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All 199 seats in the Országgyűlés 100 seats needed for a majority | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Turnout | 61.73% | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 Results of the election. A darker shade indicates a higher vote share. Proportional list results are displayed in the top left. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Parliamentary elections were held in Hungary on 6 April 2014.[1] This parliamentary election was the 7th since the 1990 first multi-party election. The result was a victory for the Fidesz–KDNP alliance, preserving its two-thirds majority, with Viktor Orbán remaining Prime Minister.[2] It was the first election under the new Constitution of Hungary which came into force on 1 January 2012. The new electoral law also entered into force that day. For the first time since Hungary's transition to democracy, the election had a single round. The voters elected 199 MPs instead of the previous 386 lawmakers.[3][4]
Background
In the 2010 parliamentary elections Fidesz won a landslide victory, with Viktor Orbán being elected as Prime Minister. As a result of this election, his government was able to alter the National Constitution, as he garnered a two-thirds majority.[5] The government was able to write a constitutional article that favored traditional marriages, as well as one that lowered the number of MPs elected from 386 to 199.[6]
Orbán and his government remained relatively popular in the months leading to the election. This was largely because of high GDP growth, increased industrial output, and a growth in the tourism sector.[7]
New constitution and electoral law
In 2010 a new government led by Fidesz initiated a drafting process for a new constitution.[8][9] On 18 April 2011, parliament approved the constitution on a 262–44 vote, with Fidesz and their Christian Democrat coalition partners in favor and Jobbik opposed. The Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) and Politics Can Be Different (LMP), citing the ruling party's unwillingness to compromise on issues and their inability to change the outcome, boycotted both the drafting process and the vote.[10][11] On 25 April, President Pál Schmitt signed the document into law, and it entered into force on the first day of 2012.[12] The enactment came halfway through Hungary's six-month Presidency of the Council of the European Union.[13]
A new electoral law was also passed on 23 December 2011. The Fidesz and its coalition partner Christian Democratic People's Party (KDNP) unilaterally approved the new bill, using their two-thirds majority, ignoring the left-wing opposition's (MSZP and LMP) protests, while Jobbik voted against it. The NGO Political Capital noted in its analysis that the newly-adopted law "shifts the election system towards the majoritarian principle", which may be the cause of possible future "disproportional" outcomes in favour of individual parliamentary seats, resulting an emergence of voting method like first-past-the-post voting (FPTP). Nevertheless, Political Capital also emphasized that this tendency "however not be interpreted as an injury to democracy."[14]
Voter registration plan
On 26 November 2012, Fidesz used its supermajority to pass legislation revising eligibility for voting. Accordingly, the citizens, who had to right to vote, should have been involved in a pre-registration process no later than 15 days before polling day "in order to spare politically indifferent citizens from the election campaign", as Fidesz officials said. According to critics, this process would have made it harder to vote the party out of power, while also threatened free suffrage with the determination of the time limit.[15] Four members of the Democratic Coalition (DK), including its leader, former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, had participated in a week-long hunger strike, protesting against the proposed voter registration plan, while President János Áder, who took the office after the resignation of Schmitt and himself was also a Fidesz member, sent the bill to the Constitutional Court.[16]
On 3 January 2013, the Court ruled that the law curtailed voting rights to an "unjustifiable degree", due to the fact that the requirement for voters to register prior to going to the polls applies to every voter. The court also argued the limitation of campaign advertisings into the public broadcasting (Magyar Televízió and its partners), the proposed bans of political advertisements on cinemas during the campaign as well as prohibition of opinion polls in the last six days of the campaign "threatens" the freedom of speech in Hungary, in addition to its unconstitutional nature.[17] After the court's decision the head of the Fidesz parliamentary group, Antal Rogán, announced his party "would drop the proposal" and they will not introduce it for the 2014 parliamentary election, despite the fact that some party members had considered just before the court's ruling that is possible that constitutional amendments can take place in order to pass the bill.[18]