Eurasia Press & News
In the European elections, Hungary’s Orban clinches bittersweet victory over determined challenger; Poland’s PM celebrates first European victory in a decade, and in the Czech Republic, Andrej Babis signals chances of comeback.
Viktor Orban and his right-wing Fidesz party won the European elections in Hungary with 44.5 per cent of the votes cast – but it was the party’s worst result in a European election and it lost two of its 13 seats in the European Parliament.
Rising political star former Fidesz member Peter Magyar and his two-month-old TISZA (Respect and Freedom) party came second with almost 30 per cent, taking seven seats and crushing all other opposition parties. The turnout was a record 58 per cent.
The liberal Momentum party lost both its seats, and the left-wing Democratic Coalition lost half its support, while the far-right Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland) party won 6.7 per cent and one seat in the European Parliament.
In local elections, held at the same time as the European elections, Fidesz won most of the counties and half of the larger cities, but the results were far from a landslide victory.
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Orban celebrated the results in a late-night speech. “We have won two elections, we have defeated the old and the new opposition, and we will defeat them in the future, no matter what they call themselves,” he said, clearly alluding to TISZA. Orban repeated his familiar culture-war message: “Stop migration, stop gender, stop war, stop Brussels,” while the party elite stood behind him.
The real winner of the night, 43-year-old Peter Magyar, a former bureaucrat, hailed his better-than-expected result as “a political earthquake and the Waterloo for Orban’s power machine. “An era has ended, the future has begun,” he told cheering supporters, adding that TISZA was now the largest opposition party in Hungary, only a few hundred thousand voters behind the ruling party. “We will be ready for the next elections,” he said.
The race was unexpectedly close in Budapest, where the incumbent mayor, the liberal-leftist Gergely Karacsony, was only 350 votes ahead of challenger David Vitezy, who was running on the ticket of the small Green party, but also backed by Fidesz after the ruling party withdrew its own candidate two days before the election. TISZA won 30 per cent of the vote in Budapest, coming neck-and-neck with Fidesz, a highly unusual constellation in Hungary that could make the capital a litmus test for the country.
Poland’s Tusk ‘so happy’ with win
In Poland, the ruling Civic Platform, KO, won the European elections with 37 per cent of votes compared to 36 per cent for Law and Justice, PiS. The third best performing party, the far-right Confederation, won an estimated 12 per cent of the votes, followed by the two parties joining KO in the governing coalition: 7 per cent voted for Third Way and 6 per cent for the Left. KO is expected to get 21 seats in the European Parliament, PiS 20, Confederation six, Third Way three and the Left three.
The victory was especially important for Tusk, as PiS has defeated KO in all European elections in the past decade. “We waited ten years to get the first place on the podium, I am so happy,” Tusk said of the results. But PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski insisted the results showed “the road to presidential elections is open”. Presidential elections are due in Poland next year.
While KO performed well, its coalition partners did worse than they might have expected, while the far-right Confederation had a very good result, likely winning six seats in the European Parliament compared to none at the moment.
In Czechia, the opposition ANO party of former Prime Minister Andrej Babis came first with 26 per cent of the votes, taking seven of the country’s 21 MEP mandates, although with a smaller than expected lead over the government SPOLU coalition, which won 22 per cent of the votes. “Thank you very much everyone! You’re amazing,” Babis tweeted as the results were released.
The surprise in this year’s ballot came with the breakthrough of the populist anti-system Prisaha and Motorists coalition led by Filip Turek, which took more than 10 per cent of the vote, ahead of the communist-led Stacilo coalition, on 9.5 per cent.
Coalition members STAN and the Pirates underperformed compared to five years ago with 9 and 6 per cent of the votes respectively. So did the far-right alliance of the SPD and Trikolora, which just barely made it past the 5-per-cent threshold. The turnout was more than 36 per cent, compared to less than 29 per cent in 2019.
In neighbouring Slovakia, more than a third of the electorate also turned out to vote to fill the 15 seats allocated to the country in the European Parliament – about half a million more than five years ago and a record in the EU’s traditionally worst-performing nation in terms of turnout.
The liberal and pro-European Progressive Slovakia came first with 28 per cent of the votes, a few percentage points ahead of the ruling Smer of Prime Minister Robert Fico, on 25 per cent. The far-right Republika emerged as a potent political force, with almost 13 per cent.
