This Sunday Hungarians will go to the polls to vote for the new parliament. From looking at opinion polls, it is expected that current PM Viktor Orban will win his third mandate in office.

His political party – Fidesz boasts about creating a so called “Hungarian economic wonder” during his last 8 years in power, while the opposition is claiming that the government is autocratic and because of it’s stance towards the migrant issue – xenophobic.

However, a man who is not running in the elections has been the focal point of this years' elections in Hungary. It is George Soros, an American stocks speculator and business magnate of Hungarian origin.

All over Budapest billboards have circulated featuring him and the opposition leaders alongside the tag line: “Let’s stop Soros' candidates.” It is part of a pro-government campaign referring to the opposition parties that share the values promoted by the Soros NGO’s.

Egyutt is one of those parties, founded just recently with a strong anti-Orban agenda. They held their final pre-election rally in the Budapest workers suburb - Csepel, hoping to attract those dissatisfied with government policies, including its position on Soros. Something that Egyutt MP candidate Krisztina Baranyi  pointed out during her interview with CGTN.

“It is a very funny thing that the government has made an 87 year old man, who is indeed very rich, to be their biggest enemy.” Krisztina says. "It is pure propaganda. Аnd on top of that, Soros has financed the education of people like the current Prime minister’s studies in Oxford with the hope that those people will lead this country into the future which wants open societies and want to live freely.”

Around the same time, but in downtown Budapest, the ruling coalition did it’s campaigning, by providing elderly citizens with basic computer training. But even there the Soros issue had to be raised. According to Istvan Hollik, MP candidate of the ruling Fidesz-KDNP coalition it is actually Soros who wants to meddle in their business and not vice versa.

“It is not our claim that George Soros and his organizations are working against the Fidesz-KDNP government. The latest example is last week’s audio leak where the former CEO of Soros Fund, Tracie Ahern says that the George Soros Open Society Foundation serves nothing but Soros' political goals. Moreover she says that more than 2.000 people in Hungary are working to defeat the Fidesz-KDNP government,” Hollik claims. 

It is political sticks and stones that parties throw at each other in this election campaign. Mutual accusations of corruption, autocracy or collusion with foreign funded NGO’s has become a part of daily life here in Hungary. But yet none of the above prevents Hungary becoming a GDP growth leader in the EU bloc. It is this economic growth that no one can deny and that has kept the ruling coalition firmly in power for the last 8 years.

Something that Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs was very proud to emphasize.

“Indeed we have inherited a country at the brink of collapse back in 2010, with a very high 11.4 percent unemployment rate, 85 percent sovereign debt, and minus 6.5 percent economic growth per GDP. Today we stand at unemployment level of 3.8 percent, sovereign debt has come down to 73, and economic growth is up to 4, 4.5 percent.”

Hungary aims to boost its trade particularly with the East and also to invest heavily in tourism expansion. Something that any opposition that plans to topple the current government will have difficulty matching.