Having the last laugh: Meet the party injecting humour into Hungarian politics and challenging the status quo

Protests against Hungary’s current government are often small and ineffective, unless you’re part of the Two-Tailed Dog Party. Its innovative off-the-wall approach created a buzz and it is now aiming to take seats in parliament, reports Csabi Tasi and Jemimah Steinfeld

A billboard in Hungary from the Two-Tailed Dog Party, 2015

CREDIT: Simon Trew/Flickr

WITH ITS QUIRKY name, Hungary’s Two-Tailed Dog Party doesn’t look like the most serious contender for the country’s leadership. And yet, over the years, the party has gone from barely known purveyors of street art to a seriously creative group vying for seats in 2018’s general election.

“We do have a lot of them,” said Robi Golubeff, a party member, of those who support the party. “More than 100 who are always active, thousands case by case, millions by the time of the elections. Plus we always can have intergalactic help, of course.”

It is this blend of seriousness and humour that has propelled the party on to the national stage. “The Two-Tailed Dog Party smuggles humour and irony into the hopeless and desperate world of Hungarian politics,” said journalist Tamas Bodoky when asked why he thought it had made an impact.

The humour typically manifests itself in unusual and highly creative protests. The one the party is best known for – and the one that turned it into a credible political force – was its campaign around the anti-EU refugee resettlement referendum in October 2016. To contrast rhetoric from the right, it initiated its own campaign in which it plastered the country with posters and billboards making fun of the referendum. Voters were urged to mark their ballot papers with both “Yes” and “No”, and the motto ran: “A stupid answer to a stupid question. Vote invalidly!” The tactic paid off: 6.3% of voters spoiled their papers and not enough people voted to make the outcome valid.

Golubeff, who describes them as “an action-based party”, told Index about other successful protests they have run, including an initiative to address Budapest’s rubbish situation (there is plenty of it, he said). In that protest, party supporters moved rubbish on the streets into “giant rubbish mountains”, which led to it being cleared up. In some instances, the rubbish would disappear before they even had a chance to refashion it. (Golubeff said this might have been partly down to a tip-off in a local newspaper.)

“We consider it a great achievement that the local government, frightened by the prospect of rubbish reconditioning, had at least collected one heap,” said Golubeff of the pre-emptive collection.

In another initiative, they painted cracked pavements a collage of bright colours. “It’s fun to colour cracks, and it’s also nice and useful not to fall over,” he explained, before adding: “All the same, a few achievements of our party’s by-now trademark interventions have been erased, because the local government couldn’t afford to let our city become more colourful (and reveal the bad state of pavements)… This demonstrates that what we do is both useful and nice. After all, it can’t be tolerated!”

As for the upcoming election, the Two-Tailed Dog Party has a lot of ideas, which it is hoping will come to fruition if it can raise enough funds, and it will look to put forward three types of candidates, as Golubeff explained: “Normal politicians (quite unusual in our party); politicians with some funny characteristic; absolutely fictional characters eg, a cat, a mushroom, an invisible man.”

When asked what result the party wants in the election, the answer was simple: “To win”.