Hungary seeks new voters abroad to shape elections at home

Viktor Orbán’s nationalist message plays well to ethnic Hungarians across Europe. The ruling party hopes that will boost its prospects in 2014 elections.

Hungary‘s next national election could be influenced by voters who have never lived here. And the ruling party is counting on that working in its favor.

For the first time, ethnic Hungarians living abroad will have the right to vote in Hungary’s national elections next year.

The government says that 480,000 people have applied for citizenship, and thousands have registered to vote, after a 2010 law allowed non-residents with Hungarian ancestry to become citizens and participate in national elections.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is betting these new citizens will support his Fidesz party. The government’s populist, nationalist message includes frequent reminders to a policy of uniting ethnic kin that live beyond Hungarian borders.

Although Mr. Orbán has repeatedly clashed with the European Union and civil society groups in Hungary over his sweeping legislative changes – which critics say undermine democracy – he is overwhelmingly popular among Hungarians in neighboring countries.

Foreign as domestic

The largest Hungarian minority groups reside in neighboring countries, including Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine. Regions within these countries were part of the large Austro-Hungarian empire, before a post-World War I treaty divided that territory up.

Ukraine and Slovakia do not allow for dual citizenship but Romania and Serbia will contribute tens of thousands of new voters to a country with an electorate of 8 million.

And polling indicates those voters could be solidly in Fidesz’s corner. Eighty percent of those eligible to vote in Transylvania – where many of Romania’s 1.2 million ethnic Hungarians reside – said they would support Fidesz in a recent poll.

Government officials have been courting these voters by backing ethnic Hungarians’ battle for more autonomy in Romania. In February, a brief diplomatic row between the two nations broke out over the Hungarian community’s display of its own flag, which Romanian authorities objected to.

Fidesz’s popularity is also boosted by a deep skepticism of the opposition Socialists. Many still resent the party for being in power during an unsuccessful referendum in 2004 on whether to grant non-residents citizenship.

“In the mass electorate [in Romania], the perception is that the Hungarian left has betrayed us,” says István Székely, researcher at the Romanian Institute for Research on Ethnic Minorities. Ethnic Hungarians believe Orbán “was the one who gave us the status law, [Orbán] was the one who gave us dual citizenship, while the left has done nothing for us.”

To secure its power base, Fidesz is strengthening its ties to Hungarian political parties abroad.

In April, investigative journalism website Atlatszo reported that Fidesz indirectly funded Hungarian parties in Romania, including the Hungarian People’s Party of Transylvania (EMNP). The EMNP says the report was politically motivated.

“Fidesz and Viktor Orbán [are] very popular in Transylvania,” says Zoltán Sipos, who conducted the investigation and is deputy editor of the Transylvanian news portal Transindex. Fidesz has long supported Hungarian parties in this region, he says.

CSmonitor