At the beginning of April, the snow on Buda Mountain has not completely melted, and Hungary has already ushered in the quadrennial general election.
Once again, the current Prime Minister Victor Orban won the competition. His Youth League (Fidesz) successfully won more than two-thirds of the seats in the parliament, and scored higher than his opponent Pé ter Má rki-Zay, a candidate put forward by an opposition alliance to defeat Orban.
In the past few years, Orban was once called “Hungarian Trump”. But the difference between the two is at least that Trump has only been in power for four years, while Orban has been in the position of prime minister for 16 years. A few months ago, he just surpassed Merkel and became the longest-serving leader in the European Union. Now, he is about to begin his 17th and 5th terms as Prime Minister.
At the victory judging meeting last Sunday, Orban shouted to his supporters: “We have won a great victory-so big that you can see it from the moon. Of course, you can also see it from Brussels.
This is Orban demonstrating to its EU neighbors. Like many Central and Eastern European countries, Hungarian politics has long faced the choice of “going east” or “going west”: being close to Russia or making friends with the European Union? Since Orban regained power in 2010, Hungary embraced the former, and Orban has always been regarded as Putin’s number one ally in the EU. However, since the fermentation of the Ukrainian crisis in February this year, with the change of western public opinion and the influx of refugees from the Ukrainian-Hungarian border, this issue has become unprecedented subtle and is quietly affecting this election.
Orban
People who care about international politics are no strangers to Orban. He is 58 years old, but he has been active in politics for more than 30 years.
Orban’s political life began in June 1989. As one of the founders of the Youth League, he made a famous speech in the Heroes Square in Budapest, the capital, demanding free elections and the withdrawal of the Soviet Union, which aroused widespread resonance and brought him far-reaching political praise.
In 1990, Orban ran for the seat of the first Hungarian Parliament in the post-Soviet era. In 1993, he took over the Youth League and transformed it from a pro-European center-right classical liberal student organization into a right-wing national conservative party. In 1998, NLD won a parliamentary majority, and Orban became prime minister. He was also the youngest head of government in Europe at that time. Orban’s first term ended in 2002. That year he lost the election and became the leader of the opposition party.
Delache Bozoki, a professor of political science at Central European University and a former Hungarian Ministry of Culture, told Interface News that eight years of opposition career has greatly changed Orban. He couldn’t stand the failure of those two general elections, and he was determined to reorganize the youth league and take back most of his power to himself.
He won the general election again in 2010 and was re-elected since then, and has been the prime minister. In the past 12 years, from the European refugee crisis to the COVID-19 epidemic, from domestic legal reform to the cultural war within the European Union, Orban has been a name that Hungary cannot avoid.
His critics say that Orban’s series of centralized measures destroyed Hungary’s democracy and freedom, aggravated domestic corruption and the gap between the rich and the poor, and made it isolated in NATO and the European Union.
In the 2010 parliamentary election, NLD won more than two-thirds of the seats, which gave Orban enough power to amend the constitution. In 2011, he implemented controversial constitutional amendments, including emphasizing traditional values and nationalism, and controversial electoral reforms, which reduced the number of seats in the Hungarian parliament from 386 to 199–which made it difficult for the opposition party to win a parliamentary majority in the system.
Advocating the traditional values of Christianity is one of Orban’s core propositions, including opposing the rights and interests of Muslim groups and LGBT, because they are “incompatible with Christian values”. During the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, the Orban government installed a huge barbed wire fence on the Hungarian-Serbian border-it has now become a symbol of the government’s anti-humanity behavior.
Orban claimed that “the Muslim invaders supported by Soros” would destroy this great Christian country. In 2021, he proposed legislation to censor any “LGBT+ positive content” in movies, books or public advertisements, and strictly restrict sex education in schools and prohibit any information that is considered as “encouraging transsexuality or homosexuality”. But it’s hard to say what his real position is-one of his party friends risked being arrested during the closure of COVID-19, which caused a strong public protest.
But Orban’s supporters say that Hungary under Orban is becoming a great country. The pride of the Hungarian nation has been restored, the Christian values representing European values have been carried forward, Hungary’s domestic economy has steadily increased, and it has gained an unprecedented right to speak within the EU.
