In Hungary they start this sunday the legislative elections, considered the most important in decades in the country, with the conservative opposition candidate Péter Hungarian and his Tisza party as the main favorite according to the polls, while the current head of Government, the ultra-nationalist populist Viktor Orbánis seeking his fourth consecutive re-election.
Something more than 8.1 million citizens with the right to vote They go to the polls to elect the 199 deputies that make up Parliament. The 10,243 polling stations opened at 06:00 local time (04:00 GMT) and will remain open until 17:00 GMT.
The Hungarian electoral system is mixed, that is, voters cast two votes: one to elect the local representative in one of the 106 constituencies, while the other distributes the remaining 93 seats proportionally among five national lists.
According to the latest surveys, Magyar -un former member of the ruling Fidesz party – has a large advantage in voting intention, although due to the particularities of the Hungarian electoral system, a victory for Orbán is not ruled out.
The electoral campaign was marked by foreign policy and security issues, such as alleged threats from Ukrainein the case of Fidesz, while Tisza focused on domestic issues, such as corruption and the poor state of the health and education systems.
Support from the US and Russia
Orbán, considered a world reference for the international ultranationalist movement, received the explicit support of the American administration of the president, Donald Trumpand also from the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.
Magyar, for his part, renounced any external support, whether from the European Union (EU) or the European People’s Party (EPP), to which his party belongs in the European Parliament.
Some 600,000 Hungarians are registered to vote abroadin the case of ethnic Magyars from neighboring countries (such as Romania and Slovakia) by letter, while those who live abroad, but have Hungarian residence, will cast their votes in Hungarian diplomatic representations around the world.
In Hungary, no projections are issued after the closure of schools, but the first real-time scrutiny data are. In any case, we will have to wait until at least 10:00 p.m. local time (20:00 GMT) to obtain results of the most advanced count, above 90%.
