Parliamentary elections will be held in Hungary on Sunday, April 3, to renew Viktor Orbán’s semiauthoritarian government. For the first time in many years, the opposition will come out as one and support a single candidate for prime minister. And according to polls, there’s a good chance he could play it out with Orbán’s coalition.
Trying to understand how it will turn out is not easy at all. For a month now, the war in Ukraine has turned the election campaign upside down although political scientists don’t know who can benefit most from it, whether the majority or the opposition and for some time Orbán has been waging a fabricated campaign of coercion and lies . , as at other times in his political career that could affect the bottom line.
The counting of the elections in Hungary is closely followed in various western countries. “Orbán’s rise to power coincided with the beginning of the era of authoritarian populism,” wrote Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times. “His defeat could mean the beginning of its end.”
Viktor Orbán (AP Photo / Anna Szilagyi)
Orbán has been prime minister since 2010, but has been in politics for most of his life. As a young man he had been a wellknown anticommunist and proEuropean activist and with those credentials and thanks to his recognized charisma he had managed to gradually rise in the hierarchy of Fidesz, the country’s main centreright party.
However, when he came to power, he passed various laws restricting freedom of the press, promoted discriminatory positions against the gay community and minorities of Muslims, Roma and Jews, and introduced laws criminalizing the admission of migrants. In the meantime, he has secured rich government contracts for his closest circle of friends and allies and centralized the judiciary in the hands of Fidesz and his allies in the Christian Democratic People’s Party.
Over the years, Orbán and Fidesz have also completely monopolized the public debate, causing the Hungarian electorate already very traditionalist, especially outside the big cities to believe that the countries of Western Europe and the European Union have taken a direction opposite to the conservative Christian values tradition, and that Hungary remained the only country to defend it. “We have replaced the failed liberal democracy with a modern Christian democracy,” Orbán proclaimed himself after his 2018 election victory.
The opposition had long been looking for a prime ministerial candidate who could please such an electorate and finally found him in Péter MárkiZay, economist and mayor of the small town of Hódmezővásárhely.
MárkiZay is 49 years old, a Catholic, has seven children and is openly a conservative: At the same time, he believes that his religious beliefs should not be imposed on everyone and that Hungary should be brought closer to the rest of the European countries that guarantee greater independence of the courts and fight corruption with more resources, which became a deeply felt concern for Hungarians in the Orbán years. In the Index of Perceived Corruption, compiled annually by the NGO Transparency International, Hungary has risen to become the second highest country in the European Union after Bulgaria over the past decade.
Péter MárkiZay (AP Photo / Laszlo Balogh)
The election campaign had just begun when Russia invaded Ukraine and foreign policy became the focus of the debate.
Orbán is one of the European leaders closest to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he has met and often publicly praised a dozen times since taking office as prime minister. Since the start of the war, Orbán has been forced to adopt a rather uncomfortable position, shared with farright European politicians who have publicly expressed a fascination with Putin in recent years: he has had to support tough sanctions imposed by the European Union against him Russia was decided, but at the same time he never explicitly condemned Putin for provoking the war.
For weeks, MárkiZay has been trying to exploit this contradiction and explains, for example, that the Hungarians have to use their vote to decide which side they are on, “with Orbán and Putin or with the West or Europe, on the wrong side”. side or on the right side of history. Orbán, on the other hand, has a strong focus on presenting himself as a safe bet in times of great uncertainty and instability. “It has taken Fidesz less than a week to launch a new campaign that Orbán as peacemaker and anchor of security, political scientist Lakner Zoltán told the Guardian.
For now, Orbán’s strategy seems to have worked: according to Politico’s poll aggregator, the gap between Fidesz and the cartel of opposition parties supporting MárkiZay has remained virtually unchanged over the past month: at the moment, the alliance between Orbán’s party and the Christian People’s Democratic Party will get around 50 percent of the vote, while the United Opposition is estimated at 45 percent.
MárkiZay’s goal is further complicated by internal tensions between the opposition parties that support him, ranging from Jobbik’s rightwing to the Social Democrats, and by the fact that Orbán has long used any means, including false ones, to stay in power.
A few months ago, for example, Orbán decided to hold a referendum on the same day as the parliamentary elections on last year’s controversial law that forbids raising issues related to homosexuality in public contexts frequented by minors. Against this law, the representatives of 14 member countries of the European Union, including Italy, had signed a joint document condemning it as discriminatory against homosexuals, and the European Commission had also initiated infringement proceedings against the Hungarian government. Several observers believe that holding the referendum on the same day as the election was a ploy to mobilize the more conservative fringes of the electorate.
Another tactic Orbán has used in the election campaign for many years to pressure the more traditionalist electorate concerns an alleged and imminent invasion of migrants. It’s a theme that comes up frequently in Orbán’s rhetoric, known for his false and hostile statements towards Islam and Muslim people, among other things.
The Associated Press wrote: “As the April 3 elections approached, Orbán described current migratory pressures as higher than in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers fleeing war and poverty arrived in the European Union. In December, in a rare press conference, Orbán told reporters in attendance that Hungarian authorities had arrested “more than 100,000 people” in 2021. In reality, the numbers were much lower: According to data from Frontex, the European Union’s border protection agency, in 2021 there were 60,540 irregular entries along the entire socalled “Balkan route”, of which Hungary is just one of the countries involved.
A group of Syrian asylum seekers cross the border between Serbia and Hungary in September 2015 (AP Photo / Muhammed Muheisen)
Orbán also uses the very tight control he exercises over the national media to his advantage. MárkiZay, for example, said that he has not received an invitation to speak on television since 2019, while public television continuously broadcasts Orbán’s reports and speeches.
“Our voice is limited,” Peter Zarand, campaign manager at MárkiZay, admitted to the Financial Times. It’s not just a question of space, but also of money. According to an unofficial estimateFidesz has spent more than double the allowable funds to fund its own election campaign, and Zarand says the United Opposition could afford about 2,000 campaign posters across the country, compared to about 20,000 for Fidesz.
The fear of possible irregularities extends to the day of voting and counting. A few days ago, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) published a hardhitting report (PDF) in which it lists doubts and skepticism about the impartiality of administrative officials and the clout of the electoral apparatus. Among other things, it will be the second time in history that the OSCE has sent a full delegation to a country of the European Union to monitor the smooth running of the elections.
The 199 deputies of Országgyűlés, the single chamber of the Hungarian Parliament, are elected using a mixed system: 106 are elected in singlemember constituencies, while 93 are elected using the proportional representation system based on party votes. Because of this system, it will not be easy to immediately understand who will have won, unless there are notable results: a clearer idea will probably be available from Monday morning.