Hungary’s maverick Two-Tailed Dog party combats Orbán with satire – POLITICO

An elderly woman recoils in shock at the sight of a ramshackle campaign bus parked outside her grocery store. It is blaring foreign pop music, flanked by a life-size rainbow llama and a giant inflatable dog with two tails.

The maverick Two-Tailed Dog party — dedicated to ridiculing the 16-year rule of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — has just rolled into town.

With the long-serving Hungarian leader due to hold a rally in the postindustrial steel city of Dunaújváros that evening, activists from the satirical party started campaigning at 2 p.m., offering a repertoire of jokes and stunts as an antidote to the toxic tone ahead of the April 12 election.

At first glance, they simply seem to be peddling offbeat humor, handing out stickers promising free beer and eternal life. But on closer inspection, almost all of the party’s antics contain political critiques of Orbán’s proudly illiberal state.

Curious passersby in Dunaújváros — once known as Stalin City — can climb aboard the bus to play arcade games based on the prime minister’s alleged cronyism. In one Mario-style game, players can steer a famous Orbán associate to go collect coins. In another, they get to play an aide from his ruling Fidesz party, hoarding Gucci bags and sidestepping homeless people while racing to parliament.

The party’s manifesto is also designed to mock Orbán, promising to build a rocket launch pad in the prime minister’s hometown of Felcsút — an obvious swipe at Orbán’s grandiose 4,000-seat football stadium in the village of 1,700 inhabitants.

Countering the mainstream

The Two-Tailed Dog — a concept the party’s founders came up with when imagining mutated animals after a nuclear catastrophe — gained its first seats in local administrations in 2024, and it’s now trying to breakthrough at the national level.

It sees its function as counteracting both Orbán and his nationalist rival Péter Magyar from the center-right Tisza party, which is currently leading the polls. Balázs Sándor, the no. 3 candidate on the Two-Tailed Dog’s list, said there was no possibility of the party pulling out to help the leading opposition figure.

“If we trusted him, we wouldn’t run in the election, but we have some concerns about him,” said Sándor in a discussion about Magyar and Tisza as we drove into town on the bus. “That’s why we need to control them.”

Still, in electoral terms, it would seem the party’s only marginally moving the needle. Polls put the Two-Tailed Dog between 2 and 3 percent — far from the 5 percent needed to gain parliamentary seats.

For retiree Gyöngy, who is a long-time party supporter, that reality is unfortunate. “You have to have more parties and more color in the parliament, not just right-wing populist promises,” she said, having traveled from a nearby city to meet with the candidates.

Gyöngy also declined to give her family name — something rather common in Hungary’s bitter political climate.

Party promises

Before we headed into Dunaújváros, I had met Balázs at the party’s headquarters, which are spread across a shabby-looking house and storage rooms behind the stands of a local football pitch in the outskirts of Budapest. Most of the rooms are makeshift workshops set up for printing posters, painting signs, woodworking and metalwork.

The party is known for its guerrilla tactics, often filling the gaps left by the state. They repair neglected infrastructure like benches and bus stops in areas starved of investment, fill potholes with plants and spray satirical graffiti against Fidesz.

The Two-Tailed Dog has staged stunts against István Tiborcz, Orbán’s son-in-law as well. These have included raids on his hotels to collect toilet paper and towels, which party members later donated to hospitals in protest of chronic underfunding in the health sector. It has also backed LGBTQ+ events, helping organize Pride in the city of Pécs by providing sound equipment and a float.

Sándor himself joined the party after responding to a call to deface Fidesz’s ubiquitous billboard campaigns, which often target migrants, the LGBTQ+ community, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

“We paint funny texts on them … the main point is to make these hate-propagandas ridiculous,” he said.

The party also supports same-sex marriage, wants transparency in public procurement to fight corruption, backs higher taxes for the rich, promotes sustainable agriculture and wants Ukraine to join the EU.

Controversially, for a country as politically conservative as Hungary, the Two-Tailed Dog party also calls for liberalizing cannabis.

Inside the bus, there is a black box labeled “do not look inside,” which conceals a fake marijuana plant. And to cap off the tour, visitors can spin a wheel of fortune offering all of Orbán’s fantasies, from “Russian oil” to “liberals’ tears.”

The wheel is rigged, though, and everyone ends up winning free beer straight from the fridge.

“See? We do what we promise: We give free beer as promised,” Sándor said.

But what about eternal life? “That comes once we are elected.”