The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (*1963) “wins” another two-thirds majority in the April 3, 2022 parliamentary election, despite polls suggesting that Orban’s Fidesz had only an advance of 5% to 6%.
With roughly 99% of the votes counted, Orban’s Fidesz-KDNP party alliance won an absolute majority of 53.1% of the votes and 133 of the 199 seats in parliament. The main opposition, the six-party alliance United for Hungary (Egységben Magyarországért, EM), composed of parties of the left, center and right, including the Hungarian Socialist Party, the Democratic Coalition, the far-right Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik), LMP – Hungary’s Green Party, Dialogue for Hungary and the Momentum Movement, only managed to win 35% of the vote and 62 of the 199 seats in parliament.
In short, on April 3, 2022 with a voter turnout of 69.54%, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz-KDNP party alliance won by a staggering marging of 18%. With another two-thirds majority, Orban can change the constitution at his will.
However, these election were not really free and fair. Viktor Orban and his Fidesz (most likely) did not cheat directly at the ballet box but, over the years, Orban and his friends have managed to control not only the state media, but also most important private mass media. Gerrymandering and pressure on local and other state employees to vote for Fidesz to keep their jobs helped Orban too.
The man former EU president Jean-Claude Juncker once only half-way jokingly welcomed as “dictator” has become more and more authoritarian over the years. In his younger years, Orban was a courageous, open critic of Hungary’s Communist regime and the Soviet Union, even a liberal reformer. After a first stint as prime minister from 1998 until 2002, he not only lost power in the election but, more importantly, he also abandoned his liberal ideas and ideals and became more and more conservative and even authoritarian. His evolution is in some regards similar to Putin’s.
In 2010, Viktor Orban managed to get reelected as prime minister and his managed to stay in power since then. In these 12 years in power, he not only managed to increase the standard of living of average Hungarians (GDP per capita), especially in the countryside. Therefore, the clear majority of rural voters are loyal to him.
After the demise of the Communist regimes in what used to be the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc, nationalism surged because people wanted to reassert their national identity. But, in his years in power since 2010, Viktor Orban has gone further and engaged in a cultural war not only against socialism, against the left, but also against Western liberalism, civil society, in fine against any dissenting voice.
In addition, Orban’s Hungary became more and more corrupt. The prime minister’s father Gyözö Orbán became suddenly wealthy. István Tiborcz married Orbán’s oldest daughter Ráhel and became rich. Orban’s childhood friend Lőrinc Mészáros even became miraculously a billionaire and Hungary’s richest man; he’s considered Orban’s strawman. In addition, one could add numerous Fidesz party friends and business leaders in favor of the prime minister and his regime who profited from their proximity to Viktor Orban.
In the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election, Viktor Orban promised to keep Hungary out of Putin’s war against Ukraine—Hungary shares a small common border with Ukraine. Shortly before Putin’s escalation of the war—ongoing since 2014—against Ukraine, Viktor Orban traveled to Moscow to make a special energy deal with his long-time political friend Vladimir Putin. He has become one of many of Putin’s useful idiots—the long list includes British PM Boris Johnson and far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who has a chance of winning the 2022 French presidential election.
During the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election campaign, it became clear that a majority of Hungarians wanted to stay out of the war. Voters were mainly preoccupied by their economic and financial situation. The countryside had strongly voted for Orban in the past because he had offered them a rising standard of living in his 12 years in office. Therefore, Viktor Orban traveled to Putin to reach an energy deal with the Russian dictator just ahead of the war.
According to a Reuters report, when the Hungarian inflation rose to a 14-year-high of 7.4% in November 2021, Orban announced a three-month cap on fuel prices that could be extended after a review in February. He made sure energy prices would not become an issue before the April 3 election. In addition, he imposed a cap on retail mortgage interest rates until the end of June to shield borrowers from rising loan repayments. On January 12, 2022 Viktor Orban announced that the prices of flour, sugar, sunflower oil, milk, pork leg and chicken breast must be cut back to mid-October 2021 levels from next month, all according to Reuters.
As for the United for Hungary party alliance leader Péter Márki-Zay (*1972), an economist and historian, co-founder of the Everybody’s Hungary Movement (Mindenki Magyarországa Mozgalom) and winner of the 2021 opposition primary, he lost his seat in the 2022 parliamentary election.
In his victory speech on election night, the reelected Prime Minister Viktor Orban mentioned a series of enemies: “We had to fight the most uneven fight ever: the leftists at home, the international leftists, the Brussels bureaucrats, the Soros organisations, the international media and ultimately even the Ukrainian president.”
With his 2022 escalation of the war against Ukraine, Putin has largely united Europe and NATO against him, but not entirely all of Europe and NATO. In short, Viktor Orban looks like Putin’s Trojan Horse in the European Union. Marine Le Pen could soon become his ally as the next French president because Emmanuel Macron cannot be sure to win again. 2022 is not 2017.
Regarding Viktor Orban, read our German review of the 2012 biography of Viktor Orban by the Polish journalist Igor Janke as well as our German article about Orban’s open turn towards illiberalism in 2014. About Hungary’s history, read our French review of the biography by Catherine Horel of Hungary’s inter-war leader Admiral Miklos Horthy, a dubious man highly regarded by Viktor Orban.
Beauty items at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Photograph showing Viktor Orban at the EPP Summit in Brussels on December 13, 2018 (cropped). Photo: European People’s Party via Wikipedia. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Article added on April 4, 2022 at 18:22 Swiss time. Last update on April 5, 2022 at 21:23 Swiss time: forgot to put “wins” in between brackets because Orban only “won” the election thanks to gerrymandering, controlling the mass media, etc.
