Whatever happens in Hungary on Sunday…

A look at the organizing lessons behind the 2022 Hungarian election

A slide from a presentation at the 2018 Citizen Participation University, where organizers dug deep on questions related to their work and engaging with the political process.

March 29, 2022

For the European Community Organizing Network, the current Hungarian election started in 2017…in Slovakia. In November of that year, ECON gathered organizers in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia just two weeks after a unified opposition had managed to oust Marian Kotleba as the governor of the region. With the dust still settling on the election, European organizers — including a large contingent from Hungary — had a chance to “look under the hood” of the Slovak organizer’s election effort.

“For the European Community Organizing Network, the current Hungarian election started in 2017…in Slovakia.”

In 2013, Marian Kotleba, the leader of People’s Party Our Slovakia, a neo-Nazi party, had won election as governor of the region with 55% of the vote. The region where Kotleba won is one of the poorest in Slovakia. It also contains just under a quarter of all the Roma communities in the entire country. Kotleba’s success at mobilizing rural voters with, among other things, an openly anti-Roma message, was a shock to the system.

The Banská Bystrica region is also home to one of the longest running community organizing initiatives in Europe. Starting in the early 2000’s, the Center for Community Organizing, or CKO, had been patiently building a base of support in the lower middle-class neighborhoods full of post-war, prefabricated housing.

It was this social base that allowed the Center for Community Organizing to play a decisive role in convening and holding together a coalition of opposition forces when Marian Kotleba ran for reelection in 2017. It was also the social capital that gave CKO the ability to convene the opposition candidates vying to replace Kotleba and negotiate a deal with their campaigns: whichever candidates are behind by a certain date would agree to drop out and support the front-runner.

In all of this work, CKO never endorsed a candidate. However, their position in the community — won through years of community organizing — allowed them to exercise real political power at the moment when it counted most.

ECON convened organizers in Slovakia in 2017 for a peer-to-peer training. It was the first of three such trainings over a year which allowed Slovak and Hungarian organizers learn from each other’s experiences of making organizing interventions into the political process.

Supporting peer-to-peer learning

The training that ECON organized in November of 2017 was the first of three peer-to-peer learning sessions designed to bring together Slovak organizers from CKO and Hungarian organizers from the Civil College Foundation. The several months that followed represented critical inflection points in the development of both organizations.

“Digging into the question of politics, in one exercise participants lined up on a spectrum in the room to indicate where they stood — agree or disagree — on the statement, ‘engaging in the political process is a natural extension of our organizing work…’”

Besides studying the mechanics of the recent local election, the organizers who met in Banská Bystrica also discussed the challenges of scaling up their work. Many of them were involved in running organizing efforts across various regions and geographies. They were asking themselves how to practically and concretely knit these campaigns and these local leaders together into something bigger than a loose network of mostly-disconnected local initiatives. Realizing that many of their leaders also carried in them the biases and prejudices of the society around them, they were also struggling with how to build anti-racism and anti-discriminatory training into their work.

Digging into the question of politics, in one exercise participants lined up on a spectrum in the room to indicate where they stood — agree or disagree — on the statement, “engaging in the political process is a natural extension of our organizing work…” Recognizing the national structure of politics in many countries, they also debated whether the place to target these interventions was at the local level. The debate was rich, and the themes that emerged would follow the evolution in these organizers’ practice for the next years to come.

Organizers at the ECON peer-to-peer training engage in a debate on the question, “Is engaging in the political process a natural extension of our organizing work?”

A tale of two political moments

A few months later, in April, this same group of Hungarian and Slovak organizers gathered in Budapest. The 2018 Hungarian parliamentary elections had just taken place. Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party had just won handily, retaining its two-thirds majority in the national parliament. The Hungarian organizers were crest-fallen. They had poured their hearts into organizing a non-partisan voter mobilization drive, but the divided state of the opposition, combined with changes to the election law instituted by Orban’s bloc in parliament, meant that their efforts were far from having the kind of power needed to affect change at the national level.

“The [Hungarian] organizers had executed a long-developed plan, but they had lost. They were left to ask themselves how they could ‘lose forward’ — in other words, what experience could they apply to future efforts? What infrastructure had they left behind for the next fight?”

