![]() ![]() That this election was democratic and free is, of course, something we continue to dispute.” "We do not dispute that Fidesz won this election. We knew in advance that it would be an extremely unequal fight," Marki-Zay said. “We never thought this would be the result. Speaking to supporters in Budapest late Sunday, Marki-Zay conceded defeat but argued that Fidesz had won under a system of its own making. The opposition coalition, United For Hungary, asked voters to support a new political culture based on pluralistic governance and mended alliances with the country’s EU and NATO allies. ![]() “The key lesson is that the playing field is tilted so much that it became almost impossible to replace Fidesz in elections.” 'Unequal fight' “Hungary seems to have reached a point of no return,” she said. Opposition parties and international observers have noted structural impediments to defeating Orban, highlighting pervasive pro-government bias in the public media, the domination of commercial news outlets by Orban allies and a heavily gerrymandered electoral map.Įdit Zgut, a political scientist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, predicted that a clear victory for Orban would allow him to move further in an autocratic direction, sidelining dissidents and capturing new areas of the economy. In a surprise performance, the radical right-wing party Our Homeland Movement appeared to have garnered more than 6% of the vote, exceeding the 5% threshold needed to gain seats in parliament. It was a discouraging sign for the prime ministerial candidate who had promised to end to what he alleges is rampant government corruption, raise living standards by increasing funding to Hungary’s ailing health care and schools and mend frayed relations with the country's Western partners. Yet even in his home district, opposition leader Peter Marki-Zay trailed the longtime Fidesz incumbent Janos Lazar by more than 12 points, with more than 98% of the votes counted there. Voters were electing lawmakers to the country’s 199-seat parliament. The contest had been expected to be the closest since Orban took power in 2010, thanks to Hungary’s six main opposition parties putting aside their ideological differences to form a united front against Fidesz. “Hungarian democracy in the last 12 years has not weakened, but been strengthened.” “We have heard a lot of nonsense recently about whether there is democracy in Hungary,” Kovacs said. ![]() As Fidesz party officials gathered at an election night event on the Danube river in Budapest, state secretary Zoltan Kovacs pointed to the participation of so many parties in the election as a testament to the strength of Hungary’s democracy. ![]()
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