For the first time in 12 years, on April 3 Hungary’s opposition stands a real chance of unseating Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party, though it remains an uphill battle: Fidesz has changed the election laws and has virtually unlimited resources for the campaign, plus it is backed by the entire state apparatus and has a vast media empire behind it.

Last week, at a closed-door caucus meeting, Hungary’s 58-year-old prime minister called on Fidesz lawmakers and party supporters, including media celebrities, to roll up their sleeves and not to be overconfident, despite being ahead of the six-party opposition alliance in the polls. Fidesz is seen as the odds-on favourite, but its lead is still within the margin of error and analysts say some 500,000 "active undecided" voters could swing the election either way.

Hungary’s illiberal strongman still remembers the bitter election defeat in 2002 after his first term. But the circumstances have changed dramatically since – Orban has transformed the country from head to toe, dismantling checks and balances, waging war against critical media and NGOs, fighting constant battles with the EU, and he has filled up state bodies with cronies.

On the economic front, Fidesz has nationalised the energy sector and its cronies had taken over complete industries from tourism to fashion and a large chunk of the media – something that could be decisive in this campaign. Many of these oligarchs will now be expected to pay back their political masters by covertly bankrolling Fidesz’s campaign.

After the 2018 vote, international organisations, including the Organisation for Security and Co-operation (OSCE), said that the election was free but not fair. The playing field was biased in favour of the ruling party due to "a pervasive overlap between state and ruling party resources, biased media coverage and opaque campaign financing regulations".

With less than six weeks before the elections, things have if anything got worse. That is why the OSCE has recommended that a full-scale international election observation mission will be sent to Hungary for the April 3 election. It is unheard of for such a mission to be conducted in an EU member state, though Freedom House now ranks Hungary a “hybrid regime” rather than a full democracy.

Bogus parties

The first hurdle for the opposition is the way Fidesz has gerrymandered the election system. The 2012 election reform phased out the two-round system, reduced the number of seats from 386 to 199 and eliminated the regional lists. On the first ballot, voters can elect MPs for 106 single-member districts using the first-past-the-post system.

The remaining 93 mandates are distributed according to votes on the party lists, plus "wasted votes" from the first ballot from losing candidates, using a complicated technique which benefits the winner.

Fidesz has also changed district lines to its favour, attaching rural areas to urban districts, where the opposition's support is concentrated.

With such a drastic overhaul of the system, opposition parties running on separate lists in 2014 and 2018 had no chance of even coming close.

The ruling party further altered the election rules in late 2020 as well, which forced the six-party opposition to run on a single national list, something that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

The ruling party calculated that a single list would be mission impossible due to the vast diversity of the opposition’s policies, and the pro-government media apparatus did everything to derail the budding cooperation between liberals, greens, centre-right politicians and leftist parties.

Yet politicians from leftist Democratic Coalition and far-right-turned-centrist Jobbik  felt the pressure from the electorate to cooperate. After the successful local government elections in 2019, they agreed on the broad terms of a future government in early 2021.

In autumn 2021 the parties ran a historic primary election to select all candidates in 106 constituencies as well as the joint prime minister candidate, outsider Peter Marki-Zay.

The appearance of bogus parties has been another way of tilting the elections Fidesz’s way. Hundreds of parties were created just months before the 2014 and 2018 elections to cash in on lucrative campaign subsidies. Parties gathering less than 1% of the vote are supposed to pay back campaign subsidies but the courts have only forced them to do so in a handful of cases.

Fidesz party founder and hardline conservative columnist Zsolt Bayer is making no secret of supporting fringe movements that could eventually be a game changer. He has recently called on rightwing voters to help them collect the necessary number of signatures to run in the elections.

In 2022, the appearance of billionaire Gyorgy Gattyan is seen as the largest threat for the opposition when it comes to losing the ballot of undecided voters. The smooth, soft-spoken porn billionaire has no shortage of cash to finance his campaign. Gattyan is running on a platform of making Hungary a digital state.

Polls show the far-right Our Homeland and the Two-Tailed Dog party also have a chance of passing the 5% threshold. The radical anti-vaccination party could lure voters from Fidesz, while the joke party that promises eternal life and free beer is popular among young urban voters who would not vote for either political block.

Fidesz has also recruited candidates in smaller rural districts, where it is an underdog, with the same name as the opposition challenger – a tactic taken straight out of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s playbook.

Legislation adopted in November that legalises the establishment of fictitious voting addresses could facilitate infringements in the election, analysts and opposition parties have warned. Hundreds of Hungarian-Ukrainian dual citizens were bussed from Ukraine to eastern border towns on election day four years ago. Opposition media have revealed that hundreds of people were registered in uninhabited houses, giving them the right to vote in the elections in swing seats. Local authorities have done nothing to curb this practice over the years.

