In Hungary, the primaries of the left-right opposition alliance, with which common candidates are to be determined for the election in 2022, were resumed on Monday after a computer system crash suffered over the weekend.
The cause of the mishap, which occurred on Saturday morning shortly after the start of the primaries, is still unclear.
The organizers spoke of a cyber attack, the government of incompetence.
The deadline for the primaries has been extended by two days to September 28th.
Stephan Löwenstein
Political correspondent based in Vienna.
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Half a dozen very different parties belong to the opposition alliance: MSZP (socialist), DK (left-liberal), Párbeszéd (social-democratic-green), LMP (green-liberal), Momentum (bourgeois-liberal), Jobbik (right-national).
The common goal is to replace Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his national-conservative Fidesz / KDNP coalition.
In all elections since 2010, Orbán had benefited from the fact that the opposition was deeply divided among themselves, including within the left camp, especially between the left-liberal parties and the originally right-wing extremist Jobbik.
Only one opposition candidate is supposed to run against Orbán
Orbán used the two-thirds majority in parliament achieved in 2010 to cement this constitutional majority: the electoral law was unilaterally sharpened so that a strong majority element favors the strongest individual party. 106 of the 199 parliamentary seats are determined in constituencies in which the strongest candidate wins with a simple majority. The remaining 93 seats are distributed on the lists in proportion to the party result.
The parties of the opposition alliance now each run with their own lists, but with a common candidate for the office of head of government. The mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony (whose Párbeszéd party has little chance of overcoming the five percent threshold), MEP Klára Dobrev (DK) and Jobbik chairman Péter Jakab are hoping for this. In addition, the opposition parties want to back the most promising candidates in all constituencies and withdraw their other candidates.
The top candidate and constituency candidates are now to be determined in the primary elections, in which every eligible voter can participate in their own constituency.
To do this, you have to register online.
It was this online registration that collapsed on Saturday.
Some opposition politicians accused the government of rejecting this.
Others referred to Chinese servers from which massive amounts of access would have overloaded the system.
A spokesman said on Sunday: “The attack was much bigger than we had imagined.
However, there is still no evidence that the government or foreign forces wanted to hack the entire system. ”According to the online intelligence service Telex, problems arose again on Monday morning, but they were resolved in the course of the morning.