By Vera Messing and Judit Durst
Electoral data in Hungary reveal that the most vulnerable populations – with some exceptions – continued to support Fidesz. This piece addresses the most predominant explanations of this phenomenon: media isolation and clientelism. We also address what it will take for political change to reach marginalized communities.
Walking through the streets of a village in Northern Hungary on a beautiful spring day on April 12, 2026, there was no hint of the election result that would soon sweep away Fidesz’s 16 years of autocratic rule. Signs of election fraud were sometimes clearly visible: a local “construction contractor” sitting in a car in front of the polling station, checking a list – likely the list of voters – to see who had voted and who still needed to be mobilized; people driving to the sports field after casting their ballots, where money changed hands. Still, the election day proceeded in a calm manner. Most of the villagers were convinced that Fidesz would win. The village’s population can effectively be divided into two groups: an elderly and ageing ethnic Hungarian population and the predominantly young inhabitants of the segregated Roma part of the settlement.
Several political scientists have argued that the recent parliamentary election in Hungary was more than just an ordinary election: it was an “electoral revolution” that swept away Fidesz’s autocratic regime with a voter turnout (77.8%) never seen before. The Fidesz party, which has held a supermajority for its 16 years in government, failed spectacularly despite boasting power over all segments of life – including the economy, the media, science, the secret service, and state institutions – as well as the open support of both the United States and Russia. Yet,
having spent the day of the election in this village, it became evident to us why this “electoral revolution” left such marginalized rural areas untouched.
The village is typical: a map of voting behavior reveals a clear spatial pattern. In areas where a high proportion of the population has low educational attainment (a proxy for social marginalization), Fidesz is more likely to have won. A substantial number of these areas are characterized by aging populations and/or a high proportion of Roma residents, a racialized ethnic minority subject to institutional discrimination and social exclusion. This analysis argues that electoral processes cannot be considered fully free or fair for this segment of the population.
The figure below shows the relationship between low educational attainment (8 years of elementary or less) and voting behavior at the settlement level.
Each circle represents one of Hungary’s 3,155 settlements (irrespective of their size). There is a direct, almost linear positive relationship between the proportion of low-educated people and support for Fidesz (orange) or the Tisza Party (blue) at the settlement level. The higher the proportion of low-educated people in a settlement, the higher the vote share for Fidesz. The opposite was true for Tisza. However, the relationship is not universal: Tisza Party was also popular in several settlements with a high proportion of people with low education levels.
The data highlight a paradox:
Why did the majority of people most impacted by steep increases in inflation and the slowdown of the economy – and who at the same time were subjected to open humiliation as a group – still vote for Fidesz?
And which are the exceptions to this rule? The answer is complex, and here we address only the most predominant aspects: Fidesz’s communication bubble and clientelist relations.
Low-educated people are heavy consumers of the state media, in their own words: “television-addicts.” In the Hungarian version of informational autocracy the spreading of fearmongering propaganda by state-controlled media channels continuously created virtual existential threats, and this was further amplified by allied social media “echo chambers.” Disinformation narratives such as the claim that Hungarian youth will be taken to the Ukrainian front if the Tisza Party wins the election were internalized among marginalized groups who had no access to alternative information sources and narratives. Our ongoing research highlights that the
Tisza Party was especially successful in those peripheral settlements where their activists were able to burst Fidesz’s media bubble.
Thus, these settlements constituted exceptions to the voting behavior of most low-educated citizens.
Second, the role of clientelism in maintaining Fidesz support needs to be highlighted. We argue that Orbán’s autocratic rule had been based on personal dependencies. The multidimensional control of people through the complex and hierarchical system of client-patron dependency reflects the essence of autocratic governance, which ensures that people turn out on election day and vote for those in power.
Clientelism is an informal institution of hierarchical domination, where clients provide loyalty and support to their patrons in exchange for guarantees of security and subsistence. In Hungary, over the past 16 years, clientelism has been facilitated by the state and operated by rural mayors and local leaders of the governing party.
(See the Price of the Vote documentary). Mayors and faith-based civil organizations were assigned a key role in and discretional power in the governance of poverty. As the distributors of key social provisions – including public works, employment, information, medicine, clothes, food, and even credit – they were able to ask for political favors in exchange for securing access to scarce resources that local poor populations depended on to make ends meet.
With the deterioration in the quality of universal public services and the marketization of social policy, being part of the clientelist networks of these locally powerful actors allowed for the social reproduction of vulnerable livelihoods. Belonging or not belonging to this network has influenced who can “make live or let die.”
The fear of losing their patrons due to a change of government, coupled with the fear of change and the unknown, played a significant role in poor people’s ongoing support for the ruling party, including at this election.
Based on our sporadic fieldwork experiences in Borsod county, the exceptions – namely those settlements where, despite a high proportion of low-educated population, the Tisza Party was able to win – are typically places where civil activism persisted even under the constraints of the autocratic regime, providing alternative channels of information. In other cases, we find that despite low educational attainment, an autonomous local elite has emerged from entrepreneurial circles capable of mobilizing resources and shaping local public opinion independently of clientelist power structures.
What will happen to these poor, low-educated people after this electoral revolution? Without clientelist networks will the governing Tisza Party be able to establish more democratic social arrangements that meet these people’s needs, which mainly concern lowering subsistence costs and creating more security?
Scholars who have analyzed the possible roots of the Orbán government’s downfall see in this historical moment a rare opportunity to challenge locally embedded patronage networks through a project of declientelization.
However, it is important to recognize the deep historic roots of clientelist arrangements and the fact that they have been part of poor people’s problem-solving strategies for a long time, spanning successive political regimes.
There is no doubt that the newly formed Tisza government has made several strong symbolic gestures towards marginalized groups, including the poor, racialized minorities, and people living with disabilities. Members of these communities are now represented in Parliament in greater numbers than ever before and some have also been appointed to roles within the executive branch. Several Roma activists and intellectuals, however, criticize the apparent lack of Roma in the government and express their expectation for Roma’s presence in the executive branch “not because they are Roma, but because the most important issues of Hungarian society cannot be validly decided without them. This would also break the norm of racialization.” Nevertheless, consultations with wide range of communities have been initiated and policy steps supporting the poorest segments of the society were announced.
While these developments are novel and significant, more needs to be done for the electoral revolution to take root in peripheral and marginalized contexts. The success of declientelization will ultimately depend on what happens at the local level – specifically, on whether the Tisza government can dismantle entrenched power structures and replace the individuals who still sustain them in rural peripheral areas.
Vera Messing is a Research Fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute and a Research Professor at the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest.
Judit Durst is a Senior Research Fellow at the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest and a Research Fellow at University College London.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
