Hungary held Europe’s most transparent elections last Sunday

Demanding the presence of international observers was a way for the Hungarian opposition and leftist MEPs to raise doubts about the Hungarian elections, but they achieved the opposite effect

Hungary held Europe’s most transparent elections last Sunday Fotó: Famille Bault

Moreover, any journalist and any NGO member could apply for observer status and enjoy the corresponding rights and privileges. This meant that there were hundreds of observers in addition to those attached to the two major observer missions described here.

Observation conditions praised by both missions

At their respective press conferences in Budapest on Monday, 4 April, the day after the elections, representatives of the two observer missions agreed that the observers had free and unhindered access to all the polling stations they wished to visit, and that they had been able to speak freely to members of the electoral committees, to voters, and also – including before polling day – to representatives of all of the institutions and NGOs with whom they wished to speak.

The “flaws” observed by the OSCE mission

The members of the OSCE mission did not observe any irregularities in the voting, except for a few minor procedural irregularities mostly related to the secrecy of the vote. They did, however, list what they considered to be “flaws” (the word used during their post-election press conference) that they felt called into question the fully democratic, honest and transparent nature of the elections. These “flaws” include the intensity of negative campaigning against the opposition by the government camp and state media, the blurring of the line between government camp campaign expenditure and government action, and the insufficient presence of women in the campaign, which OSCE mission officials believe led to a lack of “inclusiveness” that was detrimental to the full democratic nature of the elections. As a result, Kari Henriksen, a Danish member of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly who was the mission coordinator, spoke of the “absence of a level playing field”, while acknowledging that the vote itself had taken place under good conditions and that the candidates had been able to campaign freely.

The OSCE’s reservations not shared by the concurrent mission

The conservative organisations’ observer mission, however, did not share the above-mentioned reservations of the OSCE mission. It is also worth mentioning that a preliminary statement published by this concurrent mission before the elections was already critical of the OSCE mission’s perceived lack of impartiality. In its final conclusions, the conservative organisations’ observer mission notes, with regard to the conditions of electoral competition, that while the public media were undoubtedly on the side of the government in the election campaign, there are many private media in Hungary that are anti-government and pro-opposition, and thus balanced the media landscape and the possibilities of access to the media. As a matter of fact, according to a study from the third quarter of 2021, which is cited in the observer report and was mentioned during Monday’s press conference in Budapest, the “consumption” of pro- and anti-government media by Hungarians is fairly balanced. As for the negative character of the campaign, as the representatives of the OSCE mission also admitted at their own press conference, such negative campaigning existed in both directions (on the part of the government camp and the opposition) and Hungary is no exception in this respect. Finally, with respect to the blurring of the line between electoral campaigning and government spending, this second mission noted that the same blurring of the line also exists between opposition campaign spending and spending by mostly opposition NGOs, many of which receive foreign funding, including a significant number that receive funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Those NGOs also invested significant sums of money, in the millions of dollars, in the opposition’s successful campaign to have the referendum invalidated through boycotts or invalid votes (by answering both yes and no to the various questions, or even by writing vulgarities on the referendum ballot sheet, as reported to us by some election observers).

Observers’ testimonies collected by the Visegrád Post

In addition to participating in press conferences organised by the OSCE and Ordo Iuris, we visited some Budapest polling stations ourselves and we interviewed observers who had taken part in monitoring of the elections all over the country. All confirmed that each polling station had an electoral committee composed of members of the opposition and the government camp, as well as a local government representative who was not affiliated with any party. All observers had a list of all the polling stations in the country and chose the ones they wanted to visit.