A woman holding an election campaign poster for the Tisza party walks past a vandalized poster showing outgoing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Budapest on Monday.FERENC ISZA/AFP/Getty Images
Sunday’s landslide victory by Hungary’s opposition Tisza party has prompted a busy trade in campaign posters as collectors rush to snap up a little piece of history.
With nearly all the votes counted, Tisza has won 137 of the 199 seats in parliament and ended Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power.
The result sparked a frenzy of impromptu celebrations across the country − especially in Budapest, where thousands of singing, dancing and cheering people flooded into the streets Sunday. Many started tearing down the cardboard election posters that lined almost every street light and filled billboards.
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Hungary has a long tradition of colourful campaign posters, and a lot of the latest ones have ended up for sale online, with some Tisza placards going for several hundred dollars.
Among the most expensive listed for sale on Vinted, a popular site that’s used mainly for buying and selling second-hand clothes, is of party leader Péter Magyar standing alone under the Tisza logo. It’s priced at 70,000 forints, or $310.
Hungary’s history of creative campaign posters dates back to the fall of communism.Denes Erdos/The Associated Press
Another top seller is a poster that simply has the party’s name written five times in white block letters against a blue background. One of those, described by the seller as being in excellent condition, has been priced at $110.
Some posters showing Mr. Magyar posing with local Tisza candidates are selling for as much as $172.
Renáta Szimon, a newly elected Tisza MP from Budapest, has encouraged people to snatch up the signs for posterity. “Get a little piece of the system change mood,” she wrote on Facebook this week next to a photo of two men taking down a campaign poster of her and Mr. Magyar.
“If you want to preserve one as a memory or even give it to someone as a gift, feel free to remove it from the power poles when you have time. All we ask is that you take the fasteners with you and place them in the selective waste collection,” she added.
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There are plenty of posters from other parties for sale as well. Among the more striking come from the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party, a leftist group of activists best known for promising voters free beer and eternal life.
The party’s logo is a cartoon drawing of a deranged-looking dog with two tails and wearing a necktie. While the party got less than 1 per cent of the vote Sunday, some of its posters were going for $35 on Vinted.
Even some disfigured campaign material has been offered up for sale.
One beaten-up poster from Democratic Coalition candidate Dorottya Keszthelyi − with “never” scrawled across her forehead and her right eye scratched out − is being offered for $14.79. A slightly cleaner poster of the party’s former leader, Klára Dobrev, was going for $89. The DC won 1.13 per cent of the vote, and Ms. Dobrev resigned as leader Sunday.
The result sparked a frenzy of impromptu celebrations across the country − especially in Budapest.Denes Erdos/The Associated Press
Hungary’s history of creative campaign posters dates back to the fall of communism.
When the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, the centre-right Hungarian Democratic Forum produced a campaign poster featuring the back of a Soviet soldier and the slogan “Comrades, it’s over!” The poster is part of the collection at Britain’s Imperial War Museum.
Mr. Orbán’s party, Fidesz, also produced a memorable poster for the 1990 election. Titled “Let’s choose,” it featured a photo of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev kissing East Germany’s Erich Honecker, along with a photo of two young lovers kissing.
Fidesz’s recent campaign was dominated by Mr. Orbán’s attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Many of the party’s campaign posters featured unflattering photos of Mr. Zelensky, including one of him and Mr. Magyar and the slogan “They are dangerous.”
So far, none of those, or any featuring Mr. Orbán, have been put up for sale online. But you can get a few other Fidesz posters for as little as $6.63.