The political article holds that Orban’s political ideas “echo the resentment of peasants and the working class” and advocate “uncompromising defense of national sovereignty and transparency and distrust of European ruling institutions”. He once publicly stated that “we don’t want our skin color, tradition and national culture to be mixed with others … we don’t want to be a diversified country. His international allies include Polish Kaczynski, Italian Salvigni, French Le Pen and American Trump. Bannon, a former close friend of Trump, once called Orban “Trump before Trump”. Observers believe that Orban tried to make Hungary “the ideological center of the international conservative movement”.
The election was changed by the Ukrainian crisis.
“A month and a half ago, Orban’s campaign was completely different. Scholar Andras Bozoki told Interface News.
The Hungarian general election has long set the voting date as April 3, 2022, and the election campaign began at the beginning of this year. However, an international event at the end of February greatly changed the focus of this election-Russia launched a special military operation against Ukraine. The complicated relationship between Orban and Putin has unexpectedly become a hot topic in the Hungarian election.
Since Orban returned to the post of Prime Minister in 2010, he has met with Putin as many as 11 times-the latest one was the energy import negotiation summit on February 1, and Orban was the first EU leader to meet with Putin after the Ukrainian crisis. He has always been regarded as Putin’s number one ally in the European Union.
This alliance has both ideological basis and economic benefits. On the one hand, Orban and Putin are highly consistent on cultural issues such as opposing American hegemony, promoting nationalism and opposing sexual minority rights. On the other hand, Hungary is highly dependent on Russian energy, which sells oil and gas to the former at extremely low prices.
One of the most prominent economic policies during Orban’s term was the so-called “Rezsickenté s”-the government cut public expenditure and controlled administrative and living costs. One of the plans is to rely on the close relationship between Orban and Putin to buy cheap Russian natural gas in large quantities. Orban claimed that it was this measure that protected the Hungarian people from the EU’s austerity policy. This move is very popular with voters.
Orban once said in an interview with Politics that his relationship with Putin is a kind of “necessary pragmatism”. He said, “I represent not my point of view, but the interests of the Hungarian nation. We must establish a good balanced relationship with the Russians. Putin is a person you can cooperate with.
However, this position was challenged after the full-scale outbreak of the Ukrainian crisis. The pressure of public opinion from EU, NATO and Hungary forced Orban to rethink how to present his relationship with Putin and his position on the Ukrainian issue.
András Bozóki told Interface News that since March, Orban has drastically changed the campaign tone, portraying the Hungarian general election as a choice between peace/stability and war/chaos. He hopes to clear his relationship with Putin for the time being and turn himself into a leader who keeps Hungary away from war.
The opposition called on Hungary to support Ukraine and act in concert with the European Union and the military alliance NATO. However, Orban’s team and its subordinate media constantly stressed to the public that the opposition wants to drag Hungary into the conflict between Russia and Ukraine-this is a conflict between two Slavic countries, and Hungary should protect itself.
What’s more, Ukraine and Hungary have an unpleasant history. Hungary and Ukraine share a common border of over 100 kilometers. In view of Ukraine’s history of suppressing Hungarians in its westernmost region of Capata, Hungarian nationalists are reluctant to support Ukraine’s resistance. Since 2017, the relationship between Hungary and Ukraine has deteriorated rapidly due to the status of Hungarians in Ukraine. At that time, Ukraine passed a bill on education, stipulating that Ukrainian was the only educational language in public schools. Orban said it damaged the use of Hungarian, criticized it fiercely, and threatened to prevent Ukraine from further integration into the EU and NATO until it was amended or abolished.
In a patriotic demonstration in mid-March, thousands of voters in Orban and party member, a youth league, demonstrated in Budapest with a poster of “Don’t fight”. At the last rally before the election, Orban shouted to voters: providing weapons to Ukraine will make Hungary a military target, and sanctioning Russian energy imports will paralyze Hungary’s economy.
András Bozóki pointed out that this position is contradictory. At home, Orban’s message to the public is that Hungary should remain neutral and should not be biased towards Washington or Moscow; At the same time, we should maintain close economic ties with Russia, including continuing to import Russian natural gas and oil on preferential terms. But internationally, Orban actually supports most of the EU’s decisions to sanction Russia. Budapest, for example, allows NATO to deploy troops in western Hungary and has no objection to the EU providing 500 million euros of weapons and other assistance to Ukrainian troops.
