Sunday's elections in Hungary will decide whether Victor Orban – Vladimir Putin's only EU ally – stays in power, or if opposition candidate Peter Marki-Zay, who managed to get a colourful coalition of six parties together, can break the stranglehold of the incumbent's Fidesz party.
"Now, people are allowed to take a photo of their ballot paper [to show] where they've put their vote," Janos Gulyas, head of a communications company in Budapest, told RFI. Gulyas will be a voting official during Sunday's elections in Kisberzseny, a tiny village of just 76 inhabitants, a two-hour drive from Budapest.
"This is not for some souvenir, this is for all those people who will be paid for their votes. In small villages, the mayor decides if you get unemployment benefits, and maybe you have to show that you put your vote where the local mayor wanted you to," he says.
Over the last decades, Orban, and his Fidesz party, have moved from middle-of-the-road politics towards populist nationalism. While opposition groups and independent observers cited instances of vote-rigging in previous elections, the opposition now struggles to even get its message across.
"Hungarian state television is financed from a yearly budget that is double the budget of the two largest private channels combined," Gulyas says. "State television has managed to invite 18 opposition politicians over the past four years. In that context the opportunity for the opposition to convey its messages is very limited."
Machinations
Szabolcs Panyi, an investigative journalist with online publication Direkt36, a crowd-funded media outlet based in a single apartment on Pozsony Street, is trying to keep up the fight.
The publication has grown in popularity after it revealed corruption scandals involving Orban's family and machinations behind massive procurement contracts involving plans by a Chinese university to build a campus in Budapest. It also exposed how Russian hackers had gained access to correspondence of Hungary's Foreign Ministry.
As a result, Direkt36 is blacklisted by government organisations.
"We can't get in any press events organised by them," says Panyi, and party officials shy away from interview requests. But not only the press is muzzled.
"Right now we have a democracy where independent institutions are losing their independence, they are controlled by government appointees, and there are no checks and balances in the system, meaning that the executive power has almost absolute power," he says.
Russian invasion
Russia's invasion of Ukraine brought a glimmer of hope for the battered opposition.
"During the first two days of the invasion, people thought Orban's friendship and support for Putin would finally bite him" one observer, who preferred to remain anonymous, told RFI.
But swiftly, using what The Economist weekly referred to in a recent article as "stealth autocracy", Orban managed to turn the tide. Presenting himself as a "candidate for peace", he scared voters drawn to the opposition by saying they may drag Hungary "into a war nobody wants".
During his last campaign rally, in the town of Szekesfehervar, he claimed that the opposition had "already struck a deal with the Ukrainians" for deliveries of light weapons, thereby increasing the chances of Hungary being an active partner in the conflict.
“This is not our war; we cannot win anything, but we could lose everything,” Orbán was quoted as saying by the Budapest Times, adding that "the only way for Hungary to stay out of the war was by not sending weapons or troops to Ukraine," and "not allowing the transit of weapons across the country’s territory."
The opposition rules out Orban's claim to be "candidate for peace".
"This is a huge lie made up by the prime minister so that he could get the stench off having been a close ally to Putin in the past 12 years," Mayor of Budapest Gergely Karácsony told RFI.
"Moreover, he’s been the servant of Russian interests in Hungary and in Europe," says Karacsony – a representative of Párbeszéd (Dialogue), one of the six political parties forming the United Hungary opposition coalition.
Last minute surprise?
The forecast doesn't look good for the opposition.
"Victor Orban has a 2/3 majority in parliament, and one of the big questions in the elections on Sunday is whether he can retain that 2/3 majority," says Panyi, of Direkt36.
"The polls show that it is not realistic for the opposition to win. But it is also on the cards that Victor Orban can win a total majority and with that he can continue whatever he wants in tweaking all kinds of legislation in our constitutional system," he says.
"Still, we're keeping our fingers crossed," Janos Gulyas says. "I was surprised by Brexit, the election of Trump, so hopefully we'll have another surprise now, in another direction."
