The blame for defeat and the morality of politics

Abstract

Two of my old friends, Andrew Arato and Zoltán Fleck, argue on these columns about the reasons the united opposition lost and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party won the 3 April Hungarian parliamentary election. Arato claims that the 18% popular vote difference between Fidesz and the six opposition parties makes it impossible to blame the rigged electoral rules for the outcome. It is true that the tilted electoral playing field due to a disproportionate electoral system with a single round, the gerrymandering, the discriminatory treatment of citizens living outside the country (with the new citizens in the neighbouring countries, who have never lived in the borders of the contemporary Hungary, who were allowed to vote by mail, while the more liberal expat community had to go to an embassy or consulate or, as the author of this post did, fly to Budapest), winner compensation, ‘voter tourism’, all introduced by Fidesz after 2010 wasn’t the only reason for the opposition’s defeat. But similar to OSCE/ODIHR elections observers’ 2014 and 2018 reports as well as their preliminary report for 2022, the head of the mission after this year’s election came to the same conclusion: “shortcomings were already clear in the period before the vote, from the biased media through to the all-pervasive linkage of state and party”. Using the words of a recent Eurozine editorial, „you can’t loose democratic elections if they don’t exist”.