A record number of 1,200 young people are applying for various positions this year in the colors of the RMDSZ in the local authority and European Parliament elections to be held on June 9, and the association and the youth organizations cooperating with it are confident that the high level of voting interest experienced throughout the EU will also apply to young Hungarians in Romania.
Although we are often accused of being indifferent to public life and politics, young people do stand up for themselves and have a strong opinion about the world - said Emese Dóra Szilágyi, president of the Hungarian Youth Conference (MIÉRT), at the Cluj-Napoca press event at which Kelemen Together with Hunor, the president of RMDSZ, he presented this year's young municipal candidates of the two organizations.
In retrospect, it is therefore understandable why Xponential Transilvania Coworking & Office was chosen as the location of the event: the number of candidates belonging to the young generation in 2024 increased exponentially compared to previous elections, since while in 2016 there were still 500, in 2020 nearly a thousand applied for local government positions on the RMDSZ list, this year their number can be increased to 1,200. According to Emese Dóra Szilágyi, who took the third place on the list of candidates for the European Parliament of the RMDSZ, all of this is the result of a conscious construction, and the RMDSZ and the MIÉRT Transylvanian Political School and the MIÉRT Academy serve this purpose, among others.
At the press event, representatives of the youth organization from different regions of Transylvania explained the challenges they face. According to Károly Segesvári, who represents the dispersion, for example, for them, assimilation is the biggest danger, based on the formulation of MIÉRT vice-president Katona Ibolya
Partium is a special place, where you have to live as if you were in the Hungarian countryside, but at the same time you have to fight with fragmentation and the absorption effect of the motherland.
Kelemen Hunor believed that one of the biggest challenges in politics is dialogue between different generations. According to him, one of the successes of the RMDSZ lies in the fact that those who provided representation at the municipal, parliamentary and government levels have constantly changed in the formation, three generations have replaced each other at the head of the association in the last thirty years.
"Political activity has no age limit, it doesn't matter how old you are: you need commitment and will, as well as professional preparation. The builders of the coming years and decades will be the young people, the generation that is now in school, as well as the generation in their twenties and thirties, they will shape society"
- emphasized the president of the RMDSZ, encouraging the young Hungarians in Romania to be present at all levels of public life and not to stay away during this year's elections. According to a recent survey by the European Commission, among the EU member states, Romania has the highest voter turnout among young people, at 78 percent. Our paper asked at the press conference in Cluj-Napoca how valid this trend is for young Hungarians in Transylvania. While MIÉRT president Dóra Szilágyi Emese said that Hungarian youth's willingness to vote follows the national trend, Kelemen Hunor believed that there is indeed an increasing trend, and there is a reserve in the case of young people.
"Young people are less interested in politics between two elections, which is natural, you can't expect them to wake up and go to bed with politics. They are much more active when the elections are approaching"
- stated the president of RMDSZ, adding: to cross the 5 percent threshold, the association needs 500,000 votes in the EP elections, and the participation of young people is decisive here.
He also drew attention to the fact that a significant number of young people in Romania sympathize with the ultra-nationalist Association for the Unification of Romanians (AUR), and expressed his hope that young Hungarians would not entrust their lives to this group. And what attracts a young Transylvanian Hungarian to political and public life? Ibolya Katona, the president of the Szilágy County Youth Coordination Council, believes that if they talk to young people and explain to them what is at stake in an election, they will understand that it is about their future.
"Here, I see that the majority would like to stay at home, few would go abroad. And if they plan their future at home, want to start a family here, then they also see that each election greatly affects the future of all of us, including the elections on June 9"
- the young lawyer, Kraszna local government representative, who is running for the position of county councilor in Szilágy county in the local authority competition, answered to our paper in the colors of the RMDSZ.
The vice-president of MIÉRT responsible for local governments said that when he visited the county, he noticed that among the young Hungarians who came into the organization's field of view, there was a high desire to vote, but the extent to which this is true will, of course, be revealed on June 9. At the same time, Ibolya Katona sees that, unlike the members of the younger generation of the majority society, the Hungarian youth of Szilágyság and Partium are less at risk of falling under the influence of extremist trends and politicians on the TikTok social media site, for example. "I see that we are a well-knit community, which can also give young people such security that they can see the right direction. We talk to them a lot, and they understand why it is important to stand up for our interests and protect our rights," the president of the Szilágy County Youth Coordination Council told Krónika.
Featured image: Ibolya Katona, the president of the Szilágy County Youth Coordination Council, considers it important to talk to young people, address them Photo: MTI/Gábor Kiss
