Former German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who currently holds the position of president of the Bundestag, according to MTI expressed his belief that because Viktor Orbán received “very significant confidence” from the people of Hungary, “we as good democrats must accept him” as the leader of his country. No one disputes the fact that Fidesz won the election. But I think we can question Schäuble’s claim that the election results reflect confidence in Viktor Orbán and his regime. It seems that even a seasoned politician like Schäuble gets lost in the labyrinth of an electoral law tailored to the needs of the government party.
The truth is that only 49.28% of the electorate voted for Fidesz, a result that was then miraculously translated into a two-thirds majority of the parliamentary seats for the governing party. Can we call this result the embodiment of the people’s “significant confidence” in Fidesz and its leader? No. It is not without reason that the tens of thousands of citizens who have already staged two anti-government demonstrations call themselves “the majority.” Schäuble should also keep in mind that, according to the preliminary findings of OSCE-ODIHR, “the 8 April parliamentary elections were characterized by a pervasive overlap between state and ruling party resources, undermining contestants’ ability to compete on an equal basis.” In addition, “intimidating and xenophobic rhetoric, media bias and opaque campaign financing constricted the space for genuine political debate, hindering voters’ ability to make a fully-informed choice.” Perhaps Mr. Schäuble could have been more cautious in describing the Hungarian people’s level of confidence in Viktor Orbán’s illiberal rule.
Of course, when analyzing the election results, we mustn’t forget about such “Hungaricums” as overcompensating the winners of electoral districts by adding to the votes they receive the votes cast for their party list. According to Róbert László, an election expert, this unique feature of the 2013 Hungarian electoral law resulted in a gain of seven Fidesz seats in parliament. If we take nothing else into consideration, just this one ruse made the two-thirds majority possible. But what about the different methods of voting for dual citizens in the neighboring countries and Hungarians working in the West? Or distributing extra money in the form of food stamps to pensioners just before the election? In villages considerable pressure was exerted on voters employed in the public works program. The threat of losing their job if they voted wrong was a powerful incentive.
Unfortunately, even blatant, old-fashioned electoral fraud cannot be ruled out. The most suspicious event was the total breakdown of the National Election Office’s website, which was offline for a couple of hours. People who watched carefully as the numbers were released found signs of possible tampering with the results. Those who question the integrity of the elections are not crackpots. Mátyás Eörsi, who himself was often part of election monitoring teams in other countries, suspects that “the withholding of data, the unavailability of the website can serve only one purpose: to be able to penetrate the system.”
Soon after the election, several articles appeared in the government-sponsored media in which Fidesz propagandists tried to justify the two-thirds majority in light of a less than impressive vote count. An Origo article with the title “A new opposition lie has been unveiled” argued that there is no electoral system in the world where Fidesz wouldn’t have a parliamentary majority given the numbers. The anonymous author claimed that in Great Britain and Japan, with even less support, the winner would have gotten a greater percentage of seats in parliament than Fidesz did.
The article posits the theoretical electoral results Fidesz would have achieved in other countries, including the United States and Ireland, where the electoral systems are vastly different from the Hungarian one. Here I will concentrate on only a few countries. According to the article, in the electoral system of Great Britain, Fidesz would have gotten 85.85% of the mandates; in France, 72%; in Italy, 63.79%. It would have been only in the Netherlands that Fidesz would have been one seat short of an absolute majority, asserts the article. The author wisely left out a comparison to the German and the Austrian systems, where the number of votes and the number of seats match up pretty closely.
Here is a graph of the relation between the percentage of votes won and the percentage of seats won in the Hungarian system compared to some other European countries.
green: proportion of votes and orange: proportion of seats in select European countries
A few days ago the Hungarian version of Euronews published an article by Rita Palfi titled “Can one receive a two-thirds majority with half of the votes in Europe?” Palfi recalls that, shortly after the election, Viktor Orbán was asked at an international press conference about the fairness of the Hungarian system where the opposition parties received 100,000 more votes than Fidesz-KDNP but where Fidesz-KDNP nevertheless got two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. Orbán, following the propaganda in his own press, declared that in the United Kingdom Fidesz’s majority would have been even greater than two-thirds. But the two systems cannot really be compared because in the United Kingdom there are no party lists and no compensation votes. In this last election, just by way of compensation, Fidesz received an extra 1.2 million votes. In 2017 the Conservatives got 48.8% of the seats in parliament for 42.4% of the votes cast. Comparing the Hungarian system to the French is again difficult because there are no party lists, but according to recent studies, the opposition would have received a higher number of seats if the French system had been used in Hungary.
I may add that the National Election Office’s website is still not working properly. The latest election results are more or less available, but the data pertaining to previous elections haven’t yet been restored. Therefore, any kind of in-depth analysis of the data is out the question at the moment
But this is not the most important issue. Right now the most pressing task of the opposition parties is to react in some fashion to the popular demand for close cooperation in order to beat Viktor Orbán’s electoral system.
The first move came from LMP, which through MTI announced the leadership’s intention of “inviting the opposition delegations to harmonize their plans and their concepts” as far as their parliamentary strategies are concerned. I haven’t encountered any reaction to this invitation yet, but I assume that under the present circumstances the invitation cannot be declined even if LMP’s reputation among the other opposition parties is sullied because of the party leaders’ behavior during the campaign.
And the Fidesz reaction? András Bencsik’s Demokrata’s reaction was brief: “The soap opera of opposition collaboration continues” for the eighth season. The style is typical of what we expect from Fidesz, but there is something in the observation that while Bernadett Szél is calling on the other opposition parties to cooperate, Péter Ungár is making fun of MSZP’ s claim of renewal in a short Facebook comment, saying “Be careful, embrace your friends, because MSZP will be renewed today.” The young man, I’m afraid, needs to grow up.
It was only on Jobbik’s internet news site that I found any mention of LMP’s invitation. The article reminds Alfahír’s readers that LMP, which has serious internal problems, is likely trying to divert attention from its own difficulties. Although I’m no fan of LMP, I’m convinced that Szél’s invitation is genuine. There is a tremendous external pressure on the opposition parties to collaborate or even to gather together under an umbrella party of sorts. LMP’s refusal to coordinate with MSZP and DK most likely cost the opposition forces six Budapest districts. So if LMP truly wants to work together with the other parties, it must be the one to make the first move.