Hungary’s parliamentary elections start
BUDAPEST: APRIL. 3 – Voters head to the polls in Hungary on Sunday to elect a 199-seat parliament, which could give current Prime Minister Viktor Orban a fourth straight term.
Some 7.8 million voters will cast their votes at more than 10,000 polling stations from 6 am (0400 GMT) local time until 7 pm (1700 GMT). Preliminary results are expected to come out in the evening.
Polls predicted a narrow win for Orban’s Fidesz party and its allied Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP).
Orban, 58, had been in power between 1998 and 2002 and came to power again in 2010. If his party wins Sunday’s election, he would become prime minister of Hungary for the fifth time.
At a final campaign rally on Friday, he mobilized his voters by promising them peace and calm in the shadow of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and called on his supporters to give an all-out effort on the election day. The opposition alliance held its event in central Budapest on Saturday.
Peter Marki-Zay, the alliance’s candidate for prime minister and currently the mayor of Hodmezovasarhely, said that his political formation was “at the gate of victory.”
Marki-Zay, a 49-year old father of seven, won the opposition primary elections held in October 2021. In the last elections of 2018, Orban’s coalition Fidesz-KDNP won 133 seats, securing a two-thirds majority in the parliament. Some Hungarians living abroad started voting by mail on March 19.
-Xinhua
