Gergely Kovacs, Candidate for Local Mayor

Dear Expats living here in the 12th district,

As you may be aware, mayoral and municipal elections will be held shortly, on the 9th of June. I would like to introduce myself and my plan as I’m one of the candidates for local mayor in the 12th district. I have won 61% of the votes at the pre-election in April, so I will be the one from the opposition running for the mayorship against Mrs Fonti who is a member of the reigning Fidesz party. She’s been the deputy of the resigning, current Mr Pokorni for 14 years. The current leadership, reigning since 2006, have been becoming less and less popular throughout the years because of the way they have been dealing with the district and its residents. We can’t really expect any changes or improvement if she gets elected.

Introduction

I’m Gergely Kovacs, a local citizen, living in Csilleberc and the co-president of the MKKP party. I’ve been a board member at the council for 5 years. During my work I had to face the fact that things are not going well under the control of the Fidesz party mayor with his board majority at our council. The current leadership doesn’t listen to the residents, avoids involving them in major decisions and assists to shady businesses. Residents’ problems are not heard, decisions are made against their will and they are actively collaborating in favour of developers connected to the government party at the expense of the district. Many of the scandalous cases I have found were published by the press nation-wide.

If you would like to share your opinion about improvements you think are important, please fill this short, anonymous form or send me an email to kovacs.gergely@mkkp.hu

12th district form for non-Hungarian speakers

Our achievements so far

I have a very long list of what we have been doing here in the past 5 years. Our party is mostly famous for acting instead of promising. If we can’t repair it, we make it flashy. Some say that we are only good at street art, meaning painting benches and bus stops, but I’ve been the most active board member of the council, bringing corruption and wrongdoing of the mayor and his deputy public. Although, making your neighbourhood nicer is just as important. You might have noticed a couple of our actions, you just might have not known it was us. These are the ones you probably have seen, they were all performed involving the local residents:

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Here is a shorter extract of my plan, concentrating on the main problems that you probably have or will encounter while living here. The link to my detailed plan is at the bottom of this page.

Potholes, overall road conditions and safety

Problem: As you likely have noticed, road conditions are disastrous, even a Range Rover could meet challenges when driving in this district. And if you don’t have one, your car’s suspension is likely to be damaged. Crossings are not properly highlighted, parking places are not clearly designated. The 30-year old traffic order needs to be adjusted to the current, different/increased traffic (for example change two-way narrow roads to one-way, or eliminate parking places to keep the two-way traffic). The municipality has either not dealt with this area, or when they have, they’ve repaired irrelevant, low traffic streets, even though the finances of the district could have allowed them to do more. This is among the most important problems, I have received lots of complaints from the local citizens about this. 

Solution: Repairing road and pavement surfaces, including indicative road markings, making crossings safer is one of the first actions we plan to do. The municipality does have the funds to do so, they just simply didn’t take action, but I’d like to start these as soon as possible.

Communicative, responsive, interactive municipality 

Problem: The webpage, social media pages and the local newspaper operated by the council is unfortunately an exclusive propaganda of the Mayor and the governing party Fidesz, suggesting that everything is perfect, there are no problems at all. Residents’ problems are not heard and not dealt with, complaints and criticism are covered up except in certain cases when the outrage of the locals becomes too loud and public. Residents “can” express their problems once a year at the annual public hearing, but they are not taken into account in decision-making. In addition, foreigners living here are completely excluded from this. The whole webpage and digital operation of the municipality and its services are technologically very backward, they need significant improvement. The local “Hegyvidek” newspaper and TV does not allow board members from the opposition parties to express their plans, visions or opinions on local cases at all, although they are representing the residents in their electoral zones within our district. They are neither introduced before or after the election in order to inform the residents who they can vote for and later who they can turn to if they have questions or complaints.

Solution: We would like to make the official webpage interactive where the questions and reported problems of public interest, along with the responses are public, so you might not even need to ask a question if you see the same or similar question to yours. The printed version of the local newspaper has been delivered to the mailboxes for decades, not considering the digital era, so very few people read it, most of them end up in the bin unread. We’d like to make a survey if the printed version is needed at all, if yes, it will be delivered to only those who request so, avoiding producing rubbish unnecessarily. The council should ask the residents’ opinion through surveys more often, especially before major decisions and the results of the surveys should be public. And of course, the decision should reflect their opinion. We also plan to integrate an English/Hungarian chat service on the website for urgent questions and problems.

