Fidesz Designed an Electoral System to Keep Them in Power. Now it might Come Back to Haunt Them.
Guest contributor Ármin Ferenci discusses the significance of the Hungarian electoral system and how it impacts election outcomes.
One of political science’s most famous laws, one of only a few the discipline has produced, relates to electoral systems and party competition. Named after French political scientist Claude Duverger, Duverger’s law states that majoritarian winner-take-all systems tend to produce two main parties. This comes as a result of mathematical properties he called mechanical effects as well as the behaviour of voters who vote strategically in order to maximise their expected utility.
Duverger’s law is not absolute - as laws in social science tend not to be. But it continues to serve as an extraordinarily useful tool to analyse interparty competition and electoral behaviour. There is hardly a better case study to employ this framework than Hungary where electoral reform pushed an already majoritarian-leaning mixed system into even less proportionality.
The 2011 electoral reform has contributed immensely to Fidesz’s longstanding grip on the country by entrenching electoral inequalities, helping the party withstand dips in popularity, and maintaining two-thirds majorities in the country’s parliament. However, scientific literature and comparative studies tell us that a spirited challenge by an almost equally sized electoral block can credibly contest elections in this setup, particularly in the event of efficient geographical spread of their electorate. In this respect, Péter Magyar’s upstart Tisza Party might prove to be a much harder nut to crack than previous opponents.
There are some signs that suggest Fidesz is aware of the changed electoral landscape. Recent rumours about the creation of electoral districts for Hungarian nationals living in the country’s former borders point to a desire to further tweak to the rules to their advantage. Similarly, the electoral body’s refusal to address severely gerrymandered districts and reapportion existing ones in a fair manner could, in theory, further benefit Fidesz in an upcoming election.
The lay of the land
Hungary saw its single-member districts (SMDs) power the ruling Fidesz -KDNP coalition to consecutive supermajorities in the country’s unicameral parliament. The country uses a mixed-member majoritarian electoral system, meaning voters can cast votes for a candidate as well as a party list. It is worth noting that the role of members elected via simple plurality rule in electoral districts significantly increased with the electoral reform enacted by Fidesz in 2011.
Since then, the country has held three parliamentary elections. The new system consists of a mixed-member majoritarian system, where 106 seats are elected in single-member districts using the first-past-the-post method, and 93 seats are elected in a single nationwide constituency using proportional representation with a 5% threshold for parties (10% for a joint list of two parties and 15% for a joint list of three parties). There is also a compensation mechanism that allocates PR seats based on the sum of second-ballot list votes and wasted votes from the first ballot. Votes are considered wasted if they were cast for unsuccessful candidates or surplus votes for winning candidates.
It is not surprising that Fidesz opted for a more majoritarian version of the mixed-member system. Majoritarian systems, such as the constituency-based elections in the UK and the US, are known to favour large parties over smaller ones and tend to produce stable majorities. With Fidesz far ahead of other parties and facing a fragmented opposition made up of educated city-dwellers, the reforms were set to enhance their existing strengths.
The 2014 election was the first to be held under the new system, resulting in a landslide victory for Fidesz. Winning 133 seats out of 199 with a seat share of 44.87%, the party secured a two-thirds supermajority that enabled it to amend the constitution and pass legislation without opposition support. The main opposition alliance, Unity, won only 38 seats, while the far-right Jobbik party won 23 seats, and the green-liberal LMP party won 5 seats.
Four years later, the 2018 election saw Fidesz retain its two-thirds majority. The party won 133 seats again, while the opposition fragmented into several competing alliances and parties. The main opposition force was Jobbik, which won 26 seats, followed by centre-left MSZP-Párbeszéd with 20 seats, centre-left DK with nine seats, LMP with eight seats, and the centrist Együtt with one seat. With Fidesz barely clinching a supermajority in the parliament with only 49.27% of the vote, attention was turned to electoral districts where a combined opposition would have theoretically defeated the Fidesz candidate.