Internationally, this position has triggered some reactions. In the “V4 Group” composed of Central and Eastern European countries (Visegrad Group), Hungary’s actions aroused the anger of former allies such as Poland. Ukrainian President Zelensky also criticized Orban by name because it did not allow weapons to cross the Hungarian-Ukrainian border directly. It is worth noting that at the same time, the Russian government also included Hungary in its list of “unfriendly countries”
In China, opinion polls before the election found that Hungarians had serious differences on how to evaluate Orban’s foreign policy. According to a public opinion poll conducted by the Publicus Institute from July 7th to March 11th, 64% of Hungarians believe that Moscow’s actions against Ukraine are “aggression” rather than “defense”. 91% of the opposition voters think that Moscow is an aggressor, while among the voters of the Youth League, this figure is only 44%. Another study conducted by the polling agency Medián found that 43% of voters in NLD think that Russia’s behavior in Ukraine is fair.
Judging from the election results, Orban’s “balancing technique” seems to have worked.
The future of Hungary
Orban won an overwhelming victory in last Sunday’s vote. He won 54% of the votes, which was even greater than the previous poll forecast.
According to the analysis of election results by European news, on the one hand, the gap between urban and rural areas in Hungary looks as big as before. In Budapest, the opposition Coalition won the most votes. Elsewhere, the Youth League is dominant. On the other hand, this may confirm a common phenomenon in international politics-when a major crisis occurs, voters will tend to support the current political leaders.
The forces that want to defeat Orban have also launched an unprecedented action: six opposition parties have joined forces to present a common candidate: 49-year-old mayor Maki-Zahi.
Maki-Zahi is the father of seven children, a devout Christian and has strong conservative values. He even voted for the Communist Youth League in 2010, but later he was disappointed with the party. He defeated the candidate from the Youth League in the municipal election in a small town in southeastern Hungary, which was previously considered as the base camp of the Youth League.
Unlike Orban, he chose to embrace the European Union instead of the Russian Federation on the issue of “going east” or “going west”. In a political interview before the election, Marchi-Zahi said that this vote was not only for himself, but also for Europe, because “Hungary’s future lies in the EU”.
However, András Bozóki also pointed out that Orban didn’t really want to leave the EU, and “doubting Europe” was just a strategy to attract voters. The role he wants is to become a “special member” within the EU. He is well aware that membership-the ability to have one-vote veto in EU internal decision-making and the ability to seamlessly enter the EU single market-is one of Hungary’s most important diplomatic assets.
The opposition also questioned the election results, including possible fraud and media manipulation in the election process. For example, since the Hungarian public media is now basically controlled by the ruling youth league, before the election, Markey-Zahi only appeared on the largest public television station, while Orban appeared almost every day. Another example is that before the election, burned and discarded ballot boxes were found in a Hungarian-inhabited area in Romania, and overseas mailing of ballots was suspected of fraud.
Perhaps the most criticized by the opposition is the seat allocation system after Orban’s constitutional amendment. In fact, the Youth League won less than 50% of the votes in the last general election, but it was able to obtain an absolute majority of two-thirds in Parliament. The reason lies in Hungary’s complicated electoral system: the country is divided into 106 districts, and each district elects a member of parliament, just like the allocation of seats for members of the US Congress. But the other 93 seats are allocated to political parties according to a unique formula. This formula was designed by Orban to make the result favorable to the Youth League.
“This is a free but unfair election. Sociologist and former Hungarian Minister of Education Bálint Magyar told Interface News. He has served as a member of the Hungarian Parliament for a long time, and is the author of Hungary: Mafia Countries in the European Union. Before the election, he and his colleagues published a report detailing the possible election fraud in this year’s voting. The allegations of election fraud still need further investigation. However, observers also criticized the opposition: although they United, they failed to propose an effective alternative. The opposition was portrayed by Orban as a “militant” in an attempt to drag Hungary into the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and even slide to the risk of nuclear war. Apart from unconditionally supporting NATO, the opposition has no clear strategy to deal with the conflict.
