FES BRIEFING HUNGARIAN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS 2022 András Bíró-Nagy – Gábor Győri THE RESULTS Another victory for Fidesz in the 2022 Hungarian elections was not unexpected, as none of the polls during the campaign had shown that the opposition could win a majority. What was a surprise was the extent of Fidesz’s success, beating the united opposition by more than 17 percentage points(Table 1), with the opposition only winning in Budapest and two other big cities. Everywhere else, the ruling party’s candidates emerged victorious. Despite the uneven playing field, no one had expected such a large margin. At 69.54% in Hungary proper, turnout was slightly below that of the 2018 election when 70.22% of the electorate voted. Nevertheless, turnout was high by historical standards. The turnout in the 2018 election had been the second-highest since the democratic transition, and 2022 came close. 1 Defying the expectations of the opposition, Fidesz won 86 of the 88 seats in single-member districts outside Budapest, defending all of its previously held seats and recapturing the town of Dunaújváros, once a left-wing bastion that the Socialists had carried by a margin of 65-35 in 2006(it was won by a Jobbik candidate in 2018). The opposition held on to its only two other seats outside Budapest, one each in the cities of Szeged and Pécs. The minimum expectation for the opposition was that it would be able to capture many of the large urban areas it had won in the 2019 municipal election. The election of opposition mayors in large cities across Hungary at the time fed the hope that at least the parliamentary seats in these cities could swing towards the opposition. Reality shaped up very differently, however, with Fidesz not only defending these seats but mostly even expanding its lead over the opposition. HUNGARY DIVIDED BETWEEN BUDAPEST AND THE REST At the 2022 elections, it was only in the capital itself that the opposition’s victories in single-member districts largely Table 1 Results of the votes for party lists in the Hungarian national parliamentary election of 2022 (vote totals only for the vote within Hungary) Party list Fidesz-KDNP United Opposition Our Homeland Two-Tailed Dog Party % Share of the votes in 2018 within Hungary 47.36 48.91 1 – 1.79 Note: results as of 6 April 2022. Source: valasztas.hu. % Share of the votes in 2022 within Hungary 51.34 34.09 6.00 3.20 Total number of votes in 2022 2,717,308 1,804,587 317,779 169,388 Seats in 2018 133 65 – 0 Seats in 2022 135 56 7 0 1 The aggregate share of the votes won by the five party lists that ran separately in the 2018 election but jointly in 2022(the joint list of MSZP and Dialogue for Hungary(MSZP-PM), Democratic Coalition (DK), Jobbik, and Politics Can Be Different(LMP). For 2018, we also added Together, a smaller left-wing party which won about 0.7% of the vote, far below the 5% threshold in 2018. conformed to expectations, with the United for Hungary list sweeping 16 of the 18 districts in the capital. Symbolically significant is that Fidesz has lost all four of the traditionally conservative districts in Buda. Before 2010, a victory of left­wing candidates in all of them seemed inconceivable. It is 1