The recent Hungarian parliamentary elections were “free but not fair,” says virtually all analysis inside the liberal media bubble. Stronger opinions suggest that Hungary is a dictatorship or a “hybrid regime,” where elections are only theater. State-sponsored “propaganda of Viktor Orban’s ruling party,” “gerrymandering,” and “election law that favors Fidesz,” the usual charges go.
But if you actually have some basic understanding of Hungarian history and the electoral systems, you won’t be that surprised by Viktor Orban’s landslide. What’s behind the sweeping victory of Europe’s most successful conservative party?
First, let’s look at some basic facts, which most analysts simply ignore. The number of votes cast for Fidesz hit a historic record in 2022: more than 3 million votes in a country of 9.8 million people is an impressive achievement. No U.S. president ever succeeded in securing the support of a third of the population.
Margins matter too. If you read international coverage of the elections, you were expecting a neck-and-neck race between Orban’s Fidesz and the United Opposition headed by Peter Marki-Zay, a darling of the international press. But 2022 was not a close election in Hungary at all. Nor did we who live here expect it to be. In the end, the difference between Fidesz and the United Opposition was historically big; Fidesz beat the opposition by more than 1 million votes. Again, this is before the electoral system itself did anything to convert votes to mandates.
In fact, Marki-Zay admitted in an interview to 24.hu, the biggest (left-leaning) news website in Hungary, after the elections that the “Fidesz victory was so big that you cannot blame election fraud for it.”
This spring, Hungary welcomed a staggering 900 election observers (compared to 150 four years ago). The opposition itself trained and sent almost 20,000 vote-counters to local electoral committees, who admitted after the election that they didn’t experience fraud and that everybody on those committees wanted to conduct a clear and fair election. At the same time, these mostly urban liberal election observers marveled at rural life and realized that villages and towns really mostly favor the party of Orban not because they are brainwashed or tricked into it but because they feel that their circumstances have changed for the better.
Budapest, like most urban hubs, is a typical liberal stronghold. But when you look at the entire electoral map, out of 3,155 constituencies, Fidesz won 3,117, and the United Opposition won only 38. It is impossible to “gerrymander” such an electoral map. Hungary is an orange country, and it has been for a long time now.
One of the major concerns of critics is to point out that while Fidesz “only” got 54% of the popular vote, Orban’s party will have 68% of the seats in the Parliament (135 out of 199). What an unfair advantage, they say! So, let us suppose that Hungary had the British or American electoral system, where the “winner takes all.” Under these apparently much more “democratic” rules, Fidesz would enjoy 83% instead of 68% of the seats in Parliament.
The truth is, Fidesz won the election in 2010, under the old electoral system, after eight years of being in opposition. And it won so big that under the British or American rules, it would have taken 98% of the Parliament. Then, Fidesz kept its supermajority in subsequent elections of 2014, 2018, and now in 2022. The opposition complains that the electoral law, similar to the Italian one, favors “big parties” and forces smaller parties to run together. But, in fact, the real challenge of smaller parties is not the electoral law, but of their lack of popularity.
The Hungarian center-right won elections in 1990, 1998 in a completely hostile media environment, and in 2010 with a modest conservative media support. As I have written before, the Hungarian media landscape today is more balanced and more diverse than ever before. Some people do not like this because they do not like the idea of debate and the competition of ideas.
What Fidesz offered to voters was a clear continuation of the conservative policies that Hungary has been governed by since 2010. The opposition simply failed to provide a better alternative. Instead of blaming the rules for a humiliating defeat, they need to find ideas that unite, not divide, the people and identify substantive policies that a majority of voters would support. That is the way to win elections. Fidesz demonstrated as much with its 2022 win.
Gergely Szilvay is a Hungarian journalist at Mandiner based in Budapest.