The 2022 election was expected to be more competitive as the opposition parties ranging from centre-left MSZP to former far-right Jobbik formed a joint list and coalesced around a common candidate for prime minister. However, Fidesz managed to increase its vote share to 54.27% and expand its supermajority to 135 seats, while the opposition list won only 57 seats with 34.44%. Although the result was bitterly disappointing for the opposition, some analyses suggest that they would have likely won even fewer seats had they not joined forces.
In the meantime, the far-right Mi Hazánk party did not participate in the opposition alliance and entered the parliament for the first time with six seats and roughly six percent of the vote. The result was a parliament dominated by a big block in the middle, with opposition parties on its either side. This concept of Fidesz occupying the centre ground (titled “central force field”) has been prime minister Viktor Orban’s staple strategy for more than a decade.
As many observers noticed, of the main factors that helped Fidesz win three consecutive supermajorities was the manipulation of electoral districts. It has become an academic consensus that the party used its power to redraw the district boundaries in its favour, leveraging its strength in rural areas and the opposition’s concentration in urban city centres, and these gerrymanders resulted in an uneven distribution of votes and seats.
However, Fidesz also enjoyed the mechanical effects of SMDs favouring big parties, especially when up against a fragmented opposition. In the 2014 election, Fidesz won 96 out of 106 SMDs (90.5% of all seats) with only 44.87% of the vote, while Unity won only 10 SMDs (9.4% of all seats) with 25.57% of the vote. In 2018, Fidesz won 91 SMDs again with only 47.9% of the constituency votes, while a fragmented opposition could only score victories in 15 electoral districts. In 2022, a united opposition was only able to win 18 SMDs, with 16 of them coming from the capital city of Budapest.
Another metric that shows how Fidesz benefitted from the electoral system is the high level of disproportionality between votes and seats. Disproportionality in this context measures how well an electoral system translates votes into seats, and it can be calculated using various indices, such as the Gallagher Index. The method of calculating this index is slightly tedious, but for the purpose of this article it is enough to know that the higher the number, the more disproportionate the election was.
Using the Gallagher Index, we can see that Hungary's electoral system has been highly disproportionate since 2014, favouring Fidesz over other parties. For example, in the 2014 election, its Gallagher Index was 10.1, a higher disproportionality value than any post-war British election (incidentally, excluding the most recent one resulting in a Labour landslide).
Surge of the Tisza
Through clever manipulation of electoral districts and a favourable party landscape, Fidesz managed to retain its supermajorities even when facing electoral headwinds. Looking at the fragmented opposition packed into districts in cities, this should not come as a surprise. However, Tisza’s rise may pose an even bigger challenge than commonly thought.
Although Fidesz is currently enjoying the benefits of an electoral system designed to keep the party in power, a similarly sized block with a geographically favoured distribution of voters could seriously erode this advantage. An example could be found in Poland, where an alliance of opposition parties successfully won the upper house (senate) in consecutive elections against a radical populist right outlet (PiS). There is not enough space to provide a detailed analysis of those elections, but in a nutshell, two similarly sized blocks battled in fairly drawn districts with one of them winning by a hair.
If Tisza can get close to Fidesz in popularity and can increase its support in the countryside, particularly in previously Fidesz-leaning districts, it can quickly erode Fidesz’s advantage. There is evidence for movement in the direction of both criteria: the most recent poll by Medián, Hungary’s most reliable pollster, put Tisza within 4% of Fidesz (43%-39%), whilst the European elections saw Fidesz losing the most support (relatively) in smaller sized countryside towns.
Overall, there is of course no guarantee that Tisza will defeat Fidesz in 2026, let alone that it will do so by dismantling the benefits Fidesz enjoyed via an electoral system designed to keep it power. However, it does point to the consolidation of the Hungarian party system into a state where that task is at least theoretically possible.
Ármin Ferenci is a political scientist, policy researcher, and foreign affairs columnist.