The parliamentary elections in Hungary began on Sunday with restrained participation.

Around ten percent of the eight million Hungarians who are entitled to vote cast their votes by 9 a.m., three hours after the polling stations opened.

According to the state news agency MTI, it was more than 13 percent at the last election in 2018.

The 199 members of parliament are elected in Budapest.

The polls before the election pointed to renewed success for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's national-conservative Fidesz party, who has governed since 2010.

But success for the united opposition is also within the realm of possibility.

Stephen Lowenstein

Political correspondent based in Vienna.

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Unlike in the past three terms of office, Orbán is likely to lose the parliamentary two-thirds majority that, thanks to a strong majority factor in electoral law, has enabled him to rule freely, including constitutional amendments.

This time, the six strongest opposition parties have formed an electoral alliance in order to have only one opposition candidate opposite the Fidesz candidate in each of the 106 constituencies.

The parties, whose political spectrum extends from far right to left liberal and socialist, are also running with a common list for the remaining 93 mandates.

Your top candidate is the originally non-party Péter Márki-Zay, a conservative Catholic, mayor of the southern Hungarian provincial town of Hódmezövásárhely.

"Orbán has become a disgrace in Europe"

The election campaign had recently come to a head over the issue of the Ukraine war.

Orbán accuses the opposition of drawing the country into the war by supplying arms and even deploying Hungarian soldiers.

The opposition, on the other hand, portrays Orbán as a covert ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Orbán said at the end of the campaign: “We are able to defend Hungary's peace and guarantee Hungary's security.

But the left will drag us into this war.” Márki-Zay said Orbán “has become a disgrace in Europe”.

He has lost NATO support, without which Hungary cannot be protected.

Originally, the opposition parties Jobbik (right-wing nationalist), Momentum (bourgeois-liberal), LMP (green-liberal), Párbeszed (social-democratic), DK (left-liberal) and MSZP (socialist) each wanted to run their own lists.

However, they were also forced together there by a short-term change in the electoral law.

Regardless of how far-reaching the consequences, it is such unilateral changes to the framework made by the Fidesz majority that have drawn criticism for Orbán's party for abusing its power for party ends.

OSCE: Election was free but not fair

Four years ago, election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) described the elections in Hungary as free but not fair.

Reasons for this included an inadmissible mixing of state and party in the election campaign and media concentration in favor of Fidesz, especially among broadcasters and newspapers.

The latter has increased since then.

This time, the OSCE sent a large delegation to observe the elections.

An interim report before the elections already hinted at criticism in a similar direction.

The government dismissed the report as biased and biased.

In addition, a factual error was criticized in a passage in which President János Áder is referred to as "former", although he will not hand over office to his already elected successor Katalin Novák until May.