At first glance, the results of Hungary’s parliamentary elections on April 12 look done and dusted. Outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Orban seems certain to lose: he is languishing in the polls and trailing behind MEP and Tisza Party leader Peter Magyar, who launched his anti-establishment movement in the spring of 2024.
But although the populist and nationalist leader, who has ruled Hungary unchallenged for the past 16 years, might appear to be struggling, he also has a number of assets up his sleeve.
The first of these is a mixed electoral system tailor-made to benefit his far-right Fidesz party. In 2011, backed by a two-thirds majority, Orban pushed through a controversial law reducing the number of seats in parliament, as well as redrawing electoral districts designed to maximise the conservative party’s chances.
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“This gerrymandering has become a bona fide national pastime,” said Paul Gradvohl, a Central Europe history professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, with a hint of irony.
“The aim is to use the results of previous elections to take from Peter to give to Paul. In constituencies where Fidesz won by a large margin, less supportive districts have been added, and in return, the opposition has been stripped of seats where it had a chance of winning.”
Indeed, the majority of Hungary’s parliamentary seats are decided in these local elections. Of the 199 seats up for grabs, 106 MPs are elected in single-member districts using a first-past-the-post system. The remaining 93 are chosen by proportional representation based on national party lists.
Even if Magyar wins in the major cities and receives more votes nationally, Orban can still win in the countryside – his rural base and heartland – where the majority of districts are concentrated.
Furthermore, Hungary’s electoral reforms also introduced the winner’s compensation, a mechanism that enabled Orban to win a comfortable two-thirds majority in the last three elections.
In this way in 2022, Fidesz won 135 out of 199 seats with just 54% of the vote.
Magyar’s unprecedented popularity
Orban also controls – directly or indirectly – most of the country’s media. The state media is largely a government mouthpiece while hundreds of private media outlets are controlled by Orban’s inner circle, leaving his opponents with just scraps of airtime. Most of the country’s independent media has been suffocated.
His sprawling propaganda machine would not hesitate to dip into public funds to finance his campaign, notably by funding billboards with taxpayer money.
In the run-up to the vote, voters could also be mobilised by the government’s powerful patronage networks, run by Fidesz party allies.
As he faces the fight of his political life, the question of whether these levers – the tailor-made electoral system, control of the media and patronage networks – will be enough to keep Orban in power remains to be seen.
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For Hungarian voters are far more concerned with inflation, corruption, and the poor state of public services than they are about migrants, the European Union, or the LGBT+ community – some of Fidesz’s favourite campaign targets.
Orban has also escalated his anti-Ukraine rhetoric during his campaign, repeatedly accusing Kyiv of trying to drag Hungary into the war.
Tensions between the two neighbours intensified when Russian oil shipments via the Druzhba pipeline – via which Russian oil transits to Hungary through Ukraine – were halted in late January.
Kyiv claimed the pipeline was damaged by Russian strikes, while Budapest accused Kyiv of deliberately delaying repairs. Orban retaliated by blocking a €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine.
But four years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, anti-Kyiv rhetoric now has far less traction in Hungary.
And Moscow’s attempts at election interference on social media have been much less effective than in Romania and Moldova, according to Gradvohl.
Meanwhile, Magyar’s popularity has soared to new heights, making him the most formidable opponent that Orban has ever faced.
“A documentary about Peter Magyar recently enjoyed incredible success, selling 300,000 tickets at the box office. On YouTube, it garnered 3.3 million views, giving indications that go beyond the logic of the polls,” Gradvohl noted, adding that “the conditions are ripe” for the opposition to win.
The ‘stolen election’ scenario
Even if Magyar wins on Sunday, he will likely meet with challenges from the Orban camp: requests for recounts in certain districts, allegations of fraud, legal challenges – similar tactics to those deployed by his MAGA allies after Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.
“Hungary’s institutional architecture has numerous tools for implementing such strategies: a politically compliant Constitutional Court, loyalists in key positions, and a carefully rigged legal framework,” said Hungarian researcher Tibor Dessewffy in an op-ed published in French daily Le Monde.
“Everyone knows this, and everyone is ready,” said Gradvohl, who also believes that Orban will declare a “super state of emergency” to delay any transfer of power.
“It’s important to understand that we’re dealing with people so dishonest that my imagination isn’t wild enough to guess what they might next conjure up,” Gradvohl concluded.
In the meantime, as the campaign enters its final stretch, Washington on Tuesday dispatched US Vice President JD Vance to Budapest to convey Trump’s “full and total support” for the re-election of his top ally in Europe.
Magyar was quick to denounce the fresh attempt at American interference in European elections.
“This is our country,” he wrote on X. “Hungarian history is not written in Washington, nor in Moscow, nor in Brussels – it is written in the streets and squares of Hungary.”
This article has been translated from the original in French.
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