Hungarians go to the polls Sunday, April 3rd (with advance voting on April 2nd for the diaspora in North America) to decide the fate the Orbán regime, in power since 2010. A poll released this week shows a tight race between the two leading party slates: Fidesz-KDNP and the United for Hungary (Egységben Magyarországért) rainbow coalition of opposition parties. Závecz Research released figures for its opinion poll conducted between March 21-27. In it, Fidesz has a 3 percent lead over prime ministerial candidate Péter Márki-Zay’s United for Hungary. That lead falls within the margin error. As well, essentially the same proportion of Hungarians want Fidesz to stay in power as those seeking a change in government (44 percent preferring a continuation of Fidesz versus 42 percent wanting Mr. Orbán removed from office).
Závecz Research found the following levels of support in its latest poll:
- Fidesz-KDNP: 39%
- United for Hungary: 36%
- Mi Hazánk: 3%
- Two-Tailed Dog Party: 2%
- Other: 1
- No preference/did not disclose: 19%
According to Závecz Research, Fidesz has a solid core of 1.9 million voters. In contrast, United for Hungary’s core voting base stands at 1.7 million Hungarians. There are about 600,000 Hungarian voters who plan to cast a ballot, but are still undecided. Fidesz would need to mobilize 100,000 to 150,000 passive voters on Sunday, while the opposition needs to mobilize 200,000 to 250,000. All that said, mobilization is absolutely key — and this is an area where Fidesz has an advantage. Part of that advantage has to do with effectively buying off voters — sometimes by handing out free potatoes and cooking oil, and other times by making it known to the population in grander ways that loyalty pays and disloyalty is costly.
While Závecz suggests that the election is too close to call, another major and reputable polling firm — Medián — is predicting a Fidesz victory on Sunday. Looking at the pool of decided voters only, the party or party coalition standings are the following:
- Fidesz-KDNP: 50%
- United for Hungary: 40%
- Mi Hazánk: 4%
- Two-Tailed Dog Party: 4%
Medián believes that Fidesz’s lead is insurmountable this late in the campaign. The fear stoked by Russia’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine and Mr. Orbán’s crass pragmatism — essentially giving Russian dictator Vladimir Putin a pass for the murder of Ukrainians and claiming that by doing so, he is protecting Hungary from war — has resonated with segments of the voting public and has given him a measurable boost in the polls.
HFP’s editor receives his ballot. Photo: C. Adam.
And Mr. Orbán has another not insignificant advantage in what may likely be a close race — especially if Závecz Research is correct. There are a total of 450,000 Hungarians in the diaspora who have the right to vote by mail-in ballot for a party list. The proportion of Fidesz supporters in this voting pool, especially among 193,000 ethnic Hungarians from Romania, is overwhelmingly high. In practice, however, many voters in North America will not be able to mail their ballot back in time, as they arrived only this week by mail. Hungarian diplomats stationed in Canada, for instance, have instructed voters not to mail their ballot, but to drop it off at Hungarian missions in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on Saturday, April 2, 2022 between 6:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. local time. I know what I’m doing and where I’m going on Saturday, April 2, 2022.
A great opportunity for Hungary to decide in the good things Victor Babe has done ,and not done in his term.
On the wider front Hungarians shoukd know that they have gained much respect and understanding with how they have dealt with immigration,the economy and more dangerous recent events in Ukraine. The restraint and independent policies of Hungary are a beacon for difference. God bless Hungary,and Lszlo and his mum and beautiful family in Misckolt.
We cannot but respect some if victors policies, except that thing about used USA airplanes years ago .
Respect!?! Hungary has gained nothing but disgust and is even being shunned by the V4. Let’s hope that Putin’s lap dog is ousted.
Let’s not mince words:
The elections are neither free or fair – the Orbán regime has:
– liquidated almost all critical media (few websites excepted), none in the countryside
– turned the public media into its propaganda outlets with 150 billion HUF budget
– become the biggest advertiser channelling dozens of billions more to its outlets
– been spending more on “government information” campaign ie. propaganda
– been intimidating and coercing countryside voters by controlling public work, benefits, investment and grants
– harassing critical public figures or donors with trumped up tax or curruption investigations,
etc etc
Let’s not BS!!!
Trump faced in 2020, over 90% negative MSM coverage, Big Tech censorship, a weaponized mob on the streets, and a cancel mob persecuting dissenters online and in other spaces of discourse, a corporate world aligned with the globalist left, academia same. And there was also the deep state, with fake Russia collusion stories and so on, as well as helping to bury the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco, which now, almost 2 years later we are learning was 100% legit. In other words, all levers of power and influence in society aligned on the same side. By comparion, the Hungarian left is faced with an easy path in this election.
We see protesters in Canada having their accounts frozen, threatened to have their kids taken away by social services (disgusting), having their means to earn a living such as profesional credentials rewoked. Can you offer a concrete examples of similarly repressive measures in Hungary?