In the same few months, Slovakia was rocked by a major political crisis. It sparked the largest protests the country had seen since the Velvet Revolution, and it eventually led to the resignation of the Prime Minister and his cabinet. These events sparked with the murder of a journalist who had been covering corruption and mafia ties within the Slovak government. He and his fiancé were executed in cold-blood in their home, and the government was at first slow to respond in any meaningful way.

So on March 9, 2018 a wave of unrest exploded, resulting in forty eight separate protests happening in communities all over the nation. The organizers from the Center for Community Organizing found themselves suddenly thrust into the national coordination team of a movement that was sweeping the country.

In the few months that elapsed between the first and the second of ECON’s peer-to-peer trainings, a tale of two political moments in Hungary and Slovakia unfolded. In Hungary, they had been working in a pre-planned election, the results of which were not surprising (even if they were heart-breaking). The organizers had executed a long-developed plan, but they had lost. They were left to ask themselves how they could “lose forward” — in other words, what experience could they apply to future efforts? What infrastructure had they left behind for the next fight?

Coming out of their victory against Marian Kotleba, the organizers in Slovakia had been focussed on consolidating their power at the local and regional level after a period of rapid acceleration. But an unexpected political crisis pushed them even farther to start imagining their work at a completely new, national scale. In their case, they had to figure out how to “win forward” — to take their unexpected success in forcing change in the national government and to leverage that into a new orientation towards organizational growth.

At the 2018 Citizen Participation University, ECON invited Zagreb je Naš to speak to about their municpalist strategy to build political power at the city level. In 2021, Zagreb je Naš won the mayoral election in the city.

Encouraging organizers to take their “first step” into political action

For ECON’s part, we were also looking for other ways to advance the connection between local organizing and the potential for realizing greater political influence. This was not a case of dropping everything and running for office, or forming a political party, or even endorsing politics in a traditional sense.

Rather, we wanted to explore what a “community organizing approach” to the political process might look like. This was important because for many years organizers have been taught that “organizing is not political.” But as we argue in our new study, The Power of Organizing, “…organizing puts people and ideas in motion, it challenges existing power relationships, and it has the ability to change policy. So while community organizing may not be a partisan activity, it is certainly political.”

“For organizers the task at hand is to set the terms of politics on ground that is favorable to our work and the communities where we seek to build power.”

For organizers the task at hand is to set the terms of politics on ground that is favorable to our work and the communities where we seek to build power. So in 2018, ECON sought to support organizers to think of the work they were doing and to imagine what taking a “first step” into political action might look like. We offered small grants to support these projects and in the summer of 2018 we organized further training at our 2018 Citizen Participation University, which takes place every year at the training facility of the Civil College Foundation in Hungary.

At the CPU we invited leaders of Zagreb je Naš to share about their work building a muncipalist platform in Croatia. (Zagreb je Naš won the mayorship of Zagreb in 2021). We organized a seminar at the CPU with the European Anti-Poverty Network on the barriers that people in poverty experience to getting involved in politics. We also convened several national representatives of the OPEN Network to talk about the ways that digital campaigning and grassroots organizing can work together and increase the scale of our work. And we culminated the event with a role-playing simulation exercise aimed at getting participants to think about planning their own organizing intervention into the political process.

“Key concepts” from an ECON training on organizing and political action in Romania in 2018.

Organizing is a long-term process

We say this all the time, but when one looks at the arc of this story we see what the time involved in organizing means in real terms. ECON seeks to support organizers to develop their practice in ways that make sense for their time, place, and conditions. Organizing does not stand still, and the evolution of the organizers in Hungary and Slovakia related to the political processes in their respective countries speaks to how things change, and how organizers are constantly learning from one another to adapt their practice.

The coming elections in Hungary are a major stepping stone in this growth trajectory. In the amazing work being led by the Hungarian organizers on the ground, one can see the roots of so many earlier conversations, debates, and experiments from years before.

“…the organizers in Hungary are developing important civic infrastructure and building real power. This is what organizing is all about.”

So while we don’t know what will happen on Sunday — and while we recognize that the war in Ukraine has introduced a completely new and unpredictable variable into the mix — the Hungarian organizers behind this effort have every reason to be proud of what they are building. No matter what the outcome of the election is, the organizers in Hungary are developing important civic infrastructure and building real power. This is what organizing is all about.