Fidesz can already count on the vast majority of the 1.1mn Hungarians in neighbouring countries, who have been given Hungarian citizenship over the last 10 years and have been handsomely subsidised using state funds. Nine out 10 voted for the ruling radical rightwing party in 2018. The government has allowed them to vote by mail, something it has refused for Hungarians working or living abroad, who are more likely to vote for opposition parties.

Hungarian civil groups are collecting money on the internet to support the travel costs of Hungarians living in the UK to cast their votes. The government has prepared only three polling stations for an estimated 150,000-200,000 people living in the UK. Two months ago, the National Election Committee (NVB) dismissed a request to increase the number of places available for Hungarians living in the UK to cast their votes.

Roughly a quarter of the 500,000 Hungarians working or living abroad cast their ballot in 2018. Half of them would vote if it took them less than one hour to travel to polling stations. If that were the case, analysts calculate that opposition parties would receive 50,000-100,000 more votes on the national list.

Vast media empire

Fidesz’s media dominance is the second big obstacle for the opposition. Hungary's media landscape has changed dramatically since 2010, which is reflected in the country’s fall in various rankings measuring press freedom.

After the close defeat in the 2002 and 2006 elections, Viktor Orban learned the hard way that his chances of coming back to power without a solid media empire were slim.

During his years in opposition his former righthand man, the then Fidesz treasurer Lajos Simicska, helped the party to establish a handful of conservative outlets. 

After the first two-thirds majority in 2010, Hungary’s illiberal strongman began to systematically build up a media empire, buying up newspapers, online media and blogs, radio channels, outdoor billboard companies and marketing and PR ventures.

Hungary’s state media has always reflected the governing party, but it became a pure mouthpiece of Fidesz after Orban’s second supermajority in 2014. The new media council in charge of overseeing the sector and deciding on radio frequency was also filled with Fidesz loyalists.

Hungary’s premier named media as a strategic industry, as well as the retail, banking and energy sectors, where domestic ownership should exceed 50%, and by that he meant a media loyal to him.

After his break-up with Simicska in early 2015, Orban learned that depending on a single ally poses risks. The media empire of Fidesz became more diversified, with a handful of Fidesz cronies buying up media outlets one after the other.

One of them was Lorinc Meszaros, the former gas fitter from Orban’s home village, who has since become Hungary’s richest man. He became the largest shareholder of regional newspapers, which have a huge readership. Meszaros also played an instrumental role in the closure of Hungary’s largest broadsheet , the opposition-friendly Nepszabadsag, in 2016.

The takeover of commercial broadcaster TV2 by former Hollywood producer and government film commissioner Andy Vajna in 2015 also marked a milestone in Fidesz’s media strategy.

Pro-government media became even more concentrated when a handful of Orban cronies transferred their companies to the Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA) in 2019 without any compensation. The antitrust investigation of the transfer of some 500 outlets was blocked by the government. 

KESMA outlets operate with vast financial resources from state adverts, while independent media is struggling to live off the market. In some KESMA units, state advertisement accounts for 70-80% of their total revenue.

Orban’s propaganda machine flexed its muscles during the 2018 election campaign with orchestrated attacks on the opposition, as well as stories playing on fears over migration.  After the election, courts ruled against pro-government media outlets in dozens of libel cases, but this was mustard after meat for the opposition.

After the surprising setback in the 2019 local government elections, when the ruling party lost in Budapest and in a dozen major cities, Fidesz began to channel even more money to beef up its online presence. 

Fidesz has spent over HUF4bn in adverts on Facebook since 2019, and campaign spending by pro-government think-tanks, bloggers and civil groups is two or three times higher than that of the opposition.

Hungary’s state media continues to operate as a mouthpiece of the government, echoing the government’s attack lines and slandering the opposition. Opposition politicians are excluded from state media and news coverage is tilted 90-10% towards Fidesz and the government.

In the 2022 election campaign, Fidesz's propaganda machine has also been used to suppress news. Pro-government media went completely silent when the largest corruption scandal of recent years broke, which led to the fall of the state secretary of the Justice Ministry.  

There are media outlets that are independent of both the government and opposition parties with significant audiences, but they rely on donations from readers to survive, being cut off from state ads.

Finally, to concentrate minds at the election, the Fidesz-led majority parliament has also approved holding a referendum on the “Child Protection Act”, or the anti-LGBT legislation passed last summer, on the same day as the election.

The government approved the controversial legislation solely to divert attention from corruption scandals and the EU’s criticism of the deterioration of the rule-of-law in the country, as it braces for possible sanctions under the new conditionality mechanism, MEP Istvan Ujhelyi claims.

Fidesz has tried to claim that its dispute with the EU is really about the way Brussels opposes the government’s efforts to ban the promotion of “LGBT propaganda” in kindergartens and the promotion of sex change for minors.

The referendum could dominate the campaign and help the state to be even more involved on Fidesz’ side. Well before the official kick-off to the campaign on February 12, streets are filled with state-funded billboards with the caption: "Let’s protect our children". In all the furore, protecting democracy seems to have been forgotten.