Turnout: 59.46%
About this election
The 2024 European Parliament election in Hungary, held on 9 June 2024 alongside municipal elections, marked the most serious electoral challenge to Viktor Orbán in over a decade. Fidesz–KDNP still finished first, but its 44.82% was its weakest European result since taking power in 2010 and well below its 2019 high. The sensation of the night was the Tisza Party of Péter Magyar — a former Fidesz insider turned anti-corruption challenger — which, only months after its founding, took 29.60% and 7 of Hungary's 21 seats, instantly establishing itself as the principal opposition force and collapsing the fragmented old opposition.
As in every European election, Hungary voted as a single nationwide constituency under closed-list proportional representation (d'Hondt method, 5% threshold), so there is no county-level breakdown and this page presents the national result without a regional map. Hungary again held 21 seats. The European vote coincided with local and county-assembly elections, which boosted turnout to 59.46% — the highest ever for a European election in Hungary — and made the day a de facto national plebiscite on Orbán's rule midway through his fourth term.
Péter Magyar had burst into politics earlier in 2024 after a presidential-pardon scandal forced the resignation of President Katalin Novák, drawing huge crowds with a message of anti-corruption, rule-of-law restoration and an end to what he called Orbán's "mafia state" — all from a position firmly on the centre-right, denying Fidesz the ability to dismiss him as a left-wing or Soros-backed figure. Tisza's 29.60% came largely at the expense of the established opposition: the DK–MSZP–Párbeszéd list managed just 8.03% (2 seats), Momentum was wiped out, and the far-right Our Homeland edged in with 6.71% and one seat. Fidesz's 11 seats, down from 13, and its sub-45% share signalled real erosion, even as it remained comfortably the largest single party. In the simultaneous Budapest mayoral race, the incumbent Gergely Karácsony narrowly held off a challenge in a chaotic count.
The election came amid persistent high inflation, frozen EU funds, and Orbán's increasingly isolated foreign-policy positions — blocking or delaying EU aid to Ukraine and maintaining warm ties with Moscow and Beijing. For years the Hungarian opposition had been too divided and too tainted by association with the pre-2010 Socialist governments to mount a credible challenge; Magyar's arrival, from within the Fidesz establishment itself, offered disaffected government voters a destination that the old opposition never could.
The 2024 European election reset Hungarian politics around a straight Fidesz–Tisza contest. Magyar built Tisza into a nationwide movement and a clear front-runner in opinion polls through 2025, positioning the party as the main alternative ahead of the 2026 general election. For Orbán, the result was a warning that, after fourteen years in power, his coalition faced its first genuinely formidable opponent — one that could not be easily caricatured and that was eroding Fidesz's support in precisely the provincial heartlands it had long taken for granted.
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.