Voluntary involvement of residents, including foreigners

Problem: The volunteering potential of the locals is totally unused by the council at the moment. The council responds to social requests slowly and only when it’s necessary. Our first-hand experience is that the wealthier locals come and help for the first call. They willingly donate food or equipment (TV, washing machine, computers and many other type of things) whenever we just post it on social media.

Solution: Local people should be notified and involved to participate in more social activities. When Covid broke out we quickly organised help for the elderly and people in need, only by involving local citizens. We went shopping for groceries and medicine for them, walked their dogs and even made a program called “The district is cooking for the poverty-stricken”. The locals cooked a couple of extra portions at home, other locals collected and delivered them. We’ve been in touch with the people in need living here ever since and only a facebook post is usually enough to get a laptop or a TV for someone who couldn’t afford a new one when the old one died. Imagine, if we could do that on a higher level, backed up by the council’s social welfare department and a storage facility where we could collect and distribute these items.

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Foreigner friendly environment

Problem: There aren’t really any public spaces for the locals with regular activities for children, the elderly, or foreigners provided for free use by the council. The only few ones are not being used regularly and the activities are controlled and not effectively promoted. NGOs are poorly supported by the current local leadership.

Solution: There are many empty commercial premises owned by the council. Some are in bad condition, but not all of them. Some of them are empty because of their location, so renting them to profit based companies is not an option. We would like to involve many more NGO’s by letting them use these empty spaces with a discounted rent and provide their programs with funds if these programs are about activities and help for the locals. A few examples: 

• Cultural, art programs
• Learning/teaching programs for kids and adults including language programs where local foreigners and Hungarians can attend, learning about each other cultures, get to know each other (like multilingual playhouse for children, chat clubs, etc)
• Giving space for regular national activities organised by local foreigners to meet each other from the same nation
• Financial support by tender for activities to help the local foreigners develop and maintain their own community in the district  

And many more….

There are many more problems with how the current, but resigning mayor, Mr Pokorni and his deputy, Mrs Fonti (now running for mayorship) have been doing wrong for more than a decade. If you didn’t get bored reading, here’s some more reading.

Construction and preservation of green areas 

Government-sponsored oligarchs have begun massive construction efforts in the last few years to build countless luxury residences, private clubs, office buildings in the district, being blatantly supported by the mayor, and the Fidesz-majority council. They are exterminating acres upon acres of green areas, once home to a diverse group of flora and fauna, now replaced by towering blocks of flats. Aside from the ecological disaster that this is causing, it is also disastrous for the decades-, or even century-old sewage system in the area, that simply cannot support the hundreds of new bathrooms being installed, leading to overflows and other issues. Traffic in the district is also negatively affected by the hundreds of people moving in, bringing their cars with them. The main roads in the area, once seeing only a moderate amount of traffic, have become completely gridlocked in certain hours of the day. Projects such as these must be completely stopped, and the remaining green areas must be placed under protection.

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Public procurements 

Hundreds of millions got lost by the overpriced bids, by invitational tenders, inviting the same old companies. The procedure is legal, but directed, ending up with an overpriced deal instead of the best possible one. Based on my report sent to the Integrity Authority, they have imposed a fine already and they suggested the council should avoid using this method. After that I tabled a motion on this, but it was voted down by the Fidesz board majority. We plan to introduce a transparent and fair practice where there is real competition among the applicants and the best offer will win.

Property sales

 Last year, the local municipality sold HUF 1 billion worth of property, and this year they plan to sell for another HUF 2 billion. Most of the properties are sold at below their value in directed sales where only the singled out buyer can sign the contract. The sales weren’t advertised properly, biddings are not public and the price is based on a single valuation. We will try to avoid selling out the estate of the district but if we rarely decided to do so, it will be more public and more transparent.

Other matters

Our full plan also includes further topics, like families and children; helping the elderly; littering; social welfare and health matters; responsible pet ownership, involving the non-Hungarian speaking residents, too.

My whole, detailed program in Hungarian can be found here, you can read it with an online translator.  If you live here permanently and are involved in politics, it’s a very informative and long read. 

Plan of MKKP Party for the 12th district in Budapest

If you would like to share your opinion about improvements you think are important, please fill this short, anonymous form:

12th district form for non-Hungarian speakers

If you have any questions, concerns or need further information, send me an email to kovacs.gergely@mkkp.hu

If you agree that changes are necessary after almost two decades of exclusionary and corrupt leadership, please vote for our MKKP candidates and vote for me as the new local mayor. All our candidates are local, they live and/or work here so it’s in their best interest to make this district better, too. You can easily recognise our logo on the ballot paper with the 2-tailed dog.

Facebook page of MKKP 12th district

Facebook page of Gergely Kovacs