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About 300.000 ballots were distributed by mail to Hungarian citizens who are residents of Romania prior to the April 3rd elections. Normally the bulletins should have been returned to the Hungarian Electoral Authority also via regular mail. However this has not always happened: a very visible information campaign over the last week encouraged the Hungarian citizens to avoid the regular (Romanian) postal services and use “alternatives” instead.
Hungarians are the largest ethnic minority in Slovakia. According to the last year census, 422,065 Slovak citizens declared themselves to be of Hungarian ethic minority, a decline of 111,142 citizens since 1991. This constitutes 7,75% of the country’s 5.4 million population.[1]
Hungary is approaching the end of the 2022 general election campaign. Though the campaign was officially launched on 12 February, in practice, Hungary has been in a state of constant campaigning for significantly longer. The ongoing campaign was turned upside down by Russia’s war on Ukraine. A campaign period that was set to be dominated by economic issues was wholly consumed by the war.
Hungarians are the largest ethnic minority in Romania: at the latest census (2011) they represented 6.1% of the total population of the country of 20.1 million. A new census is going on in 2022, but the proportion is likely to stay roughly the same since the demographic decline occurred uniformly in most ethnic communities; the total population of the country today is estimated at 19.1 million.
Summary
On April 3, 2022, many Ukrainian citizens of Hungarian origin will vote in Hungarian parliamentary elections. Because dual citizenship is officially banned in Ukraine the exact number these voters are not disclosed by the Hungarian authorities, though up to 40,000 Ukrainian citizens have voted in Hungarian elections since 2014.
Based on the political environment and various party preference polls showing the same trends, Fidesz-KDNP is most likely to win the upcoming general election. They will presumably gain a significant advantage in the next National Assembly, not a minor one. We believe the likelihood of either of these two scenarios of the ruling party’s victory is 70%. The main reason for this is that the ruling party has a substantial structural advantage in the framework of the Orbán regime. All aspects of this political system, such as the electoral system, campaigning resources and the huge discrepancy between the sides in terms of their prevalence in the public discourse, favor the current ruling party. The pro-government information bubble has become hermetically sealed, especially in the more rural electoral districts that are crucial for the election, and there is no indication that the opposition could break through this wall.