Hungary’s Fidesz-led alliance, which has held office for the past twelve years, won a fourth successive term in Sunday’s election amid a high turnout of 69.49 percent, and was on course to win 135 seats in the 199-seat parliament, keeping its two-thirds majority, while United for Hungary, a coalition of opposition parties which had harboured high hopes of unseating Viktor Orbán’s government by joining together, fell well short of a mandate to govern.
Hitherto non-parliamentary parties, the radical Mi Hazánk (My Homeland), and the liberal Momentum Movement, which campaigned as part of United for Hungary, both crossed the 5 percent threshold for seats in parliament, with the radical party notching up seven mandates. Whereas
the opposition performed strongly in Budapest, capturing 16 out of 18 districts, Fidesz painted most of the election map in its party colour, orange, with the exception of 18 individual consistencies out of a total of 106.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared a “huge victory” “We’ve secured a huge victory, so big in fact that you can see it from the Moon, and certainly from Brussels,” Orbán said at the Balna Centre on the Pest side of the River Danube, the site where Fidesz awaited the results. “We’re looking pretty good; we’re looking better and better, perhaps we’ve never looked as good as we’re looking tonight,” he said. Orbán also
reassured ethnic Hungarians in western Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region that the motherland was “with them”, telling them to “hang in there” and not to be afraid.
Peter Márki-Zay, the prime ministerial candidate of the united opposition, conceded to Fidesz. “I’m stunned just like everyone else,” Márki-Zay said at the City Park Ice Rink in Budapest. “I don’t want to hide my disappointment and my sadness; we would never have thought that this would be the outcome.”
Márki-Zay said the conditions in the election were “extremely unequal”,
adding, however, that the opposition was not disputing the result, “only that it was a democratic and free race”. With 91.06 percent of the votes counted, the Fidesz-led alliance won 53.49 percent with their national list as against 34.63 percent for the united opposition, while
Mi Hazánk secured 6.28 percent.
László Toroczkai, the leader of Mi Hazánk, hailed his party’s achievement in securing seats in parliament, saying: “The miracle has happened; this is the first step in saving Hungary.” Toroczkai, who is the mayor of Ásotthalom on the Hungarian-Serbian border, said Mi Hazánk had worked “against an unprecedented headwind”, citing
Facebook’s move to suspend the party’s page days before the election.
Meanwhile, János Lázár, a former prime minister’s chief of staff, defeated Márki-Zay in his electoral district of Hódmezővásárhely, in southern Hungary.
“The civil war ended tonight because we’ve won the war,”
Lázár said in his victory speech. Lázár captured 52.14 percent of the vote with 96.33 percent of votes counted.
The Centre for Fundamental Rights think-tank said Sunday’s election was an “outstanding event” in the history of post-Communist Hungarian politics.
The referendum on child protection held simultaneously with the ballot is expected to be valid and successful, the think-tank said.
The election and the plebiscite “have shown that Hungarian democracy is robust,” it added. Hungary’s legal framework “is stable and provides proper guarantees against foreign attempts at interference and internal abuses, and could maintain the election’s integrity.”
The referendum on child protection held in parallel with the election contained four questions.
- To the question: “Do you support children in public schools participating in classes demonstrating sexual orientations without parental consent?” 4,489,977 responses were given, with 1,314,726 spoiled papers. Of those who gave valid responses, 2,788,951 indicated ‘no’ (92.39pc).
- To the question: “Do you support information about gender change treatments being given to children?” 4,489,464 responses were given, with 1,340,222 spoiled papers. Of those who gave valid responses 2,870,667 indicated ‘no’ (95.93pc).
- To the question: “Do you support media content of a sexual nature and affecting the development of children being presented to them without any restrictions?” 4,490,711 responses were given, with 1,347,895 spoiled papers. Of valid responses, 2,847,858 indicated ‘no’ (95.37pc).
- To the question: “Do you support media content presenting gender change being presented to children?” 4,490,237 responses were given, 1,349,509 papers were spoiled, while 2,841,561 answered in the negative (95.23pc).
Source: MTI
6 Comments
Three articles at this moment in time in the DNH telling readers (most of whom do not live in Hungary) that Fidesz won. A fact mentioned in most mainstream media elsewhere around the world. The expression is ‘over egging it’. Does the DNH think that its readers are so incapable of grasping a straightforward fact that they have to be told THREE times in the same banner section of the home page? Once is enough. Fidesz won, now move on to the usual stories about Hungary being ranked in the top ten button counting championships or whatever other similar trivia is floating around the internet at the moment.
Shame, but it is what it is…. A dictatorship hiding behind the pretence of a democracy.
We knew what the outcome would be really. The Opposition never stood a chance, they need to regroup and change their leaders, too much baggage still. But of course when the government controls the media the way it does, it makes it that much harder. So, we take these results with a pinch of salt, as do other countries.
The good thing is nothing lasts forever and as they’re saying, when Putin falls (and he will) Orbán won’t be far behind…….
90%of the media in the US is controlled By left wing – largest corporations and the highest and most powerful government agency’s. The specialize in Russian
disinformation and lies or just avoids anything that might be negative to the left. The left wing agenda is spread world wide by the NYT and the BBC – just now they are covering the Biden Crime family story- much of it centered around Ukraine,
Russia and China. Who do think pushes that Hungary is a dictatorship and all this LGBST. Little coverage in English of the EU and US corruption in Ukraine. The social media here is also controlled by US.
Trump has been banned by them – tell us again how bad the media is in Hungary.
@TM, it is totally incorrect to say that 90% of the media (I presume that you meant news media) in the US is controlled by the left wing. Just look at the holdings of the Murdoch empire alone and the influence that his outlets such as Foy News have on gullible and frequently poorly educated people – the type that say that )0% of the media is left wing. As for the rest of the nonsense, it is not worth discussing.
Interesting the way in which the “referendum” results were given. I know it’s probably pedantic but for the sake of bias the ‘yes’ results should have been published too.
The referendum did not have sufficient responses to pass the threshold so in effect, it is now invalid.