I may have used that poor pun before, but to hell with it.
So, this weekend I get to vote in the local elections here. I do firmly believe in all this voting stuff, even though I don't think I've ever voted for someone who's actually won in my entire life. But that's by the by, and is the way the democracy works. My vote might never have counted but it counted that I voted. I think. I'm telling myself that anyway.
The trouble is that while I want to vote this weekend I have no idea of who is standing and what they stand for. The election advertising is the pure preserve of the Hungarian parties who are guaranteed to be the only ones actually getting elected. I say parties because this year there are seemingly 3 such parties. The well known and all powerful (round here anyway) RMDSZ (or UMDR to give them their Romanian acronym), who hold all the cards and all the seats and pretty much run Harghita County as a one party state. Then there is the MPP which is a party which appeared about 5 years ago and are fully funded and supported by FIDESZ (the governing party in Hungary). Now FIDESZ are a bunch of obnoxious right wing scumbags, so I am just assuming that MPP are just as shit). There is also some other party who are called something like the Erdelyi Magyar Neppart, about whom I know absolutely fuck all. Their website is very coy on policies, and basically just tells you news about where they've been and what they've been up to, so it's difficult to know what their ideology is, but I have my suspicions.
Essentially I have no interest in voting for any party which makes nationality a central part of its identity/platform. Not because I'm not Hungarian, but because I feel that elections and politics ought to be about ideas and projects and proposals and manifestos rather than ethnicity.
In other nationalist news, I have recently discovered that here in Harghita County at least, the PDL, a party which seems to go further and further right with every passing week have formed an electoral alliance here with the PRM. Now the PRM are the far right, real hardcore nationalist scum (next to whom even the MPP look like a bastion of enlightenment). I hope people are made aware of this alliance when it comes to elections elsewhere in the country. There can be no excuse for getting into bed with the PRM and there ought to be a lot of people in the PDL who are ashamed of this fact. But I bet they don't care.
But the above information aside, I have no idea who is standing here. There is an electoral alliance nationally between the PNL (a party who I used to quite like) and the PSD (a party who I think are a bunch of corrupt and deeply untrustworthy wankers), and that's about all I can tell you. Searching Hungarian and Romanian language websites as much as I can has thrown up nothing regarding who I could vote for and support in these elections.
Can anyone help? Any parties standing in Harghita/Ciuc which advocate an end to nationalist rhetoric, a liberal social policy, enlightened (by which I mean broadly left wing and anti-austerity) economic policies, and a sense of environmental awareness? The Green party in Romania seems to be the best bet nationally, but their own website doesn't offer up any clarity over where they are actually putting up candidates locally (or at least if it does I can't find it)
I feel democratically thwarted.
So, this weekend I get to vote in the local elections here. I do firmly believe in all this voting stuff, even though I don't think I've ever voted for someone who's actually won in my entire life. But that's by the by, and is the way the democracy works. My vote might never have counted but it counted that I voted. I think. I'm telling myself that anyway.
The trouble is that while I want to vote this weekend I have no idea of who is standing and what they stand for. The election advertising is the pure preserve of the Hungarian parties who are guaranteed to be the only ones actually getting elected. I say parties because this year there are seemingly 3 such parties. The well known and all powerful (round here anyway) RMDSZ (or UMDR to give them their Romanian acronym), who hold all the cards and all the seats and pretty much run Harghita County as a one party state. Then there is the MPP which is a party which appeared about 5 years ago and are fully funded and supported by FIDESZ (the governing party in Hungary). Now FIDESZ are a bunch of obnoxious right wing scumbags, so I am just assuming that MPP are just as shit). There is also some other party who are called something like the Erdelyi Magyar Neppart, about whom I know absolutely fuck all. Their website is very coy on policies, and basically just tells you news about where they've been and what they've been up to, so it's difficult to know what their ideology is, but I have my suspicions.
Essentially I have no interest in voting for any party which makes nationality a central part of its identity/platform. Not because I'm not Hungarian, but because I feel that elections and politics ought to be about ideas and projects and proposals and manifestos rather than ethnicity.
