Turnout: 69.73%
About this election
The 2018 Hungarian parliamentary election, held on 8 April 2018, returned Viktor Orbán's Fidesz–KDNP alliance to power for a third consecutive term with a renewed two-thirds constitutional supermajority. Fidesz–KDNP won 49.27% of the party-list vote and 133 of the 199 seats in the National Assembly (Országgyűlés), comfortably clearing the 133-seat threshold needed to amend the constitution unilaterally. Turnout, at 69.73%, was the highest at a Hungarian election since 2002, reflecting an unusually polarised contest fought above all over immigration. The result confirmed Hungary's transformation, under Orbán, into what he himself approvingly called an "illiberal democracy", and it cemented Fidesz's dominance of the Hungarian political landscape.
Hungary elects its 199-member unicameral National Assembly through a mixed-member majoritarian system, substantially redrawn by the Fidesz government in 2011. Of the 199 seats, 106 are filled in single-member constituencies by first-past-the-post, and 93 are allocated from national party lists by proportional representation, with a 5% threshold for single parties (higher for coalitions). Crucially — and unlike Germany's compensatory MMP — the two tiers are not fully linked: a "winner compensation" rule transfers a winning constituency candidate's surplus votes to the party list, amplifying the seat bonus for the largest party. Combined with constituency boundaries widely criticised as favourable to Fidesz, this system allowed Fidesz to convert under half the vote into a two-thirds seat majority. One seat is reserved for the largest national minority list.
The campaign was dominated almost entirely by immigration and the figure of the Hungarian-American financier George Soros, whom the government cast as the architect of a plot to flood Hungary with migrants. Fidesz ran an intensely nationalist, anti-immigration and anti-Brussels campaign, building on the migration crisis of 2015 and the government's border fence with Serbia and Croatia. The fragmented opposition could not agree on a common strategy: the formerly far-right Jobbik, under Gábor Vona, had repositioned itself toward the centre and emerged as the main challenger, while the left — the Socialists (MSZP) in alliance with Párbeszéd, the Democratic Coalition (DK) of former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, the green LMP and the new liberal Momentum — was divided and uncoordinated. A high-profile opposition victory in a February by-election in Hódmezővásárhely briefly raised hopes of tactical anti-Fidesz voting, but it failed to translate nationally.
Fidesz–KDNP led the party-list vote in all 19 counties and in Budapest, producing a uniformly orange map. Its support was strongest in the rural west and the Great Plain — Vas (57.77%), Győr-Moson-Sopron and Zala — and weakest in the capital, where it took 38.15%. Jobbik finished second nationally with 19.06% and 26 seats; the MSZP–Párbeszéd alliance took 11.91% and 20 seats; DK won 5.38% and 9 seats; and LMP 7.06% and 8 seats. Momentum, contesting its first general election, fell just short of the 5% threshold. Despite Fidesz's clean sweep of the county list votes, the opposition won most of Budapest's individual single-member constituencies, a reminder that the capital was already drifting away from the governing party.
Hungary is a parliamentary republic in which executive power rests with the prime minister and the government, while the president, elected by parliament, holds a largely ceremonial role. Since returning to power in 2010, Orbán's governments had used their supermajorities to enact a new constitution (the Fundamental Law), reshape the judiciary and media regulation, and centralise control over state institutions — changes that drew repeated criticism from the European Union over the rule of law. The 2018 election was therefore widely seen as a referendum on a decade-long project to entrench Fidesz's vision of a Christian-national, sovereigntist Hungary.
Armed with a third supermajority, the fourth Orbán government pressed ahead with controversial measures, including the so-called "Stop Soros" laws criminalising assistance to asylum seekers, the forced relocation of the Central European University to Vienna, and a labour-law amendment dubbed the "slave law" that triggered street protests in late 2018. Jobbik's centrist gamble unravelled after the election, splitting the party and ultimately pushing it into a broad anti-Orbán coalition for 2022. The election entrenched a pattern — Fidesz dominance nationally, opposition strength concentrated in Budapest — that would define the next contest.
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.