The new york Times interviewed Tibor Tisahe, a supporter of the Youth League, who is the owner of a Hungarian taxi company.At the beginning of April, the snow on Buda Mountain has not completely melted, and Hungary has already ushered in the quadrennial general election.
Once again, the current Prime Minister Victor Orban won the competition. His Youth League (Fidesz) successfully won more than two-thirds of the seats in the parliament, and scored higher than his opponent Pé ter Má rki-Zay, a candidate put forward by an opposition alliance to defeat Orban.
In the past few years, Orban was once called “Hungarian Trump”. But the difference between the two is at least that Trump has only been in power for four years, while Orban has been in the position of prime minister for 16 years. A few months ago, he just surpassed Merkel and became the longest-serving leader in the European Union. Now, he is about to begin his 17th and 5th terms as Prime Minister.
At the victory judging meeting last Sunday, Orban shouted to his supporters: “We have won a great victory-so big that you can see it from the moon. Of course, you can also see it from Brussels.
This is Orban demonstrating to its EU neighbors. Like many Central and Eastern European countries, Hungarian politics has long faced the choice of “going east” or “going west”: being close to Russia or making friends with the European Union? Since Orban regained power in 2010, Hungary embraced the former, and Orban has always been regarded as Putin’s number one ally in the EU. However, since the fermentation of the Ukrainian crisis in February this year, with the change of western public opinion and the influx of refugees from the Ukrainian-Hungarian border, this issue has become unprecedented subtle and is quietly affecting this election.
Orban
People who care about international politics are no strangers to Orban. He is 58 years old, but he has been active in politics for more than 30 years.
Orban’s political life began in June 1989. As one of the founders of the Youth League, he made a famous speech in the Heroes Square in Budapest, the capital, demanding free elections and the withdrawal of the Soviet Union, which aroused widespread resonance and brought him far-reaching political praise.
In 1990, Orban ran for the seat of the first Hungarian Parliament in the post-Soviet era. In 1993, he took over the Youth League and transformed it from a pro-European center-right classical liberal student organization into a right-wing national conservative party. In 1998, NLD won a parliamentary majority, and Orban became prime minister. He was also the youngest head of government in Europe at that time. Orban’s first term ended in 2002. That year he lost the election and became the leader of the opposition party.
Delache Bozoki, a professor of political science at Central European University and a former Hungarian Ministry of Culture, told Interface News that eight years of opposition career has greatly changed Orban. He couldn’t stand the failure of those two general elections, and he was determined to reorganize the youth league and take back most of his power to himself.
He won the general election again in 2010 and was re-elected since then, and has been the prime minister. In the past 12 years, from the European refugee crisis to the COVID-19 epidemic, from domestic legal reform to the cultural war within the European Union, Orban has been a name that Hungary cannot avoid.
His critics say that Orban’s series of centralized measures destroyed Hungary’s democracy and freedom, aggravated domestic corruption and the gap between the rich and the poor, and made it isolated in NATO and the European Union.
In the 2010 parliamentary election, NLD won more than two-thirds of the seats, which gave Orban enough power to amend the constitution. In 2011, he implemented controversial constitutional amendments, including emphasizing traditional values and nationalism, and controversial electoral reforms, which reduced the number of seats in the Hungarian parliament from 386 to 199–which made it difficult for the opposition party to win a parliamentary majority in the system.
Advocating the traditional values of Christianity is one of Orban’s core propositions, including opposing the rights and interests of Muslim groups and LGBT, because they are “incompatible with Christian values”. During the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, the Orban government installed a huge barbed wire fence on the Hungarian-Serbian border-it has now become a symbol of the government’s anti-humanity behavior.
Orban claimed that “the Muslim invaders supported by Soros” would destroy this great Christian country. In 2021, he proposed legislation to censor any “LGBT+ positive content” in movies, books or public advertisements, and strictly restrict sex education in schools and prohibit any information that is considered as “encouraging transsexuality or homosexuality”. But it’s hard to say what his real position is-one of his party friends risked being arrested during the closure of COVID-19, which caused a strong public protest.
But Orban’s supporters say that Hungary under Orban is becoming a great country. The pride of the Hungarian nation has been restored, the Christian values representing European values have been carried forward, Hungary’s domestic economy has steadily increased, and it has gained an unprecedented right to speak within the EU.
