The Orbán cabinet to drastically change electoral laws again?

In the next parliamentary elections, at least 71 independent deputies in 14 separate counties will be needed for a party to set up a national list of deputies. All this was proposed in the Committee on Justice by independent MP János Volner and supported by the Fidesz-KDNP coalition.

Today independent deputy János Volner has proposed a new modification of election laws that is supported by the governing coalition. The proposition would further limit the possibilities of setting up a national list – writes telex.hu who was informed by László Sebián-Petrovszki, a parliamentary deputy of the party DK and member of the Committee on Justice. He said that the deputies of the coalition unilaterally voted to accept the proposition, meaning that 8 of them voted yes and the four opposition deputies present at the session voted no.

The proposition of János Volner would limit future elections as only those parties would be able to set up a national party list who had managed to give an independent deputy in at least 14 counties plus the capital and in 71 independent electoral districts.

All this basically means that in case the 2/3 of the parliament votes for accepting this package that modifies the electoral laws, opposition parties will have neither the chance nor the possibility to set up their own separate party list during the next elections in 2022. Moreover, several small but existing parties will be unable to set up a list without naming at least one candidate in districts where oppositional candidates have a higher chance to win.

This news is extremely interesting since Gergely Gulyás, Minister of the PMs Office denied two weeks ago that the government tries to limit the chances of opposition parties to set up their own lists own their options to cooperate. In reality, however, the modification proposed two weeks ago, apart from some technical improvements, would indeed change a crucial point of the process, thus making it more challenging to set up a national list.

According to the modification, “a party list can be set up by a party that is able  – at least in 9 counties and in the capital – to give one independent representative at least in 50 individual electoral districts” in the future.

Currently, parties have to choose a candidate in 27 districts; this number would have been increased to 50.

According to the government, the reason for this change is to make it more difficult for parties to acquire funds supporting their electoral campaign and to avoid fake parties to obtain these funds.

Telex already wrote about the possibilities given to opposition parties. Theoretically, the acceptance of the modification still would have meant that the cooperation among opposition parties would have been able to set up two independent lists: a list of MSZP – DK – Párbeszéd with 53-53 independent candidates, and another one of Jobbik – Momentum – LMP, however, the execution of this idea would have been much harder even in this situation. But the setting up of two separate lists in this system demanding 71 independent candidates seems absolutely impossible without the candidates of the same cooperation going up against each other.

Electoral expert, László Róbert of Political Capital wrote a quick summary on how the new changes can turn into something even more brutal: ”It is almost sure that recent and further changes will come to which we will pay even less attention. But those will probably be politically even more relevant. For instance, the redrawing of the electoral map. And we will not know who’s goals that will help to achieve.“

Read alsoGovernment: Election law changes needed to repress “fake parties”

Source: telex.hu