In other nationalist news, I have recently discovered that here in Harghita County at least, the PDL, a party which seems to go further and further right with every passing week have formed an electoral alliance here with the PRM. Now the PRM are the far right, real hardcore nationalist scum (next to whom even the MPP look like a bastion of enlightenment). I hope people are made aware of this alliance when it comes to elections elsewhere in the country. There can be no excuse for getting into bed with the PRM and there ought to be a lot of people in the PDL who are ashamed of this fact. But I bet they don't care.
But the above information aside, I have no idea who is standing here. There is an electoral alliance nationally between the PNL (a party who I used to quite like) and the PSD (a party who I think are a bunch of corrupt and deeply untrustworthy wankers), and that's about all I can tell you. Searching Hungarian and Romanian language websites as much as I can has thrown up nothing regarding who I could vote for and support in these elections.
Can anyone help? Any parties standing in Harghita/Ciuc which advocate an end to nationalist rhetoric, a liberal social policy, enlightened (by which I mean broadly left wing and anti-austerity) economic policies, and a sense of environmental awareness? The Green party in Romania seems to be the best bet nationally, but their own website doesn't offer up any clarity over where they are actually putting up candidates locally (or at least if it does I can't find it)
I feel democratically thwarted.
Posts
8 comments:
Which Green Party? there are a bunch of them.
There's the Ecologist Party (PER), which is quite odd: they claim to be ecologist, but support everything that can destroy the environment: in the early 1990s they wanted to import nuclear waste for long-term storage here, now they support the Roșia Montană project. They probably can be easily bribed, I guess, so if you want a Green Party to support your polluting project, call them.
Then there's the Partidul Verde. At one time, they had Remus Cernea as president, but they kicked him out after they "realized" that he's "a Satanist and an Atheist" (the proof that he's a satanist was a photo of him getting an autograph from Salman Rushdie on a copy of "Satanic Verses") who also "filled the party with homos". In any case, I've seen that one candidate promises more parking spaces. Green parking spaces, I guess.
And the last one is Remus Cernea's current party, "Green Movement - Democratic Agrarians", which is currently allied with USL and Cernea is in the government.
Ah, you see I was living in the past, Bogdan and remembering the days before the Partidul Verde turned into the People's Popular Front of Judea.
I liked Cernea. I have problems with the USL though.
I have now found a list of candidates and I am left with a choice of:
UDMR, MPP, EMN, USL, UDL, Dan Diaconescu's bunch or independents, the most prominent of which is the fucking idiot Csibi Barna.
I guess this time round I don;t vote
I have the same problem. I would usually vote PNL, but as they have no candidate in my sector (the USL candidate is from the PSD, which by the sound of things you hate as much as I do) I have nobody to vote for.
I'm just curious: as a foreigner, to which elections are you allow to vote? Just for the local one, or also for the Parliament?
Local and European. Not national.
I think that's true of any EU citizen in any EU country other than their own.
Hi Andy,
Tough task, isn't it?
But I was thinking at what you've written about MPP. I honestly don't believe they are any better than PRM. Two hardcore nationalist parties, how on earth do you expect one to be even sligthly enlightened than the other? Unless you are biased and you find the Hungarian nationalist slur and provocative actions to be more acceptable than the Romanian ones. Which I think you're not. :)
Anyways, from the bunch you are left with, I would still go with UDMR, if I were you.
Good luck if you decide to vote!
Camy
Using phrases like "obnoxious right wing scumbags" is very revealing about you.
At first sight I thought I'd read your blog.
You see I thought I'd got away with my subtle editorialising and managed to pass it off as entirely even-handed reportage, but I can see you're more than a match for me, my anonymous friend. Hats off.
FIDESZ are right wing, I presume we can agree on that.
FIDESZ are scumbags. Well Orban Viktor is, and as the most high profile member of them, I may be guilty of tarring the whole party by association, but as they appear willing to go along with all his scumbaggery, I reckon that is close.
Obnoxious is a little bit more in the eye of the beholder, I agree. But in the eye of this beholder, "obnoxious right wing scumbags" is actually a fairly mild description of FIDESZ.
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