Free but not Fair: Observing the Hungarian Elections in Pécs

1 — Hook: Pécs, Election Day

“It’s the first time in years, I actually feel that my vote can make a change,” the woman sitting across from me on the train said as we pulled into Budapest Nyugati. She hadn’t voted in the previous elections because she felt there were no real alternatives, “but now,” she added, with a meaningful look, “there is a real opportunity.”

When I entered a polling station (PS) in central Pécs at 5:30 in the morning with a colleague and our interpreter, our three-person delegation almost went unnoticed in the buzz of election-day preparations. The energy inside contrasted starkly with the still-sleepy city outside. Identifying ourselves as international observers with the Agora Election Observation Mission, we received some inquisitive looks from the PS members, before they were forced to temporarily suppress their curiosity and return to their duties. After all, the PS had to open their doors for the first voters at 6:00.

The city of Pécs, located in Baranya county in southern Hungary, is a student city of about 140,000 people. Its economy is historically centered on mining, while more recently the city has shifted its focus to developing the tourism sector, and is one of only two Hungarian cities to have received the title of ‘European Capital of Culture’^[1]. Moreover, Pécs ranks as one of Hungary’s most multicultural cities, particularly for German and Croatian minorities. Perhaps for those reasons, it has been somewhat of a laboratory for opposition success. Both in 2018 and 2022, Pécs District 1 was one of the rural districts where no Fidesz-KDNP candidate won an individual victory, largely due to opposition withdrawals and unification behind a single candidate^[2] – a pattern repeated in the 2026 elections.

2 — “Free but not Fair”

As a short-term observer (STO) with Agora, a youth-focused international election observation organisation, the historic 2026 Hungarian parliamentary elections, which featured a record turnout of nearly 80%^[3], made for an exceptionally exciting first deployment. Essentially a contest between 16-year incumbent Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, the latter’s two-thirds supermajority victory was not a given in an electoral environment that the OSCE has repeatedly described as “free but not fair” since 2014^[4]. In the days prior to the elections, I was briefed together with the other Agora observers on the institutional-electoral architecture, media environment, and political situation of marginalized communities in the country.

It is important to underline that Orbán built and consolidated the system in his favor for 16 years, using his two-thirds supermajority, Fidesz amended Hungary’s constitution a staggering fifteen times, packed the Constitutional Court, and redesigned the electoral framework. Constituency boundaries were gerrymandered, and a ‘winner’s compensation’ mechanism ensured that Orbán could count on a supermajority. Hungary’s minority list system creates what the European Court of Human Rights ruled to be structural disenfranchisement^[5], as minority voters lose their standard party list vote when participating in minority representation.

Orbán’s so-called “system of national sovereignty” systematically marginalized vulnerable communities, proving remarkably effective at limiting the sovereignty of its own citizens. The repressive “Transparency in Public Life” foreign agents bill would allow the government to blacklist NGOs receiving foreign funding, including EU grants, requiring prior authorization for any support. Constitutional amendments banned LGBTQ+ public events, including last year’s Budapest pride, which in an ironic turn subsequently saw its biggest turnout to date.

3 — Election Day: Pécs

I felt an energetic atmosphere from the first polling station we observed onwards. As we continued throughout the day along the randomly selected route we had planned the day before, this tangible charge in the air did not change. This was not just a feeling: every time I asked the question “what is the turnout so far?” – a standard question on our observer form – the data confirmed the high turnout. The high international interest was also manifestly visible as we ran into no less than four other international observation missions during the day. Aside from the well-established international missions like the OSCE’s ODIHR, the 2026 election also attracted partisan observer groups like the Polish Liberty Coalition, seeking to legitimize predetermined narratives and operating without an internationally recognized methodology.

The organization of the polling station itself was a reflection of the mutual distrust between the two main opposing parties: both Fidesz and Tisza had announced that they would have party representatives in each polling station as part of the core team. In my experience, this resulted in a high engagement within the democratic process itself and did not lead to any observable tension within the PS. Interestingly, political parties organized warm lunch deliveries for their own PS members. The result was that parties with more financial means, read: Fidesz, could offer their PS members a nicer lunch, producing a nutritional hierarchy of sorts.

Dietary stratification aside, the day passed in orderly fashion. The main irregularities I observed personally were limited to multiple instances of family voting, where multiple people, often family members, go into the voting booth together, thereby foregoing the secrecy of the vote. However, our parallel observation team, whose route covered more villages on the outskirts of the district, had some interesting stories to tell, including a fake bomb threat and second-hand stories of vote-buying – stories that seemed to echo the craziness of the days leading up to the election^[6].

4 — The Closing

At 19:00 the PS closed and counting began. The mood of certain PS members visibly turned celebratory as results streamed in via live news coverage, prompting one Fidesz member to sharply warn a jubilant Tisza colleague against ‘being provocative.’

We ended our night at the tabulation center located in the town hall, the place where the results of all PS were gathered. We could hear the festivities in the adjacent main square getting increasingly louder. When Orbán – much to everyone’s surprise – conceded early in the evening, a civil servant in the office had to close the window so the (still audible) celebration outside would not disturb the final procedures. The reason for this excitement was clear: a landslide Tisza victory with a two-thirds constitutional majority – a requirement for properly changing the Fidesz system.

The lady on the train had been right: her vote could make a change. For sixteen years, Orbán’s model of ‘illiberal democracy’ had become a template studied from Warsaw to Washington and beyond. From Pécs to every capital where leaders have learned to hollow out democracy from within, April 12th proved that even carefully skewed systems can still surprise their architects – something that must make many an authoritarian leader uncomfortable.

Read the Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions here:

OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights

Agora EOM

^[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Capital_of_Culture

^[2]https://telex.hu/valasztasi-foldrajz/2024/05/25/onkormanyzati-valasztas-baranya-megye-Pécs-szigetvar-mohacs

^[3]https://www.reuters.com/world/hungary-election-2026-live-viktor-Orbáns-fidesz-faces-challenge-opposition-peter-2026-04-12/

^[4] https://odihr.osce.org/odihr/elections/hungary/121098

^[5] https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-220672%22]}

^[6] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj60x206dx1o