Despite the evident strength and sincerity of my companion’s convictions there is ample evidence to suggest that the truth is a great deal more complex. While Fidesz may have gained an impressive number of seats in Hungary’s Parliament, the election results show conclusively that the Party does not enjoy overwhelming support amongst the electorate. Without taking account of possible electoral irregularities – now the subject of mounting speculation – Fidesz-KDNP received one hundred thousand fewer votes than the opposition parties combined. Fidesz’s striking success, in terms of winning parliamentary seats, is far from an accurate barometer of its real approval ratings. Rather, the party’s two-thirds majority in the new Parliament is the product of Hungary’s spectacularly skewed election laws, which were designed by Fidesz and passed by a Fidesz-dominated legislature. As underlined by the historian and blogger, Eva Balogh, “many people underestimated…the devilish nature of the electoral system Viktor Orbán created.” [...]
Aside from alleged material inducements, occasional reports of pressure from employers on their workforce and, most worryingly, suggestions of serious election irregularities, including the contention that as many as 125,000 votes may have simply “vanished”, the governing party’s campaign was greatly helped by a range of dubious practices. In its preliminary report on the Hungarian elections, an OSCE Election Observation Mission noted: “the ability of contestants to compete on an equal basis was significantly compromised by the government’s excessive spending on public information advertisements that amplified the ruling coalition’s campaign message.” The Observation Mission also emphasised that, while the public broadcaster had “fulfilled its mandate to provide free airtime to contestants”, its “newscasts and editorial outputs clearly favoured the ruling coalition”. At the same time, most commercial broadcasters – the bulk of which support Fidesz – had been “partisan in their coverage”. These factors go some way towards explaining why Fidesz was able to attract significantly more votes than any other single party in the elections. Persistent and grossly biased media coverage – in combination with omnipresent state-funded “public information advertisements” that, in reality, simply reinforce the anti-migrant, anti-EU and anti-(George) Soros rhetoric of Fidesz – have helped to create and sustain a fearful social climate in which poorly educated, low-income citizens, in particular, especially in deprived rural areas, have grown to accept Fidesz’s fictive political narrative. As Balogh noted recently in Hungarian Spectrum, although opposition parties took most of the seats in Budapest, „[t]he inhabitants of villages, in fact, the poorest villages, voted in droves for Fidesz. They are under-educated, ill-informed, and brainwashed.” [...]
Strikingly, many educated younger Hungarians I encounter – most of whom have had little or no direct involvement in politics – no longer see a meaningful future for themselves in a Fidesz-dominated Hungary, where corruption and nepotism – as well as the continuing assault on civil liberties – are becoming the norm. Since 8 April, the talk amongst customers in the café where I often take breakfast has been almost entirely of emigration. Fidesz may have won the recent parliamentary elections but it’s Hungary, not only the country’s hopelessly divided and ineffectual opposition parties, that has lost.
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