SMEs Hard-Pressed, Unemployment Rife
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2. (SBU) The Somogy County president of the National
Association of Entrepreneurs Gabor Daxner is an engineer and
the CEO of VAEPSZER, a company founded in 1986. VAEPSZER
prepares sites for construction by draining excess water from
the ground. Daxner told Emboffs that small- and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs) were struggling in the face of
competition, and that the state should provide subsidies to
ease their plight. He said he would not expect such support
from a victorious MSZP. (Comment: A FIDESZ government may
find it difficult to fund such support.) Tenders lacked
transparency, according to Daxner, and the courts provided
insufficient recourse against abuses. At the same time, he
allowed that Kaposvar and the region were alive with
construction projects, thus creating opportunities for his
own business. Unemployment was a key issue in Somogy County,
he declared, and stated that he observed significant
long-term unemployment in the area. For example, he said,
local employers would hire workers from the local labor
office for three months minus one day, then go back and hire
new ones. (Note: Workers who stay on past the three-month
probationary period allowed by Hungarian law are much more
difficult for employers to let go.) Official unemployment
data, he insisted, reflected neither the true state of
unemployment in Hungary nor its broader demoralizing effect.
Against this backdrop, Daxner explained that party loyalties
are directly related to economics, with traditions of land
ownership and self-sufficiency among FIDESZ supporters and of
dependency on the state among socialists. (Comment: Given
FIDESZ's campaign promises of state support for SMEs, free
medicines for children and the elderly, and an additional

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month's pension, a better explanation for the party's support
among smallholders might be values-based.) (Note: Average
monthly wages for Somogy County's blue- and white-collar
workers are HUF 85,343 (USD 406) and HUF 164,547 (USD 784),
respectively. Those figures do not include unreported
income.)

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MSZP Leader on the Mayor's Mojo
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3. (U) Interior Minister Monika Lamperth's campaign manager
in Kaposvar, who doubles as the local MSZP party president,
Robert Zsoldos recounted for Emboffs the contrasting messages
by the two major parties. On recent visits to the city:
according to Zsoldos, PM Ferenc Gyurcsany spoke of plans for
Hungary's future and of its integration into Europe, while
FIDESZ leader Viktor Orban told voters they were worse off
than four years ago. On the local scene, Zsoldos described
the popularity of Mayor Karoly Szita (FIDESZ) as personal
rather than party-based. He claimed that Szita's alleged
past as a secret-police case worker had tarnished his appeal,
but admitted there were no local polls to demonstrate a drop
in his numbers. He confirmed that Lamperth was running
against FIDESZ vice-mayor Tamas Heintz in an
individual-constituency race. (Note: Szita is not running
nationally this time.) Zsoldos related how he had worked
with Lamperth in Budapest on MSZP's working group on local
government in 2001-2002. A local man, he loyally disputed
Emboffs' suggestion that Hungary's 3,200 local-government
bodies need consolidation. As homebodies, Kaposvar's
residents are not much interested in international issues,
said Zsoldos, and young people have little time for politics,
although MSZP was persisting in its outreach to youth.
Twenty-seven-year-old Zsoldos is himself younger than most
party activists in Hungary,

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Educator on Those Left Behind
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4. (U) Kaposvar's Mihaly Tancsics Gymnasium, a high school,
turns out the city's future elite. According to principal
Ferenc Reothy, some eighty percent of the institution's
students go on to university, and claimed many of the town's
leading lights among its alumni. Kaposvar's schools were
holding their own in the face of closures and social change,
said Reothy, and Mihaly Tancsics was attempting to build on
existing programs in western foreign languages and
information technology. Those hardest hit by change included
former collective-farm workers, many of whom continued to
live at the same location they always had, though there was
little left to stay for. The high school participates in a
nationwide scholarship program for disadvantaged youth, who
comprised some two percent of the school's student
population. Reothy stated that there were Roma children in
the program, although he could not say how many. (Note:
Under this program, eighth-grade students identified by their
teachers as disadvantaged --generally, because their parents
received an eighth-grade education or less-- are given a year
of catch-up training, scholarships and dorm housing in
preparation for onward education.) On bilateral issues, the
principal described positive attitudes toward the U.S.,
formed in part through contacts with U.S. personnel formerly
stationed at Taszar Air Base. (Note: Reothy is also a
member of a foreign-relations board based at city hall.) On
the local scene, Reothy characterized Kaposvar residents as
uninterested in "ideology."