The political article holds that Orban’s political ideas “echo the resentment of peasants and the working class” and advocate “uncompromising defense of national sovereignty and transparency and distrust of European ruling institutions”. He once publicly stated that “we don’t want our skin color, tradition and national culture to be mixed with others … we don’t want to be a diversified country. His international allies include Polish Kaczynski, Italian Salvigni, French Le Pen and American Trump. Bannon, a former close friend of Trump, once called Orban “Trump before Trump”. Observers believe that Orban tried to make Hungary “the ideological center of the international conservative movement”.
The election was changed by the Ukrainian crisis.
“A month and a half ago, Orban’s campaign was completely different. Scholar Andras Bozoki told Interface News.
The Hungarian general election has long set the voting date as April 3, 2022, and the election campaign began at the beginning of this year. However, an international event at the end of February greatly changed the focus of this election-Russia launched a special military operation against Ukraine. The complicated relationship between Orban and Putin has unexpectedly become a hot topic in the Hungarian election.
Since Orban returned to the post of Prime Minister in 2010, he has met with Putin as many as 11 times-the latest one was the energy import negotiation summit on February 1, and Orban was the first EU leader to meet with Putin after the Ukrainian crisis. He has always been regarded as Putin’s number one ally in the European Union.
This alliance has both ideological basis and economic benefits. On the one hand, Orban and Putin are highly consistent on cultural issues such as opposing American hegemony, promoting nationalism and opposing sexual minority rights. On the other hand, Hungary is highly dependent on Russian energy, which sells oil and gas to the former at extremely low prices.
One of the most prominent economic policies during Orban’s term was the so-called “Rezsickenté s”-the government cut public expenditure and controlled administrative and living costs. One of the plans is to rely on the close relationship between Orban and Putin to buy cheap Russian natural gas in large quantities. Orban claimed that it was this measure that protected the Hungarian people from the EU’s austerity policy. This move is very popular with voters.
Orban once said in an interview with Politics that his relationship with Putin is a kind of “necessary pragmatism”. He said, “I represent not my point of view, but the interests of the Hungarian nation. We must establish a good balanced relationship with the Russians. Putin is a person you can cooperate with.
However, this position was challenged after the full-scale outbreak of the Ukrainian crisis. The pressure of public opinion from EU, NATO and Hungary forced Orban to rethink how to present his relationship with Putin and his position on the Ukrainian issue.
András Bozóki told Interface News that since March, Orban has drastically changed the campaign tone, portraying the Hungarian general election as a choice between peace/stability and war/chaos. He hopes to clear his relationship with Putin for the time being and turn himself into a leader who keeps Hungary away from war.
The opposition called on Hungary to support Ukraine and act in concert with the European Union and the military alliance NATO. However, Orban’s team and its subordinate media constantly stressed to the public that the opposition wants to drag Hungary into the conflict between Russia and Ukraine-this is a conflict between two Slavic countries, and Hungary should protect itself.
What’s more, Ukraine and Hungary have an unpleasant history. Hungary and Ukraine share a common border of over 100 kilometers. In view of Ukraine’s history of suppressing Hungarians in its westernmost region of Capata, Hungarian nationalists are reluctant to support Ukraine’s resistance. Since 2017, the relationship between Hungary and Ukraine has deteriorated rapidly due to the status of Hungarians in Ukraine. At that time, Ukraine passed a bill on education, stipulating that Ukrainian was the only educational language in public schools. Orban said it damaged the use of Hungarian, criticized it fiercely, and threatened to prevent Ukraine from further integration into the EU and NATO until it was amended or abolished.
In a patriotic demonstration in mid-March, thousands of voters in Orban and party member, a youth league, demonstrated in Budapest with a poster of “Don’t fight”. At the last rally before the election, Orban shouted to voters: providing weapons to Ukraine will make Hungary a military target, and sanctioning Russian energy imports will paralyze Hungary’s economy.
András Bozóki pointed out that this position is contradictory. At home, Orban’s message to the public is that Hungary should remain neutral and should not be biased towards Washington or Moscow; At the same time, we should maintain close economic ties with Russia, including continuing to import Russian natural gas and oil on preferential terms. But internationally, Orban actually supports most of the EU’s decisions to sanction Russia. Budapest, for example, allows NATO to deploy troops in western Hungary and has no objection to the EU providing 500 million euros of weapons and other assistance to Ukrainian troops.
