The Hungarian election campaign is surprisingly calm, and the distribution of voters is not changing. The ability of the parties to bring their supporters to the polls will be decisive.
Despite expectations, there has not yet been any fundamental turn in the election campaign before the parliamentary elections in Hungary. Voter attitudes and camps remain unchanged, and everyone is just impatiently waiting for election day. Voting results depend on the parties’ ability to mobilize their voters, political scientist Gábor Török, director of the Vision Politics Budapest Institute, said in an interview with the Budapest correspondent TASR.
“Even though big twists and major events were expected in the campaign, the voter camps remained divided and their positions frozen. The activities of Fidesz and the intensive tour of the head of the opposition Tisza, Péter Magyar, help the mobilization, but no event was able to reach the other party and change its thinking,” said Török.
Stable party preferences
According to him, the support of both camps remains almost unchanged, as evidenced by public opinion polls. “At the end of the campaign, new events will not be decisive, but the ability of each party to convince its own supporters to actually come to vote on Sunday,” the analyst underlined.
“Of course, I’m not saying that the things that are happening now are not important. The visit of the American vice president (JD Vance) obviously helped to strengthen the Fidesz camp and perhaps has a certain role in the mobilization. Equally important are the constant trips of Magyar, who visits five to seven cities a day. However, during the campaign, there was basically no event that would appeal to the other camp or change the mindset of its members,” Török specified.
Estimate of the distribution of mandates
On Wednesday, the Median Institute made an estimate of the distribution of mandates in the 199-member National Assembly based on its five current representative polls, according to which the opposition Tisza would occupy 138 to 143 seats and the governing Fidesz would occupy 49 to 55 seats. This would mean a two-thirds majority for the party led by Péter Magyar.
On April 3, the pro-government Nézőpont Institute published the results of its survey, which measured Fidesz at 46 percent and Tisze at 40 percent. Eight percent of respondents preferred the Our Homeland movement (Mi Hazánk Mozgalom). The institute presented the results with the claim that “public opinion research from Nézőpont is more realistic than from Median”.
