Hungary braces for a post-election battle

BUDAPEST — As Hungary heads toward next month’s election, the focus in Budapest is already shifting to the days after the vote, and how the loser might respond.

With the campaign already marked by accusations of bias, smear tactics and manipulated polls, concern in Hungary is growing that the aftermath could be contentious, with the losing side — Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz or Péter Magyar’s rising Tisza party — contesting the result.

Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former Fidesz lawmaker and one of the party’s earliest members, told POLITICO she worries that if Magyar wins, Orbán could be tempted to disrupt, or even block, the transfer of power. 

“If the opposition wins just a simple majority, Orbán will have a lot of tools to make it almost impossible for a new government to be formed or even for a new parliament to be convened,” she said. “He could engineer a constitutional crisis and declare an emergency.” 

Orbán’s supporters, for their part, point to the prime minister’s past as proof that he is ready to accept the result of an election. Voted out after his first term in 2002, Orbán bided his time and staged a comeback eight years later. If there’s a danger of somebody not accepting the results, they say, it’s more likely to come from Magyar’s Tisza party.

“They are building the narrative that if they lose the election, then this is an illegitimate result,” said János Bóka, Hungary’s EU minister. 

“Would Péter Magyar come out to a camera and say that, okay, I’ve heard the voice of the Hungarian people, they want this government to stay in power?” he added. “Is this a realistic possibility after all this political hysteria that they created?”

Whatever the truth of the accusations, the campaign has already turned acrimonious, with competing claims about the legitimacy of the process. Against that backdrop, the risk of post-election turmoil is rising. 

Surveys by independent and Tisza-friendly pollsters have Magyar’s movement ahead on average by 8 to 10 percentage points. Others by pollsters with ideological or financial ties to Fidesz — notably the Nézőpont Institute and the Center for Fundamental Rights — show Orbán’s party with a comfortable lead.

The pollsters point to methodological reasons behind the divergence, but supporters on both sides of the political divide have accused their opponents of fabricating surveys and weaponizing them to try to shape public opinion.

“Regardless of who wins, there’ll be clamor about a stolen election,” said Gábor Tóka, a political scientist at Central European University. 

Orbán, he added, can be expected to contest an unfavorable result. “Unless there’s a landslide against him, I can’t see him conceding easily,” he said. 

“I think he will challenge the vote in the districts and may encourage street protests to frame the result as illegitimate,” he added. “Not so much because he will think he can reverse the outcome, but because the more damage he can do to the new government and undermine it, the better chances for him to mount later a political comeback.”

The prospect of unrest is not limited to Orbán’s supporters. Given the expectations driven by the Tisza-friendly polls, “there will be enormous tension in the weeks after the election if the opposition loses,” Tóka said.

For Orbán, his past contains clues about how he might react to a defeat, said Szelényi, the former Fidesz lawmaker, who quit the party as its ideology shifted from liberal to national conservative in the 1990s. Szelényi was subsequently reelected to parliament under a new party banner.

The last time Fidesz lost a national election, in 2006, Orbán initially accepted his defeat at the hands of the Hungarian Socialist Party.

That changed six months later due to a leaked speech in which Socialist leader Ferenc Gyurcsány admitted he had lied to win the election by denying he would introduce austerity measures.

After spontaneous anti-government protests erupted, Fidesz lawmakers moved to exploit them, dismantling security barriers around the National Assembly so protesters could approach the parliament.

“Fidesz took politics to the streets and harried the government with highly obstructionist tactics in parliament,” Szelényi recalled.

Orbán, she predicted, will likely repeat the playbook. “Orbán can make life very difficult subsequently for Tisza to govern,” she said. “Without a two-thirds majority, Tisza will be blocked in passing a lot of reforms.”

These would include measures demanded by Brussels for the release of some €18 billion in EU funds that have been frozen because of rule-of-law concerns about Hungary, and which Magyar has promised to bring home.

Still, even some of Orbán’s fiercest critics doubt he would go so far as to claim outright that the election had been stolen.

“The political price of not observing [the results] could wreck his chance of a political comeback,” said Tóka, noting that Orbán had congratulated Joe Biden in 2020 even as Donald Trump was alleging the American election had been stolen.

Asked last year whether he would accept the result if he lost in an interview with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of German media group Axel Springer, which owns POLITICO, Orbán said he had “practice” in opposition.

“I am not just the record holder of being prime minister,” Orbán said. “I’m a record holder of being the leader of the opposition as well.”

“The Fidesz party is in politics since 1988,” Bóka, the EU minister, told POLITICO. “We have won from opposition, and we have won from government. We have lost from opposition and we have lost from government. All of this has happened already and never did we question the outcome of the elections.”

Max Griera Andreu contributed to this report.