Internationally, this position has triggered some reactions. In the “V4 Group” composed of Central and Eastern European countries (Visegrad Group), Hungary’s actions aroused the anger of former allies such as Poland. Ukrainian President Zelensky also criticized Orban by name because it did not allow weapons to cross the Hungarian-Ukrainian border directly. It is worth noting that at the same time, the Russian government also included Hungary in its list of “unfriendly countries”
In China, opinion polls before the election found that Hungarians had serious differences on how to evaluate Orban’s foreign policy. According to a public opinion poll conducted by the Publicus Institute from July 7th to March 11th, 64% of Hungarians believe that Moscow’s actions against Ukraine are “aggression” rather than “defense”. 91% of the opposition voters think that Moscow is an aggressor, while among the voters of the Youth League, this figure is only 44%. Another study conducted by the polling agency Medián found that 43% of voters in NLD think that Russia’s behavior in Ukraine is fair.
Judging from the election results, Orban’s “balancing technique” seems to have worked.
The future of Hungary
Orban won an overwhelming victory in last Sunday’s vote. He won 54% of the votes, which was even greater than the previous poll forecast.
According to the analysis of election results by European news, on the one hand, the gap between urban and rural areas in Hungary looks as big as before. In Budapest, the opposition Coalition won the most votes. Elsewhere, the Youth League is dominant. On the other hand, this may confirm a common phenomenon in international politics-when a major crisis occurs, voters will tend to support the current political leaders.
The forces that want to defeat Orban have also launched an unprecedented action: six opposition parties have joined forces to present a common candidate: 49-year-old mayor Maki-Zahi.
Maki-Zahi is the father of seven children, a devout Christian and has strong conservative values. He even voted for the Communist Youth League in 2010, but later he was disappointed with the party. He defeated the candidate from the Youth League in the municipal election in a small town in southeastern Hungary, which was previously considered as the base camp of the Youth League.
Unlike Orban, he chose to embrace the European Union instead of the Russian Federation on the issue of “going east” or “going west”. In a political interview before the election, Marchi-Zahi said that this vote was not only for himself, but also for Europe, because “Hungary’s future lies in the EU”.
However, András Bozóki also pointed out that Orban didn’t really want to leave the EU, and “doubting Europe” was just a strategy to attract voters. The role he wants is to become a “special member” within the EU. He is well aware that membership-the ability to have one-vote veto in EU internal decision-making and the ability to seamlessly enter the EU single market-is one of Hungary’s most important diplomatic assets.
The opposition also questioned the election results, including possible fraud and media manipulation in the election process. For example, since the Hungarian public media is now basically controlled by the ruling youth league, before the election, Markey-Zahi only appeared on the largest public television station, while Orban appeared almost every day. Another example is that before the election, burned and discarded ballot boxes were found in a Hungarian-inhabited area in Romania, and overseas mailing of ballots was suspected of fraud.
Perhaps the most criticized by the opposition is the seat allocation system after Orban’s constitutional amendment. In fact, the Youth League won less than 50% of the votes in the last general election, but it was able to obtain an absolute majority of two-thirds in Parliament. The reason lies in Hungary’s complicated electoral system: the country is divided into 106 districts, and each district elects a member of parliament, just like the allocation of seats for members of the US Congress. But the other 93 seats are allocated to political parties according to a unique formula. This formula was designed by Orban to make the result favorable to the Youth League.
“This is a free but unfair election. Sociologist and former Hungarian Minister of Education Bálint Magyar told Interface News. He has served as a member of the Hungarian Parliament for a long time, and is the author of Hungary: Mafia Countries in the European Union. Before the election, he and his colleagues published a report detailing the possible election fraud in this year’s voting. The allegations of election fraud still need further investigation. However, observers also criticized the opposition: although they United, they failed to propose an effective alternative. The opposition was portrayed by Orban as a “militant” in an attempt to drag Hungary into the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and even slide to the risk of nuclear war. Apart from unconditionally supporting NATO, the opposition has no clear strategy to deal with the conflict.
The new york Times interviewed Tibor Tisahe, a supporter of the Youth League, who is the owner of a Hungarian taxi company.