The party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary is facing parliamentary elections on Sunday that are expected to be exceptionally close. And the marginalized Roma ethnic minority may prove to be an unexpected swing vote, pivotal to whether his party remains in power.
Over the last 16 years, Mr. Orban’s government has doled out public jobs to Roma voters, some in exchange for political loyalty to his party, Fidesz. But it has also overhauled Hungary’s education system in ways that experts and analysts say have systemically trapped Roma in Hungary’s underclass.
“There are many reasons why we won’t vote for Orban,” said Bettina Pocsai, an education expert in Budapest who is Roma and works with Roma people. “Many people in our community face so many challenges that it’s not just the failure of the educational system. But mainly that is what contributes to it.”
Long held back by economic instability and prejudice across Europe, ethnic Roma make up about 8 percent of Hungary’s population of 9.6 million, according to government officials and experts. But with a range of polls showing Mr. Orban’s party trailing in the election, “this is not the best time to risk the Roma vote,” said Gabor Gyori, a political analyst with the Policy Solutions research organization in Budapest.
Since taking office in 2010, Mr. Orban has imposed a range of national education initiatives that academics and analysts say have had a disproportionate impact on Roma students, largely limiting them to mediocre or substandard schools that, in turn, lead them toward low-wage jobs.
Mr. Orban’s government centralized control of public elementary and secondary schools, taking decisions about how children are educated out of the hands of communities. It shifted public funding to church-run schools that relatively few Roma attend. And it lowered the mandatory school attendance age from 18 to 16, leading to a significant drop in 17-year-old Roma continuing their educations.
At the same time, government programs have provided low-skills jobs to impoverished or otherwise disadvantaged Hungarians, many of them Roma, to replace some welfare assistance.
Disagreement over whether Mr. Orban’s education and employment policies hurt or help Roma has simmered for a long time. It took a profanity-laden remark in January by Mr. Orban’s transportation minister, Janos Lazar, to turn the debate into widespread anger.
Speaking at a public forum at a lake resort town west of Budapest, Mr. Lazar used a racial epithet for Roma to declare that “someone has to clean the toilets on InterCity trains.”
He later apologized, but the remark created an uproar. Mr. Gyori said it reflected how politicians had generally “ignored the problems of the Roma community, thereby effectively cementing racial segregation in parts of Hungary.”
He called it “an instance of the mask slipping.”
Mr. Lazar did not respond to a request for comment.
Tisza, the political party challenging Mr. Orban and led by the opposition politician Peter Magyar, said Mr. Orban’s policies had “further deepened social exclusion” of Roma, in part through the advantages for religious schools.
Mr. Orban’s allies dismiss the criticism as a campaign ploy and predict that Roma voters will continue to support him.
“I think the Roma in general acknowledge the work that the government is doing,” said Attila Sztojka, who is Roma and is Mr. Orban’s state secretary for social opportunities and Roma relations.
In the months since his minister’s disparaging comment, Mr. Orban has focused Fidesz’s election campaign on illegal migration and European Union support for Ukraine, presenting them as threats to Hungary’s sovereignty. That may resonate with Roma voters.
Attila Csik, a Roma cabdriver whose children go to a kindergarten in Budapest with non-Roma students, said he knew many people who would “stand up for Fidesz,” adding, “They will believe the propaganda about the war, about migration.”
Agnes Alexandra Bercsenyi’s two children go to the same kindergarten. She is not Roma but is disgusted, she said, by policies and political rhetoric that Mr. Orban presides over.
“We don’t need that hate,” she said. “I hope it will have an impact in April.”
Mr. Orban’s education overhaul, starting in 2011, is a particular sore point among Roma.
Centralized control of public education and the shifting of money has led to an exodus likened to “white flight” to church-run schools by skilled teachers and privileged students, according to a report issued in November by the deputy commissioner for protecting citizens’ fundamental rights. That report, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, has since been taken off the office’s website.
Lowering the mandatory school attendance age, to 16, was part of the Orban government’s efforts to supply the economy with blue-collar workers, according to a 2023 study by Janos Kollo and Anna Sebok, researchers at the KRTK Institute of Economics in Budapest. The study concluded that significantly more Roma students ended their schooling early after the change than did non-Roma.
The study found that the number of 17-year-old Roma children who were attending school in 2016 fell by 21 percentage points from 2011, before the law took effect. By contrast, that number dropped by 5.9 percentage points among non-Roma 17-year-olds in the same time period.
That meant Roma children were more likely to be locked in cycles of low-wage work, Mr. Kollo said in an interview on Monday.
Mr. Sztojka, the Roma government official, defended the government’s education policies.
He said centralized control was established to create a consistent nationwide standard for the country’s schools. And he said that teachers earned the same salaries in church-run and public schools and that those who worked with large populations of economically disadvantaged students, which generally include Roma, were offered 20 percent raises.
Any school where Roma or other disadvantaged groups are not fairly represented among students risk losing 10 percent of government funding, Mr. Sztojka said.
“We constantly monitor the situation,” he said.
He said the lowering of the mandatory school age did not have a negative effect on Roma graduation rates, pointing to a 2025 study by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights showing that more Roma were attending early-childhood education and graduating from high school than were a decade ago.
Those rates remain far behind those of the rest of Hungary’s students. The study also said slightly more Roma were attending schools that were fully or mostly segregated than in 2016.
Klaudia Kiraly was the only Roma student in her public high school class in Kalocsa, a small city south of Budapest, after rejecting teachers’ suggestions in 2013 that she switch to a vocational school to become a nurse. She said Roma who remained in public schools were often pushed toward trade colleges instead of universities.
“I told them I have other plans,” said Ms. Kiraly, 26, now a lawyer in training.
The New York Times was not allowed into a range of public schools in Kalocsa and in a heavily Roma district in Budapest. Nor would the principal of a Catholic-run school in Kalocsa answer questions about students’ ethnicities or government funding when approached in late February outside the building, a gleaming, modern structure with a soaring glass atrium.
Its advantages were made obvious, however, by a public vocational school next door that had paint peeling from its fading yellow facade.
A few blocks away, a semicircle of Roma and non-Roma kindergartners sat on the carpet in a classroom, listening to their teacher. Kindergartens in Hungary are run by local municipalities, not the central government, and making sure they include a mix of Roma and non-Roma students is left to communities.
The district’s director, Ildiko Szabone Juhasz, used to oversee a Roma-only kindergarten in Kalocsa that closed in 2022. Her students there, many from poor neighborhoods, rarely interacted with children from other parts of the city until they were transferred to the integrated school, she said.
“I’m glad we were able to get rid of that,” Ms. Juhasz said.
Lara Jakes, a Times reporter based in Rome, reports on conflict and diplomacy, with a focus on weapons and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. She has been a journalist for more than 30 years.
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