Turnout: 43.56%
About this election
The 2019 European Parliament election in Hungary, held on 26 May 2019, was a triumph for Viktor Orbán's Fidesz–KDNP, which won 52.56% of the vote and 13 of Hungary's 21 seats. It was the first time a single party had taken an outright majority of the Hungarian vote at a European election, and it came at a moment of acute tension between Fidesz and its own European political family, the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), which had suspended the party's membership two months earlier. Turnout surged to 43.56%, far above the 28.97% of 2014, as Orbán turned the European contest into another referendum on migration.
Hungary elects its members of the European Parliament by closed-list proportional representation in a single nationwide constituency, using the d'Hondt method with a 5% threshold. Because the whole country forms one constituency, European elections in Hungary produce no regional or county breakdown — voters across all 19 counties and Budapest choose from the same national party lists — so this page reports the national result only, without a regional map. Hungary held 21 seats in the 2019–2024 parliament. Seats are allocated to parties in proportion to their national vote share above the threshold.
Orbán campaigned almost entirely on stopping immigration and defending "Christian Europe", explicitly positioning Fidesz as the standard-bearer of a continental anti-migration right and clashing openly with EPP leaders and the European Commission. The opposition was fragmented: the Democratic Coalition (DK) of Ferenc Gyurcsány emerged as the strongest anti-Orbán force with 16.05% and 4 seats, overtaking its rivals on an unambiguously pro-European platform. The liberal Momentum movement broke through with 9.93% and 2 seats — its first national mandates — while the Socialist–Párbeszéd alliance (6.61%) and a much-diminished Jobbik (6.34%) each won a single seat. Our Homeland, LMP and the satirical Two-Tailed Dog Party fell short of the threshold. Fidesz's 52.56% underlined the breadth of its dominance even as its relationship with mainstream European conservatism frayed.
The election unfolded against the backdrop of Fidesz's deepening estrangement from the EPP, triggered by a Fidesz poster campaign attacking Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and George Soros. Orbán used the European campaign to argue that the EU's institutions had been captured by pro-migration forces and that only parties like his could defend national sovereignty and Europe's Christian heritage. The strong DK and Momentum results, meanwhile, signalled a gradual reshaping of the Hungarian opposition around explicitly pro-EU, liberal and social-democratic poles, displacing the older Socialist establishment.
Fidesz's MEPs remained in limbo within the EPP for nearly two years before the party finally left the group in March 2021, ahead of an expected expulsion, leaving Fidesz without a major European political home and eventually helping to found the sovereigntist Patriots for Europe group. Domestically, the 2019 European result was quickly followed by municipal elections that October in which a united opposition captured Budapest and several major cities — the first significant cracks in Fidesz's grip since 2010, and a foretaste of the urban–rural divide that would mark the 2022 general election.
National Election Office of Hungary (Nemzeti Választási Iroda) — valasztas.hu.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.