In a shock setback to Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a liberal member of the country’s opposition party won a surprise victory in the Budapest mayoral election over the weekend—with other opposition candidates appearing poised to win mayor’s races in 10 of Hungary’s 23 major cities. And observers say that the release of a sex tape featuring one of Orban’s closest allies may have played a key role in shaking up Hungary’s political scene.
Zsolt Borkai (pictured above), the 54-year-old mayor of Gyor, Hungary—who is also the married father of two—was recorded aboard a yacht participating in sexual acts with two sex workers, according to The Daily Mail. Borkai initially denied that he appeared in the video, blaming a conspiracy by his political opponents, but the right-wing mayor later admitted that he did, in fact, participate in the yacht-bound sex party.
He denied, however, that he financed the yacht orgy with public funds, or that he used drugs during the sex romp.
Borkai, however, resisted calls to resign as the mayor of Gyor—and went on to win re-election on the city on Sunday, according to a report by Hungary Today.
Even the now-outgoing mayor of Budapest, István Tarlós, called on Borkai to step aside, calling Borkai’s appearance in the sex tape “undefendable, unacceptable and unworthy,” and asking, “does he not realize what he should do?”
Nonetheless, Borkai showed up at the polling place on Sunday with his wife at his side to cast his ballot. In the end, he won 44.33 percent of the vote in the city of about 130,000, edging opposition candidate Tímea Glázer by less than 1.5 percentage points.
But his fellow members of Orban’s nationalist, right-wing Fidesz party did not fare as well, dealing Hungary’s ruling party its first major setback since 2006.
Opposition candidates seized on the sex tape as a symbol of everything wrong with Orban’s party.
“The filth that’s come to light in Gyor isn’t unique,” Gergely Karacsony, the opposition’s candidate who on Sunday won an upset victory and will serve as the next mayor of Budapest, said two days before the election. “There’s not two types of Fidesz, there’s only one and it’s rotten to the core.”
Orban in 2016 was the first foreign leader to go public with his support for Donald Trump in the United States presidential election. Trump repaid him with an official White House visit earlier this year—an invite that both Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush refused to extend due to Orban’s extreme right-wing policies.
Photo By Pavol Frešo / Wikimedia Commons
