Víktor Orbán is emerging as the winner of the elections in Hungary

The Prime Minister of Hungary, the ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative Victor Orbanwill continue to lead the country. At the close of this edition, and with 36% of the vote counted, the ruling party had received 58% of the votes compared to 30% of the main opposition coalition in the legislative elections held this Sunday in the Central European country.

According to a poll released at the last minute by the Median demographic institute, Orbán’s party, fidesz, would have added 49% of the votes. The opposition coalition United for Hungary would remain at 41% of the votes and, therefore, quite far from being able to dispute the victory of the ruling party. Median broadcast the projection after the polls closed at seven in the evening. Pending final official results, the projected advantage will be enough for Orbán to lead the country for fourth consecutive term and for the fifth time in his life. The Fidesz leader has governed uninterruptedly since 2010, and had already been prime minister between 1998 and 2002.

The opposition coalition – made up of six matches ranging from the radical left to the right, passing through greens and liberals – it came to be tied with the Orbán formation in the electoral polls until the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine: As various analysts pointed out before the appointment with the polls, the war seems to have given an electoral bonus to the Hungarian Prime Minister, who has presented himself in recent weeks as the guarantor of stability and peace in a context of tremendous uncertainty international.

“In Hungary there is no democracy. There are no free and fair elections, regardless of today’s results”, said the leader of the opposition coalition, Peter Marki-Zay, after voting this Sunday. Márki-Zay, mayor of the town of Hódmezõvásárhely, has constantly denounced during the campaign the harassment that public and private media have carried out against his opposition alliance. This conservative politician has proposed the parliamentary elections as perhaps the last opportunity to get the country out of authoritarian drift in which Orbán has plunged Hungary over the last 12 years into a model baptized by himself as “illiberal democracy”. “We are fighting for decency, the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law,” said Márki-Zay.

The harsh denunciations of his rival have not, however, taken Prime Minister Orbán out of his script: the ruling party insists on accusing the opposition of being incapable of calibrating the seriousness of the moment that Europe is experiencing. “Wars never end like the people who started them think they will. They always carry a much higher risk. and there is one war in our region between two great countries. It is very dangerous and we must stay out of it. In my opinion, our political rivals do not feel the seriousness of the moment and want to take steps that could push Hungary into that conflict. And that would be traffic for Hungary”, Orbán said after casting his vote in Budapest.

The war in Ukraine has been key in these elections. The Orbán government has not vetoed the sanctions against Russia approved within the European Union, but the Hungarian prime minister has avoided direct criticism of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, with whom he shares certain positions. This, added to Hungary’s enormous energy dependency on Russia, has caused Orbán to oppose sending weapons to the Ukrainian government and allowing weapons to cross Hungary towards the neighboring country.

From kyiv, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, made no secret of his criticism of Orbán on the eve of the Hungarian elections. “He is virtually the only one in Europe who openly supports Putin,” Zelensky said in a speech on Saturday. “Putin is not running in the Hungarian elections, so I am not going to deal with this issue today,” Orbán replied from Budapest after being repeatedly asked about his ties to the Kremlin.

More than 200 international observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe They have accompanied the Hungarian electoral process and the previous campaign, in an unusual mission in an EU country.

A preliminary report of the OSCE mission has already denounced deficiencies in the campaign, such as, for example, that the state administration works in favor of the ruling party or that the public and private media systematically take sides in favor of Orbán’s party. It is not the first time that the OSCE has made these criticisms of the Hungarian model: observers from the international organization have already described the 2014 and 2018 elections as “free, but not fair”.