Most polls suggest a straightforward outcome for Hungary’s high-stakes election for a new Parliament on Sunday: Prime Minister Viktor Orban will lose.
But nothing about the vote is that simple.
For a start, the electoral system “is exactly what you would expect for a country that invented the Rubik’s Cube,” according to Ralph Schoellhammer, an Austrian scholar at a government-aligned college in Budapest, Hungary’s capital.
While most pollsters predict that the main opposition force, Tisza, will win more votes than Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party, the extreme complexity of Hungary’s system and years of gerrymandering mean that the results may not be quite what they seem.
Even if the polls are partly right, the governing party could still end up with a majority of seats in Parliament or enough to form a new government in coalition with smaller parties.
And many, particularly Fidesz supporters, believe the polls are wrong. So does Vice President JD Vance, who declared during a visit to Budapest on Tuesday that “Viktor Orban is, of course, going to win.”
Mr. Orban agreed, saying this was “the plan.”
Extreme Gerrymandering
That “plan” has been years in the works.
The ruling Fidesz party has tweaked the electoral system repeatedly in the years since Mr. Orban returned to power in 2010 for an unbroken 16-year run.
His government reduced the overall number of parliamentary seats to 199 from 386, a drastic change that required a complete redrawing of electoral district boundaries, which were further amended in 2024.
This redistricting and numerous other changes, according to Mr. Orban’s critics, have tended to pack opposition-leaning areas into larger electoral districts and split pro-government areas into smaller ones, which gives their votes more weight.
These changes have often meant that fewer votes were needed to win a parliamentary seat in rural areas, where Fidesz is generally strong, than in urban constituencies that tend to favor the opposition.
The Budapest 16 district, for instance, has more than 83,000 voters and elected a left-winger to Parliament. The Tolna 02 district in the southwest, represented in Parliament by Fidesz, has 56,000.
So even before voting commences, the scales are tilted toward Fidesz.
Magnifying the Victory
An added twist of the Hungarian system is that it shifts votes cast for losing candidates to the winners. This has the effect of magnifying the victory of the dominant party.
Since 2010, that party has been Fidesz.
In the last vote for Parliament, in 2022, Fidesz not only outperformed the forecasts of some polls, but after winning 37 percent of votes cast overall, it won 68 percent of seats.
This shifting of votes is done as Hungarians actually cast two ballots for the national legislature in races with two different electoral systems.
The first vote is for a local member of Parliament, elected in a first-past-the-post race in the electoral district where they live. These districts choose 106 members of Parliament.
The second vote is for national party lists. Which candidates on the national party lists get into Parliament is decided under a proportional system used to fill 103 seats.
A certain number of the votes cast in local races are transferred to the party list results according to a convoluted formula — known as the d’Hondt-matrix — that in previous elections has tended to benefit Fidesz.
Parties that fall below a 5 percent threshold of votes do not enter Parliament.
How smaller parties fare will have an important role in shaping the next government, should neither Fidesz nor Tisza win a majority of seats on its own.
While Hungary’s repeatedly revised election system can magnify the scale of a victory, the overall winner — the party with the most seats in Parliament — has never lost the vote count.
In the previous four elections, Fidesz has won the most votes and a large majority of seats in Parliament.
Media and Polling Distortion
Because getting votes is still what matters most, whatever the distortions of the system, Fidesz and Tisza have scrambled to energize their voters.
To that end, they have each pointed to different sets of opinion polls indicating their side will win. Each scorns the other’s preferred polls as rigged and politically biased.
Median, a polling organization that accurately predicted the outcome of the last election, last week released data from its latest survey showing that Tisza, the opposition party, was so far ahead of Fidesz that it could even secure a two-thirds majority of seats.
Fidesz-friendly commentators scoffed, pointing out that Median’s founder and managing director was Endre Hann, a former left-wing politician known for his hostility to Fidesz.
Mr. Hann, in an interview, denied any political bias in Median polls, saying he had been open about his past political affiliations, unlike some of the pollsters whose surveys put Fidesz in the lead.
Hungary’s political polarization is so acute, he said, that “pollsters have unfortunately been completely dragged into this party political division.”
The Center for Fundamental Rights, which hosts an annual meeting in Budapest of the U.S. Conservative Political Action Committee, said last week that its own polls showed Fidesz with a stable lead in two-thirds of electoral districts.
And while polls themselves may not be intentionally biased, coverage of them in the media is.
This reflects what is perhaps the biggest distortion afflicting Hungarian democracy: a media landscape overwhelmingly dominated by television and other outlets that are controlled by Fidesz either directly or through friendly tycoons.
“Public broadcasters have been turned into a propaganda outlet for the government and its Russian ally,” Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom advocacy group based in Paris, said last month after sending a study mission to Hungary.
“Independent private-sector media have been weakened, threatened and silenced through the biased allocation of state advertising, arbitrary suspension of broadcast licenses, unlawful surveillance, smear campaigns and takeovers by oligarchs allied with Fidesz,” it said.
It estimated that Fidesz and its allies “now control around 80 percent of the media landscape.”
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw, on temporary assignment in Shanghai.
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