How to watch the Hungarian election like a pro

Hungarians are heading to the polls on Sunday in an election that will potentially end Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule.

The race is being closely watched worldwide thanks to Orbán’s outsize influence as the preeminent EU ally of both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In both Washington and Moscow, the Hungarian leader’s departure would be viewed as a setback. On the U.S. side, he has been directly endorsed by Trump and MAGA allies, who see him as a trailblazer for their brand of Christian-oriented nationalism. And on the Russian side, Orbán has proven himself useful, delaying and blocking EU measures to support Ukraine.

POLITICO’s Poll of Polls suggests the prime minister is now in trouble, with his challenger Péter Magyar and his center-right Tisza party enjoying a comfortable lead.

But polling numbers don’t necessarily mean parliamentary seats — especially not in Hungary’s complicated electoral system. Most voters will be picking both a constituency candidate and from a party list, with districts that have been redrawn to benefit the ruling party and ballots coming in from abroad.

It’s not the easiest race to wrap one’s head around, but here’s everything to know before the first results start coming in.

Voting logistics

Polls open at 6 a.m. and close at 7 p.m. on April 12. Voters who are already in line by the time polls close will still be able to cast their ballots. All Hungarian citizens who are at least 18 years of age can vote; as can some over the age of 16, if they are married. 

Most will cast two votes: one for a candidate who can win a seat in a direct race in their own constituency; the second for a party list that runs across the country. Voters who belong to a registered ethnicity can also cast a vote for a nationality-based list — although only the German and Roma minorities have the numbers to elect a representative.

What the polls say

Hungarian polls diverge wildly depending on the pollsters and the organizations that commissioned or conducted them. 

POLITICO’s Poll of Polls aggregates the numbers from different pollsters, and its projections put Magyar’s Tisza party at 49 percent, 10 points clear of Orbán’s Fidesz at 39 percent. 

POLITICO excluded some pollsters because they didn’t meet criteria for sample size, methodology or transparency regarding their funding and commissions. If these were also taken into account, the gap between the two parties would narrow — but it wouldn’t be reversed in Orbán’s favor.

Still, voting intention polls rarely match voting results to a tee, and with Hungary’s (mind-boggling) electoral system and gerrymandered constituency map, vote shares don’t equal final political weight.

Case in point

Back in 2022, polls suggested a tight race between Orbán and his then-challenger Péter Márki-Zay. But Fidesz ultimately received a whopping 54 percent of the party-list vote, compared with just 34 percent for the opposition, and won 87 out of 106 constituency mandates.

That tally handed Fidesz 135 out of 199 parliamentary seats — or 67.8 percent. 

And that’s without counting Imre Ritter, the representative of the German Hungarians and a former Fidesz affiliate, who has tended to support the ruling coalition.

Complex counting mechanics

The Hungarian parliament has 199 seats, 106 of which are filled through constituency races. Those races are easy to follow: The candidate with the most votes wins the seat.

The remaining 93 seats are filled through nation-wide party lists — and this is where things get complicated. 

Only parties that receive at least 5 percent of the vote are eligible to win party-list seats. But the calculation for those seats isn’t just based on party-list votes. That would be far too simple. Instead, some of the vote count for those 93 seats include votes cast in the 106 constituency races. This not only includes votes that went to unsuccessful candidates, but also votes that winning candidates didn’t need to stay ahead of their closest competitor! This is the result of a 2011 reform, which has since been blamed for baking a winner-takes-all element into the system.

Seats are distributed proportionally according to the D’Hondt system, but the vote threshold is lower for nationality list candidates.

Time for results

Results for the constituency race typically trickle in first, while shares for the party-list vote remain in a flux throughout the night due to the complicated math.

Hungary’s electoral bureau said vote counting will start when polls close at 7 p.m., with the first preliminary results expected to land from 8 p.m. 

The bureau said it expects up to 95 percent of the party-list votes and up to 97 percent of the constituency vote to be counted Sunday night, but warned it could take up to a week before 100 percent of the votes are counted.

Expect the first projections of the new breakdown of parliament seats around midnight.

The vote from abroad

Hungarians who live abroad can cast their vote by post, but only for country-wide lists. 

Those mail-in ballots were enough to determine one parliamentary seat in 2018; and two in 2022. And with analysts now projecting the postal vote could again determine two seats, they could become critical in a tight race.

In the previous two elections, the mail-in vote heavily favored Orbán, with Fidesz receiving more than 90 percent of the postal vote in 2022, and over 216,500 out of about 225,000 mail-in ballots in 2018 — a slant that has previously led opposition parties to advocate for removing nonresident Hungarians’ right to vote.

This year, nearly 500,000 people have registered for a postal ballot — a record number — with many of them located in Romania and Serbia. According to a government counter, more than 321,000 of those votes had already arrived at the time of writing Thursday.

The largest Hungarian party in Romania, the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, openly supports Fidesz, and party leader Hunor Kelemen has called on Hungarian Romanians in Transylvania to support the prime minister. 

Still, Magyar tried to appeal to Hungarians in Slovakia earlier this year by criticizing new Slovak legislation revolving around the controversial Beneš decrees — a set of World War II-era laws that stripped ethnic Hungarians and Germans of citizenship and property in what was then Czechoslovakia.

Meanwhile, Hungarian citizens who live abroad but still have residency in the country can cast their votes at embassies or consulates. This demographic tends to favor opposition parties more, but their ballots count toward the domestic vote, both for party lists and constituencies.

This year, a record number of voters picked this option, with ​​90,734 people registered to cast their ballots abroad. Tisza launched a website specifically aimed at luring this group to polling stations.