Hungary’s unfair election: Why Viktor Orbán is so hard to beat

BUDAPEST — 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.”

Media capture

For many voters, especially those in rural districts, the only election narratives and campaign messages they hear or see are fashioned by the government, with the opposition hardly getting a look in.  Orbán has an almost total grip on the media.

From 2010, the state stopped placing adverts in critical news outlets, and private advertisers were warned to sever ties with news outlets unfriendly to Fidesz or see their government business shrink. Independent media began to fail, as it was already struggling with the rise of the internet, and Orbán’s business associates swooped in and bought outlets on the cheap. 

“If you don’t have free media, it’s really difficult to have free elections in the end,” said Tineke Strik, a Dutch MEP from the Greens. 

In November, the European Parliament produced yet another report highlighting how close Hungary has come to an electoral autocracy. Strik, who was the rapporteur on that file, told POLITICO that Hungary “isn’t a democracy right now. If you look at the almost total state capture of the media, it’s really difficult for citizens to hear anything else than state propaganda, and when you switch on the radio or TV you only hear a lot of bashing of the EU and and Ukraine.” 

Kovács disputed that characterization. “Any claim that there’s a monopoly of public opinion in Hungary would be completely false,” he told POLITICO.  “It has never been the case.”

Voter tourism

As the 2022 election neared, it became clear that Orbán would be challenged by a largely united alliance of opposition parties. In November 2021, he legalized what was dubbed “voter tourism,” allowing Hungarians to register to vote anywhere in the country, even if they didn’t reside in the district. 

“Orbán knows who his voters are,” Scheppele told POLITICO. “Fidesz has very good internal polling and very detailed databases. It’s actually illegal to collect a lot of personal data on voters, but Fidesz has been doing it for decades, so it has the ability to move voters into districts Fidesz fears it may lose,” she said.

Did voter tourism actually boost Fidesz in 2022? “They made it impossible to know because you can’t get hold of the historical lists of who was registered in previous elections, which would give you some clues. So we can’t tell,” answered Scheppele. 

But the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a nongovernmental organization working on human rights, warned that the voter tourism law “created a risk that multiple voters will reregister in single constituencies where a very close race is expected, with the intention to tilt the election outcome.”  The Warsaw-based European Platform for Democratic Elections, an alliance of a dozen independent European citizen election observation organizations, has also signaled the danger of this practice, saying it “may not only distort election results but could potentially decide ‘battleground districts.’”

Extra Hungarian voters next door

On the hunt for additional votes and seats ahead of the 2014 election, Orbán offered citizenship and the right to vote to an estimated 2 million ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries. And over the years, hundreds of thousands living in territory that formed part of Hungary before World War I have taken up the offer.

These voters tend to be older and harbor irredentist grievances about Hungary’s territorial losses after the war. Up to around 90 percent of them tend to vote for Fidesz, which has plowed hundreds of millions of euros into their communities. And with nearly 500,000 registered to vote out of an eligible Hungarian electorate of around 8 million — they can make a difference.

What’s more, voting is easy for near-abroad Hungarians. They can vote by mail. “It’s been proven that there have been organizations closely tied to the governing party that have been going around collecting these votes, you know, envelopes and ballots to pass them on. This is documented,” said Péter Kramer, a veteran election observer who’s worked for the EU.

For Hungarian émigrés farther afield, who tend to be younger and favor opposition parties, voting is more arduous. They have to vote at embassies and consulates and clear a gauntlet of checks. Kramer told POLITICO the result is that there’s “a high turnout of about 50 percent with the near-abroad Hungarians, with 90 to 95 percent of their votes going to Fidesz. But the turnout for émigré Hungarians is low, at around 20 to 25 percent.”

Vote-buying (including potatoes)

When all of the above proves insufficient, there have been accusations of  outright vote-buying. The phenomenon is sometimes termed “Krumpliosztás” — or potato distribution — in Hungarian, as critics say sometimes food is literally doled out to poorer districts such as Roma communities. In 2020, a far-right parliamentarian was fined for dumping a sack of potatoes on Orbán’s desk, effectively accusing him of buying votes.

During the last election, the Clean Vote Coalition — an alliance of four Hungarian NGOs — said it had received numerous complaints of irregularities, including voters being offered 10,000 Hungarian forints (€26) for their vote. Meat and other goods were also offered as an inducement, the coalition said.

The accusations have reappeared in this election too. A documentary by independent journalists titled “The Price of a Vote” aired on March 26, alleging widespread vote-buying and pressure on voters in rural communities. Eyewitnesses claimed Fidesz offered cash in exchange for votes.

“I can tell you that if there’s misuse or any kind of fraud going on in the background, all local authorities and national authorities have the chance actually to investigate it,” said Kovács. However, he accused the filmmakers of planting interviewees “with criminal background, party affiliation” to voice the allegations.