Assessing the 2022 Hungarian Parliamentary Elections

Guests featured in this Episode

Gábor Tóka, Senior Research Fellow in the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest.  A sociologist by training, he has published more than 60 articles on electoral behaviour, public opinion, political parties and democratic consolidation in edited volumes, political science and sociology journals. He is also the author of Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and has co-edited The Europeanization of National Polities (Oxford University Press, 2012).

GLOSSARY

What is Fidesz, the Hungarian political party ?
(00:1:20 or p.1. in the transcript) 

Fidesz, by name of Federation of Young Democrats–Hungarian Civic Alliance, is a centre-right Hungarian political party. Fidesz (the Federation of Young Democrats) was founded in 1988 as an anticommunist party that promoted the development of a market economy and European integration.  Initially, membership was restricted to those age 35 and younger, though this restriction was eliminated in 1993. In 1995 the party appended the name Hungarian Civic Party to its shortened form (altered to Hungarian Civic Alliance in 2003). Fidesz had its first notable success in 1990, when candidates associated with a coalition of which Fidesz was a member won mayoralties in a number of cities. In elections to the National Assembly, Fidesz won 22 seats. In 1997 members of a Christian Democratic group that had dissolved joined Fidesz in the National Assembly, enabling the joint group to form the largest bloc. The following year Fidesz became the single largest party in the National Assembly. 

After some eight years of Socialist rule, Fidesz, capitalizing on Hungary’s ongoing economic problems after the country’s economic collapse in 2008, swept back into power in the parliamentary elections of April 2010, winning more than two-thirds of the seats. Fidesz and its junior electoral coalition partner, the Christian Democratic People’s Party, repeated that feat in 2014 and again in 2018 and 2022, with Orbán returning as prime minister each time. Source: 

What is The Visegrad Group? 
(00:22:12 or p.5 in the transcript) 

The Visegrad Group (V4) is an informal regional format of cooperation between the four Central European countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, which are not only linked by neighbourhood and similar geopolitical situation but above all by common history, traditions, culture, and values.

The idea behind the Group was to intensify cooperation in building democratic state structures and free market economies and, in the long term, to participate in the process of European integration. The date of its creation is 15 February 1991, when the Presidents of Poland and Czechoslovakia, Lech Wałęsa and Václav Havel, and Prime Minister of Hungary József Antall signed a joint declaration on the objectives and conditions of cooperation in the Hungarian town of Visegrad.

Since 2004, all V4 countries have been members of the European Union, and the Visegrad Group provides a forum for exchanging experiences and working out common positions on issues relevant to the future of the region and the EU.

In addition to European issues, V4 cooperation focuses primarily on matters concerning Central Europe, exchange of information, and cooperation in culture, science, education and youth exchanges. Priority areas include expanding transport infrastructure and strengthening energy security in the region. Source:

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