Fidesz will win because it got to power in 2010, taking charge of a broken country, on IMF life support, after a decade of worst economic performance in the region by far, people leaving the country due to 12% unemployment and so on. The nation was dying, with the lowest birth rates in the EU, at 1.2.
Fidesz delivered, with the unemployment rate now under 4%, and labor participation rate at a post-communist high. Almost 1 million more people are now active in Hungary’s labor force, while average wages are nearly double in euro terms. Since 2017, a net influx of Hungarians moving back to Hungary. Birth rates at 1.6 in 2021, rising to above the EU average.
With the 2015 migrant crisis, the current Ukraine crisis Fidesz is providing cool headed leadership, while most of the Western world has been responding with irrational self-righteousness, causing self-harm in the process. Orban is one of the last true statesmen in the Western World, whereas much of the rest of the Western world is drowning in inneptitude, hystreria and a poisounous neo-Marxist ideological takeover.
Phill M
What are the great things done by Orbán:
– His orgy of corruption making him/Mészáros the richest man in Hu?
– Making Hu a pariah in the west while dancing to Putin’s tune?
– Making the Hungarians the second poorest in the EU?
– Achieving the worst health stats in Europe, the highest COVID mortality, one of the lowest healthcare spending?
– Dragging down the education sys results and overlooking the highest rate of emigration of tertiary educated Huns?
– Turning the “merriest barrack” of Eastern Europe under the USSR into the saddest free country?
Etc. etc
“Medián believes that Fidesz’s lead is insurmountable this late in the campaign. The fear stoked by Russia’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine and Mr. Orbán’s crass pragmatism — essentially giving Russian dictator Vladimir Putin a pass for the murder of Ukrainians and claiming that by doing so, he is protecting Hungary from war — has resonated with segments of the voting public and has given him a measurable boost in the polls.”
Russia may have been the one that resorted to military aggression, but at the root of this conflict is in fact the globalist ambition of our own Western ruling oligarchs. As a senile old puppet (Biden) recently admitted, it is about regime change in Russia. Not so much because Putin is a “bad man”, but because our oligarchs want a puppet government in place in Moscow, so they can contol the flow of the vast natural resources that Russia is sitting on. It would be one of the final pieces of the puzzle needed by them to fall in, so they can install themselves as the new global noble rulers, over us serfs around the world, wielding absolute power over us, with no place left to escape to.
So really, Ukrainians are more than anything the victims of our oligarchs, not the Russian oligarchs, who are in fact pushing back defensively. There were plenty of opportunities to avoid this conflict. Most of them involved our oligarchs telling their puppets to back off from continuing to militarily encircle Russia. Since Maidan in 2013, they wanted Ukraine to serve as a new Afghanistan as a means to drain Russia economically through drawing them into a military engagement, as well as an economic war with us, in order to achieve regime change in Russia.
So when we ignore the BS narrative we are fed in regards to this conflict, Hungary’s position on this is actually ethical and in the interest of Hungarians.
Author forgets that Hungarians were already greatly sacrificed 100 years ago, for the benefit of others. Perhaps he forgets that a strip of land inhabited by 800 k ethnic Hungarians, along the current Hungary-Slovakia border was gifted then to Chechoslovakia by simply invoking the argument that it was good farmland that the new state needed. Just a sample of the sacrifice of the Hungarian nation. And now he thinks that Hungarians should sacrifice their own interests, self-destruct economically, for the victims of a proxy war? Victims who in turn have been victimizing the ethnic Hungarians living there for the past decade? Why??? Just to be on the same bandwagon with the rest of the morons herded on it by our oligarchs in search of achieving absolute power over the world? In order to help serve those interests?
@ Joe
“Let’s not BS!!!”
Physician !!! Heal thyself !!! In the event you are not a physician but a preacher, why don’t you practice what you preach ??
Joe
Pls Let’s not BS!
It’s valid for your 6.oo comment too, eg:
– so the cause of the war was not that when Puttin’s man Yanukovich was ousted the former annexed Crimea and started the insurrection in Donbas,
– it was not that Putin has been trying to install a puppet gov in Kiev which he calls denazification, but
– some “world oligarchs” (illumitati, lizard men, clandestine power?) want a puppet gov in Moscow..
– and the usual Trianon, “poor Hungary wronged by all” BS.
Your ilk are the embodiment of the joke that “there is no fascism among the Hungarians, but a great demand for it”.
@ Joe
And if by chance you are not a human but a bull, would you mind spreading it somewhere else, other than in this poorly ventilated underpass ? Why not spread your poo poo on Orbán Viktor’s back yard where the grass isn’t doing too well under the shade cast upon it by that crazy stadium he built next door to his house from moneys he stole from Europe’s hard-working tax-payers ? If Orbán doesn’t want your BS, why not offer a load of your precious waste product to Andrew Ludányi or his lunatic sidekick Fodor, they’re always on the lookout for highly concentrated BS like yours. Make yourself useful and give help where help is badly needed. Oh chee wah wah 🙂 🙂