All you need to know about Hungary's election

Supporters of Viktor Orban, Hungary's prime minister, during a closing campaign rally in Budapest, Hungary, on Saturday, April 11, 2026. (Akos Stiller/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Prefer on Google by Chris Powers As Hungarians are heading to the polls on April 12, the prospect that the 16-year rule of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party might come to an end will have far-reaching consequences for Ukraine, Europe, and maybe the world. A lot is at stake for Ukraine in this election. Orban has blocked a €90 billion EU loan for Kyiv, and used its veto power to prevent the EU from opening accession negotiations with Ukraine — and Moldova — for almost a year. Facing down Fidesz, and mostly outperforming them in the polls, is the center-right Tisza party of Peter Magyar, around whom the opposition in Hungary has united. Magyar has promised to combat government corruption and reestablish working relations with the EU and NATO. The end result has left national diplomats in Brussels and EU staffers alike telling the Kyiv Independent that they're all waiting for April 12 before deciding how to proceed on a range of policy files. Following the last summit of EU leaders in March, which failed to reach an agreement on the above-mentioned €90 billion loan, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever openly said he's “not too worried" because he expects that after April 12, things will change. Where the Europeans are playing a game of wait-and-see, Russia and the U.S. have intervened more decisively to back the incumbent. Moscow's interest is clear: any blocking of support for Ukraine helps Russia better prosecute its war of aggression. Leaked phone conversations in the last days of the election campaign have exposed how Budapest has consciously worked to advance Russian interests. The U.S. government has identified its interests similarly, with the December 2025 National Security Strategy , characterizing the EU as one of several "transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty." That helps explain why U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Orban in February, "we want you to continue… It's in our national interest." U.S. Vice President JD Vance has taken that support on tour in Hungary to drum up support for Fidesz, as well as to criticize the EU and Ukraine, days before Hungarians cast their ballots. Here is everything you need to know about Hungary's pivotal parliamentary election. Magyar was himself formerly part of Fidesz but, from 2024, turned against the party, not on ideological grounds, but rather against corruption. Ending said corruption is the overwhelming focus of Tisza's manifesto , while some policy positions remain similar to those of Magyar's former party, such as immigration and border control. Cleaning up said corruption could unlock some 20 billion euros ($23.4 billion) in frozen EU funds, according to the manifesto, which outlines several other promises to align Budapest more with the EU. Among those: signing Hungary up to the anti-fraud European Public Prosecutors Office, paving the way for Budapest to adopt the euro as national currency, and a commitment to phase out Russian fossil fuels. Viktor Orban, Hungarian prime minister, holds a campaign rally alongside local MP candidates in Szekesfehervar, Hungary, on April 10, 2026. (Balint Szentgallay/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Where Orban has sought to portray Kyiv as a threat , Magyar has tried to walk a constructive yet critical tightrope . Ukraine is barely mentioned in Tisza's manifesto, which only rules out sending Hungarian soldiers to help and is against an accelerated EU accession process for Kyiv. Outside of the contest between Fidesz and Tisza, the far-right Our Homeland Movement (Mi Hazank) is the only other group expected to enter the parliament. They could play a decisive role if neither Fidesz nor Tisza commands a majority on its own, or if they are short of a supermajority and need to change constitutional laws. As of March 29, Tisza is set to win 49% of the vote, versus 41% for the governing Fidesz-KNDP coalition, according to a polling average published by election analysts at Europe Elects. However, individual polls give widely varying results from a decisive win for Magyar's party (56% vs 27%) through to a clear Orban victory (50% vs 42%), making it hard to draw definitive conclusions. Those looking to the betting markets for an alternative source of wisdom will see 2:1 odds in favor of Magyar becoming Hungary's next prime minister, according to gambling website Polymarket, with his lead having only extended through the last weeks of the campaign. Peter Magyar, lead candidate of the Tisza party, speaks to voters at an election campaign rally on April 9, 2026 in Gyor, Hungary. ( Sean Gallup/Getty Images) But the Hungarian election is not a straight-up proportional vote, meaning the share of the popular vote doesn't necessarily translate exactly into how many seats the respective parties will have in parliament. Hungary's electoral system is a mix of two voting systems: For the proportionally awarded seats, Hungary also requires that any party entering the parliament must have over 5% of the popular vote. These systems are not in themselves a cause for suspicion, with Germany operating a similar 5% threshold and the UK having a parliament entirely elected by first-past-the-post, but they do tend to reinforce larger parties such as Fidesz when faced with a fragmented opposition. A 2022 OSCE report highlighted that the constituency sizes for Hungary's FPTP seats vary wildly, by as much as 33% , which means not every vote has an equal weighting. "Because small constituencies are mostly rural and strongly overrepresented, and because Fidesz is strong in these rural communities, this creates an unreasonably strong, unfair advantage for Fidesz," said Tobias Schminke, founder at Europe Elects. Even so, a projection for the 106 constituencies by the political intelligence firm Forefront Advisers has a majority (59) of seats predicted for Magyar's Tisza party, with an additional 10 too close to call, even after adopting a conservative approach. In the case of either party achieving a decisive victory, it is possible that the result could be known on the night of April 12, with most seats expected to declare around 10 p.m. CET. However, the votes of Hungarians outside the country could take days to arrive, which, if the results are close, could end up being decisive. But in the case of a Tisza win, "there is a long list of poison pills available for Fidesz to use," said Christopher Glück, managing director at Forefront Advisers. Those pills range from slow-walking acknowledgment of the results by potentially as long as a month, to even having the Hungarian parliament declare a state of emergency and nullify the election result. Glück expects that Magyar will try to pre-empt such maneuvers by holding a mass event immediately after the elections. Tisza "will want to maintain street pressure until the handover is complete," he said. Chris Powers is the Brussels Correspondent with the Kyiv Independent. He is tasked with reporting on EU news and policy developments relevant to Ukraine, bridging the gap between Brussels and Kyiv. He was formerly the Defense and Tech Editor at the EU media outlet Euractiv. Chris holds a BA in History from the University of Cambridge and an MA in European Studies from the College of Europe.