“Hungary's authoritarian, Russia-aligned prime minister, Viktor Orban, has now secured a fourth consecutive term and parliamentary supermajority in an election that was neither free nor fair,” our researchers Bálint Magyar and Bálint Madlovics write in their op-ed on Project Syndicate.
“In a democracy, such a victory would reflect the decision of the voters to whom the incumbent is accountable. But in Hungary, the European Union’s only full-blown autocracy, the outcome merely reflects the incumbent’s manipulation of the electoral process,” they argue, adding that “Hungary has clearly become a country where elections are decided before election day.”
“Classic electoral fraud through falsifying the vote count was probably limited, owing to organized civil-society efforts to ensure that opposition delegates were present in every polling station,” they continue.
“For the European Union, the question of what to do about the full-blown autocracy in its midst has become more urgent than ever,” they write.
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