District XII is the South Kensington of Budapest. Overlooking the city from the steep slopes of the city’s Buda side, Hegyvidék, as it is officially called, is home to the country’s wealthiest and most influential people. It’s where the celebrities live. It’s where the oligarchs live. It’s where Viktor Orbán lives.
In British political terms, it would be a safe Tory seat, and for nearly 30 years it voted consistently for Orbán’s conservative Fidesz party. But today, it is led by Gergely Kovács, head of the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party (MKKP), which, as its name suggests, is a joke party. Its policies include free beer for all, and eternal life.
Kovács, 45, doesn’t look like the mayor of one of the country’s richest neighbourhoods. He is usually to be found wearing a T-shirt, jeans and trainers. He is also one of Hungary’s most successful grassroots politicians.
It all started at the turn of the century in Szeged, a town in southern Hungary, where Kovács and his friends ditched academic elitism for underground culture, hanging out with skaters, rappers and street artists, and plastering the streets with politically themed stickers. After a poster competition to imagine the consequences of a nuclear war, the two-tailed dog was born, and in 2006, so was the party of the same name.
To start with, the whole thing remained a political joke between Kovács and his friends, who made posters, staged fake protests, and ran the occasional joke candidate in elections. As a former member put it, they were a group of friends who smoked weed together, sobered up, then actually did the things they planned when they were high.
That all changed in 2015. In response to the refugee crisis, Orbán’s government littered the country with billboards bearing xenophobic slogans. Kovács raised £100,000 to run a counter-campaign using the same template, with satirical messages like: “The Hate Campaign Loves You”; and “Immigrants Don’t Work, They Just Take Our Jobs”.
The billboards attracted many who were tired of hateful politics. They formed MKKP’s grassroots network of “passivists”, and volunteered to rejuvenate their neighbourhoods and help people in need.
After the Dog Party’s parliamentary campaigns failed in 2018 and 2022, it moved into local politics, a shift spearheaded by Kovács, who turned his attention to Hegyvidék. By the late 2010s Fidesz was struggling in its historic stronghold. As Orbán pivoted to the far right, he increasingly turned towards working-class rural voters in his messaging and policies. While this helped him secure landslide victories in general elections, it estranged his party’s centrist and centre right base in areas like Hegyvidék, where it lost the parliamentary race in 2022.
Kovács won a seat on the District XII council in 2019. He started making a noise about Fidesz’s corrupt practices and campaigned against destruction of green areas, and led a campaign to support the elderly during the pandemic. As Fidesz’s politics turned farcical, the joke party emerged as the serious alternative.
In 2024, opposition parties united in District XII to kick out Fidesz. Kovács ran a satirical-yet-serious campaign for mayor. He won a 14-point victory, and the Dog Party formed a majority on the Hegyvidék council. He has now been mayor for a year. “Even if we don’t end up doing anything, we’ll already be better than Fidesz,” he said when taking office. He has already reversed Fidesz’s shady public procurement policies, and launched fundraising efforts for disadvantaged communities.
In 2026, there is a good chance Hungarians will remove Orbán from power, with the help of the opposition leader, Péter Magyar. As for the Dog Party, it has announced its candidate for prime minister: Kutyika Kutyi, “Doggity Dog” – Kovács’s labrador.
Iván L Nagy is a Hungarian political journalist living in New York
