Last polls before the election

All the pollster companies project a Fidesz victory in the Sunday election, but a former conservative MP who is now a supporter of the opposition is still hopeful that Fidesz will be defeated on Sunday. Centrist and pro-government pundits on the other hand take Fidesz victory for granted.

In their last polls before the election, major pollster companies find Fidesz ahead of the opposition by 2 to 8 per. In Medián’s projection, Fidesz will gain 128 seats with the opposition coalition to be confined to 71 mandates in the new House. All pollster companies underscore that there is a significant (8-15 per cent) pool of active but yet undecided voters who may make a significant impact on the final result. (Although Medián suggests that only one third if those have no political preferences and are thus unlikely to tilt the result in favour of the opposition.)

In Népszava, former MDF MP Károly Herényi is confident that the opposition can win. He recalls that in 2002, polls also projected a clear Fidesz victory, but in the end, the opposition came in first. Herényi believes that this time, there is an even bigger cohort of dissatisfied voters who do not appear in the surveys. He contends that these voters are aware of government corruption and its increasing geopolitical isolation as well as the poor state of the Hungarian economy, and will therefore support the opposition at the ballot box.

In a Facebook post, András Hont advises that the opposition to do some soul-searching. The centrist pundit points out that the opposition coalition is projected to have basically the same amount of support the opposition combined won in 2018. Hont thinks that the opposition has proven inept, as it failed to broaden its constituency despite the government’s poor record in the Covid pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis as well as its controversial stance on the Ukraine war.

In a short sarcastic comment in Magyar Nemzet, Ádám Petri Lukács hopes that voters will  prove the projection of Medián true (Medián  is often considered as a left-liberal-leaning pollster company) and boost the company’s prestige.

Mandiner’s Róbert Baranya comments the last polls by claiming that the opposition lead by Péter Márki-Zay has failed to woo conservative voters – or mobilize undecided ones. He conservative commentator takes the polls as clear proof that voters are satisfied with the government’s performance and ability to handle crises.

Tags: election, Fidesz, opposition, polls