The biggest losers of the 2019 EP election were probably the Hungarian public opinion polls, who basically signaled only the total success of the ruling parties (FIDESZ-KDNP) correctly, the results of the opposition forces were completely misled.
The biggest surprise of Sunday’s European elections was not the total victory of FIDESZ, but the complete transformation of the power relations of the opposition space. As a result of the 43.36 percent Hungarian participation, the record voting of all previous EP elections in Hungary, the FIDESZ-KDNP coalition obtained 52.14 percent (1,777,757 votes) to destroy the complete opposition, which could send 13 members to the European Parliament.
However, the second and even third place could not be won by the two parties or party associations that most of the preliminary polls were expecting.
The second place went to the Democratic Coalition (DK) list led by Klára Dobrev, wife of Ferenc Gyurcsány’s party president with 16.3 percent of the votes (554,286 votes). With this result, DK can send 4 MEPs to the European Parliament, two MEPs more than 5 years ago.
The third place is won by the Momentum Movement, which was surveyed by the poll researchers around the 5 percent threshold, at 5-7 percent, in the last research before the election. But the Momentum Movement not only got in, but with its 9.92 percent result (338,314 votes), two new MEPs, namely Katalin Cseh and Anna Donáth can be sent to the EP.
Making the Momentum’s result even more interesting is the fact that the green party Politics Can Be Different (LMP) polled around around 4 to 6 percent by the public opinion polls has not even reached the threshold, but with its 2.2 percent result (with 74, 554 votes) it was brutally defeated. In addition, the green party LMP achieved the best results of its history at the last Hungarian parliamentary election just a year ago. Not to mention the fact that the LMP was preceded also by Our Homeland Movement (MHM) with 3.33 percent (with 113,529 votes). MHM was established from the membership of the far-right Movement for a Better Hungary party (Jobbik) just a year ago, reopening of racism to our public debate. Even the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party using absurd humor and community activism as an internal policy tool has got better results than LMP (89,635 votes, 2.63 percent). By the way, the public opinion polls company Median in its recent research measured László Toroczkai’s MHM party at 2 percent and the Two-Tailed Dog Party at one percent.
Among the nine registered Hungarian parties the last place finally won by Thürmer`s Workers Party (Munkáspárt) with the acquisition of 0.42 percent of the votes (14,385 votes), which is very interesting in view of the need for the party to collect minimum 20,000 signatures for participation in the EP elections.
Although the coalition of the Hungarian Socialist Party and Dialogue (MSZP-Párbeszéd) at the yesterday`s EP election was slightly ahead of Jobbik. but their victory proved to be pyrrhic: only 6.68 percent of the votes (227,786 votes) were won by MSZP-Dialogue. The far-right Jobbik party also fell enormously, and received only 6.44 percent of the votes (219,539 votes), which made Our Homeland Party Movement very close to MSZP-Párbeszéd.
With this above result, MSZP and Jobbik can send only one MEP each to the EP, and Párbeszéd`s previous MEP Benedek Jávor, an environmentalist, must say goodbye to the Brussels politics, because he was the fourth in the MSZP-Dialogue list and it is not enough for him to get in the EP. The MSZP’s board will decide on next Saturday whether MEPs István Ujhelyi or Tibor Szanyi will receive the sole socialist mandate.