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FIDESZ Contacts Vow Pluck and Gumption
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5. (SBU) In conversation with Emboffs, Kaposvar vice-mayor
Tibor Juhasz (FIDESZ) described himself as a strong supporter
of Viktor Orban, and frequently invoked his leader's name
(e.g., "as Viktor Orban has said"). Together with Kaposvar
FIDESZ president Gergely Jako, he presented a much harder
line than Zala County MP Peter Cseresnyes on foreign affairs.
The Russian President's apology for 1956 was not conspicuous
enough, in Juhasz's view, and his "refusal" to meet with
Viktor Orban in a one-on-one meeting was a mistake. In
Juhasz's recounting, the Russians realized that they needed
some kind of meeting with Hungary's possible next prime
minister and went forward with an event involving all four
party leaders. The vice-mayor then told Emboffs that
"Hungarians were waiting, waiting for the Americans to come"
in 1956, and that the U.S. should understand FIDESZ's
December 2004 decision not to support mandate extension for
the country's transport battalion under Operation Iraqi

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Freedom in that context. The vice-mayor also faulted MSZP
for failing to support the Hungarian military. (Note:
FIDESZ contacts often contrast the 1.75 percent of GDP
devoted to the military in 2002, the party's last year in
government, with the current figure of 1.18 percent.) U.S.
visa policy toward Hungary was also misguided, he told
Emboffs. (Note: Juhasz stated that he had relatives in Ohio
who had been to visit Hungary, but he had not returned the
favor.) Moreover, under Viktor Orban, a new GOH would be
more assertive in promoting the rights of ethnic Hungarians
abroad. "We're not talking about border revisions," Juhasz
expressly articulated, but neither would Hungary hesitate to
stand up to its neighbors. On other topics, our hosts
complained of MSZP control over state media, and neither
local figure was convinced of the necessity of local
government reform.

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Cleric: Churches Face Some Unfair Criticism from Left
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6. (U) Mild-mannered Father Laszlo Varga has served as a
priest in Kaposvar for thirteen years. He stated that the
local church did not truck with political subjects, and
received no funding from the FIDESZ-run city government --
rather, from parishoners and the bishops' conference. He
observed that, after World War II, state expropriations
deprived the Church of much of its wealth. Father Laszlo saw
no involvement in politics on the part of the national
Catholic radio station, except when "the left unfairly
criticizes the Church." He told Emboffs of cordial relations
with other churches in town, and of coordination on local
charity projects, including consultations with the local Roma
minority self government. He noted that the city's Roma did
not always receive the social services and public support
payments provided for by law. Within his own congregation,
he stated that a significant number of young families was
turning to the Catholic faith for community and spiritual
succor. (Note: Of Hungary's "traditional" Christian
churches --Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist-- the Catholic
Church is the strongest in both Zala and Somogy Counties, and
is also the largest nationwide.)

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Comment
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7. (SBU) Although Kaposvar is visibly more prosperous than
the only slightly smaller Nagykanizsa in neighboring Zala
County, many of our contacts spoke in discouraged tones.
Even the most optimistic among our interlocutors described
locals as "homebodies" little concerned with the mayor's
secret-police past. The rejection of "ideology" in politics,

SIPDIS
described by an older contact, also sounds typical of an
older electorate reared on the sloganeering of a one-party
state. Budapest's political bickering thus has little
resonance in the provinces. The mayor in Kaposvar is thus
likely to hang onto his seat, despite his past.


8. (U) Visit U.S. Embassy Budapest's classified website:
www.state.sgov.gov/p/eur/budapest/index.cfm
REEKER