Le elezioni ingiuste in Ungheria: perché Viktor Orbán è così difficile da battere

The prime minister’s rivals say his total control over the state and the media allows him to influence elections in his favor.

Hungarians will head to the polls on April 12 for what will likely be the country’s most consequential elections since the fall of Communism — but they won’t be voting in a fair contest. 

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has seen to that, having tilted the electoral playing field heavily in his favor amid a creeping state capture, gradually rolled out over his years in power.

His tactics aren’t quite as brazen as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s managed elections; Orbán doesn’t ban serious opponents from standing. But his rivals say he has still engineered a massively unfair edge for his Fidesz party through gerrymandered constituencies, a captive media landscape and vote-buying.

Despite independent pollsters reporting for months that opposition figure Péter Magyar’s center-right Tisza party is running well ahead of Fidesz, actually beating Orbán on election day is going to be very difficult. The reality of how a Hungarian election works on the ground is very different from the trends identified in polls.

In his 16 years in power, Orbán has retained complete control over the rules that govern elections, refining them as political circumstances dictated and the nature of the opposition changed, all to give his party a systemic advantage. It reflects “his will to win at any price,” said Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former Fidesz lawmaker, who broke with Orbán when he shifted the party from liberalism to illiberalism.

We’ve seen this drama play out before. Ahead of the country’s 2022 election, opposition parties were also expected to perform well by forming a common front against Orbán — but Fidesz’s entrenched advantage ultimately allowed it to win an all-important two-thirds supermajority in parliament.

To Orbán, that was simply a sign that the conservative majority was being heard.

“The entire world can see that our brand of Christian Democratic, conservative, patriotic politics has won,” a swaggering Orbán told cheering supporters after scoring what was then his fourth consecutive win. “We are sending Europe a message that this is not the past — this is the future,” he added.

Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University and an expert in Hungarian elections, took a more skeptical view.

“Orbán’s Hungary demonstrates how autocrats can rig elections legally, using their parliamentary majorities to modify the law to neutralize whatever strategy the opposition adopts to try to beat them,” she said, likening Hungarian elections to a fiendish combination puzzle — a real-life Rubik’s Cube that only the designers of the complex riddle know how to slot in place.

“Back in 2022, a unified opposition bloc also was leading in the opinion polls and hopes were high that Orbán could actually lose. But much of Orbán’s electoral successes result from an election system crafted to ensure he wins,” Scheppele added. 

While opposition activists hope to solve Orbán’s Rubik’s Cube this time and unlock a new future for the country, they and election analysts harbor a gnawing suspicion that the prime minister will still be able to conjure up a fifth straight election win.

Indeed, the opposition fears a repeat of 2014 and 2018, when Orbán won parliamentary supermajorities with less than half the popular vote thanks to a Fidesz-friendly election framework, organized voter tourism, gerrymandering of voting districts, the support of ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries and a compliant media largely owned by his business allies swamping the airwaves.

Can he do it again? Will those levers still work?

Gerrymandering

After Orbán won Hungary’s last free and fair election in 2010, he quickly embarked on laying the foundations for his subsequent victories. He reduced the size of the parliament and redistricted the country into 106 single-member constituencies that markedly vary in size. The larger districts are in opposition strongholds; the smaller ones in Fidesz-loyal districts. An additional 93 seats are selected through proportional representation, using party lists.

In 2024, there was some further shifting of districts in Budapest, which tends to back opposition parties.

The disparities in voting district sizes breach the standards of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. And the organization’s most recent report noted the concerns raised over gerrymandering “favouring the ruling party.”

The report also stressed the unequal size of the constituencies: “Based on the current voter distribution, 20 of the 106 single-member constituencies have more than a 10 per cent deviation, with the largest deviation being 22 per cent.”

The government rejects the suggestion it has gamed the system through boundary changes, often arguing they reflect demographic changes. Government Spokesman Zoltán Kovács has called suggestions of gerrymandering a “flimsy argument.”

Nah, i can *beat* him!

Because he’s not doing elections fairly, he’s a corrupt megalomaniac