With a record 2.04 million votes, some 200,000 more than in the previous 2019 EP election, Fidesz won 11 of Hungary’s 21 seats in the Brussels parliament. And an unprecedented voter turnout just short of 60% enabled Orbán to boast that Hungarian democracy is alive and well despite what he termed “a wartime situation.”
However, despite these successes, the Fidesz vote share was 45% of the total, down from 52.6% in 2019, and the new Fidesz MEP contingent is two short of the 13 achieved in the previous cycle.
This aspect of the news (inevitably played down by state media) is the result of the unprecedented emergence of former Fidesz insider Péter Magyar and his Tisza (Respect and Freedom) Party, a combination that achieved just short of 30% of the vote to garner seven MEP seats.
“Today is the Orbán government’s Waterloo, the beginning of the end […] Tonight, many have regained their faith in the possibility of building a different kind of Hungary, which is not based on division and lies, but on peace, unity and love,” the ex-husband of former Minister of Justice Judit Varga declared.
Regardless of his questionable analogies regarding Napoleonic history, Magyar’s whirlwind success, coming from a virtually unknown Fidesz bureaucrat to claim leadership of the opposition in just four months of feverish nationwide campaigning, cost the traditional Hungarian opposition parties dearly.
The Democratic Coalition-Socialists-Dialogue alliance, which earlier had hopes of winning at least four seats this year, saw its support slashed, garnering just 8% of the vote and gaining only two seats in Brussels (down from five in 2019).
The Momentum Movement, whose two female MEPs had proved remarkably active in the past five years, also saw support collapse as the Magyar campaign developed, leaving the liberal party short of the 5% threshold in the final votes.
Likewise, the alternative Two-Tailed Dog Party, which held real hopes of winning an MEP seat as late as early June, achieved just 3.6% of the vote, while both the Jobbik-Conservatives (with one MEP in 2019) and the green LMP (Politics can be Different) virtually sank without trace.
This left only Our Homeland on the EP score sheet, its 6.7% share of the vote yielding the radical-right party one MEP.
“I believe that there is really a new political era that has begun in Hungary on Sunday,” Zoltán Ranschburg, senior analyst at the Republikon Institute, told foreign media on June 11.
“The sort of dichotomy between Fidesz and the left-wing opposition, which is more or less circulating around the person of Ferenc Gyurcsany, and the Democratic Coalition being the sun of this micro-solar system of this opposition, that’s practically over,” he added.
For Magyar to begin from nowhere and reach nearly 30% of the EP vote in such a short period, with no real party or formal support, and having to overcome a massive Fidesz smear campaign en route, was nothing short of extraordinary, Ranschburg said.
“This is the best result that a single opposition party has achieved against Fidesz in the 21st century. I mean, this is really a big, big thing,” he added.
Naturally, the question now is whether Magyar can build on his platform to pose a serious threat to the Orbán administration in the 2026 general elections. A 30% slice of the vote is impressive but insufficient to defeat the incumbent government, barring some political catastrophe, and the wave of euphoria among his supporters cannot alone carry him to victory during the next two years.
“This sort of momentum, I think, is not going to last very long,” opines Ranschburg. While Magyar has energy and charisma, whether he can organize and manage a party machine or find the money to finance the overheads needed to sustain a large party’s activities is unclear.
“At this point, we have absolutely no idea,” because there is no evidence as to whether Magyar possesses these qualities, the analyst argues. “I think this is why it’s practically impossible to tell what to expect from him because these sort of political skills are going to be the ones that are decisive,” he says.
In what proved to be the most exciting battle in the entire election mix, incumbent Gergely Karácsony fought back to overturn a significant deficit in the early vote count to defeat challenger Dávid Vitézy for the position of Lord Mayor of Budapest by the thinnest of margins.
At the final count, Karácsony, a Dialogue-Green party member within the Democratic Coalition-led alliance, polled 47.53% of the vote, with Vitezy on 47.49%, trailing by a mere 324 votes in a total count of 807,000. The turnout was 60.51%.
The late withdrawal of Alexandra Szentkirályi, the Fidesz candidate for the post, spiced up the contest with the former government spokes-woman urging her supporters to vote for Vitézy. He had once served as the head of the Budapest Transport Office in the former Fidesz Mayor István Tarlós.
This resulted in election administrators crossing out Szentkirályi’s name by hand on 1.4 million ballot papers and has given Vitézy grounds to call for a recount. Pointing to 24,592 invalid votes, he claimed that the tiny margin of victory justified a recount on fundamental democratic principles. According to Hungarian electoral law, a recount can only be justified on grounds of specific voter fraud and not merely on the closeness of the vote.
On Wednesday, June 12, as this edition of the Budapest Business Journal went to press, Vitézy personally delivered his appeal to the Budapest Election Office. The body automatically forwards the appeal to the National Election Committee, which has three days to decide on a recount.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of June 14, 2024.
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