In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán surprisingly won the parliamentary elections on Sunday with his national-conservative party Fidesz.

"We won a huge victory," Orbán triumphed in front of supporters late in the evening.

The success is so great that you can see it “even from the moon and definitely from Brussels”.

After counting 75 percent of the votes, another two-thirds majority for the seats in parliament (with just under 55 percent of the votes) seemed possible;

however, the count in the big cities, especially in Budapest, could lower this intermediate figure again.

In any case, Orbán will continue to govern with a clear majority.

Stephen Lowenstein

Political correspondent based in Vienna.

  • Follow I follow

The combined opposition list, which received only about 33 percent of the votes according to the interim result, landed far behind.

It consists of six parties from right to left, led by the provincial mayor Péter Márki-Zay.

Surprisingly, the right-wing extremist party Mi Hazank (Our Homeland) can also count on entering parliament, which accounted for more than 6 percent of the votes.

Márki-Zay conceded defeat but added: "This is not democracy".

He pointed to the massive imbalance in finance and media presence.

"Orbán has become a disgrace in Europe"

The 199 members of parliament in Budapest were elected.

Even the polls before the election indicated another success for Orbán's Fidesz, who has governed since 2010.

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

In any case, the merger seemed to have the effect that Orbán would lose the parliamentary two-thirds majority that, thanks to a strong majority factor in electoral law, had enabled him to govern largely 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 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.

This issue has eclipsed another that the government had linked to the general election: the issue of the public portrayal of homosexuality and gender reassignment.

The government majority passed a law last year that forbids such depictions in schools, the media or advertising to be made accessible to minors.