Gerrymandered districts, manipulated polls: Orbán’s party banks on local races to win 2026 elections

Viktor Orbán’s party may lose the popular vote by over 5 points and still win a parliamentary majority, as local districts are gerrymandered heavily in the ruling party’s favor. In recent weeks, pro-Fidesz actors used suspicious polls and falsified quotes to focus the national attention away from the popular vote to local races, where the incumbent Fidesz has a systemic advantage.

In the past year, pollsters have been releasing poll after poll showing the leading opposition force Tisza Party with a significant lead over Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party. The gap ranges between 7 to 15 percentage points of likely voters depending on pollsters, but the pattern seems clear: Fidesz has been losing ground since the European Parliamentary elections, while Péter Magyar’s Tisza party has been surging ahead of the 2026 parliamentary elections.

This trend is bucked only by the two large regime-affiliated polling groups, Századvég and Nézőpont.

Századvég,has been silent since November 2024, pausing their regular stream of polls

about party preference and election intent.

At the same time, the pollster tried to reassure Fidesz supporters with polls with vague subjects, such as one that showed that more people consider Orbán than Magyar a capable leader.

Nézőpont’s director also reassured people in interviews that in their private polls, Fidesz is still the strongest party, and they finally broke their silence in June, publishing a poll showing a 12-point lead by Fidesz over the largest opposition party, implying that the ruling party increased its voters share since the EP election.

Attack on pollsters

The timing of this poll raised suspicion as it came out shortly after the silence of the two pro-regime pollsters became national news. Polling results continued to be central to political discourse, with prominent

pro-Fidesz figures accusing pollsters of conspiring to undermine the regime by publishing fake numbers – most recently, the Sovereignty Protection Office also joined this campaign.

Viktor Orbán also referenced internal polls, which according to him show that Fidesz would win 80 of 106 single-member districts. Soon, pro-government news portal Index.hu published a series of polls allegedly “leaked” from Fidesz’s internal polling team, most of them showing Fidesz with strong leads over Tisza in local districts.

Fooling Orbán, the voters, or both?

We looked at the series of polls published by Index and compared the results to the EP vote in the respective districts. This produced hard-to believe numbers: the Index polls suggest that Fidesz suffered massive losses in some districts, with Tisza surging by double-digit percentage points. However, in others, the ruling party maintained or even increased its voter share.

The difference between the results of the 2024 EP elections and the public opinion poll data sent to index.hu

For example, in the 5^th district Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County, a largely rural constituency in North-Eastern Hungary,

Fidesz has lost 16.63 percentage points of voters, while Tisza gained 15.67 – an over 30% realignment.

In the same period, Tisza gained 4.83 percentage points and Fidesz also increased their share among likely voters by 1.14 percent in Pest County, Central Hungary. Even stranger, in Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County, Eastern Hungary, Tisza has been losing support (-0.5) along with Fidesz (-2.24) while smaller parties have been surging – this contradicts not only national polls but also common sense since Tisza and Péter Magyar all but pushed those parties out of the public eye.

For example, the small green party,

LMP, which according to the Index poll, supposedly doubled its voter share, has virtually stopped campaigning in the past year and will likely not participate in the 2026 election.

In other words, if these polls are to be believed, local districts vary massively in how the political balance of power is developing, but ultimately, Fidesz remains on the top. Index shows Tisza gaining the most on Fidesz in districts where the ruling party dominated, so now in those districts, Fidesz would win a tight race. While in districts where Tisza came close to beating Fidesz in 2024, the movement is small or opposite.  The other possibility is that the figures have simply been manipulated either to sway public opinion, or – if they are indeed internal polls – assuage party leaders.

How voters shift

We looked at how party support changed between the last two elections: the 2022 parliamentary and 2024 EP votes. We have found that in each single-member district, Fidesz lost some degree of support, meaning that there were not significant differences between how voting preferences changed locally.

Change in the proportion of votes cast for Fidesz-KDNP in the 2024 EP elections compared to the 2022 parliamentary elections

In the Index poll, Fidesz’s gains and losses range from -16.63 +1.14, in just one year. By contrast, election-to-election, Fidesz’s loss of local voters ranged from 4.12 to 11.92 percentage point. Nationally, the ruling party lost around 8 percentage points between 2022 and 2024. This trend is consistent with the 5-10 percent decline in national voter support measured by pollsters over the past year.

However, while the Index polls are suspicious, it is not impossible that Fidesz wins in 2026 by sweeping district-level elections and significantly losing the national popular vote. Hungary’s single-member districts are heavily gerrymandered, and many of them have been carved out of small rural communities where Fidesz tends to get most of its support.

Models and misquotes

András Pulai, head of the pollster Publicus told Átlátszó that Tisza needs to win by about 5 to 6 percentage points to gain enough seats (from local districts and from the national list) to get a majority in parliament. Publicus’s data currently suggests a victory for Tisza, with one mathematical model (based on district-level polls) putting Tisza 7 to 8 percent above Fidesz and predicting the opposition party winning several key swing districts.

A recent interview with Pulai also shows how important polling – even local-level polls – became to Hungarian political discourse. After the director once mentioned that Tisza tends to underperform locally compared to national polling, the quote was widely circulated by pro-regime outlets, misinterpreting it to mean that Fidesz is set to win all local districts.

It is noticeable how much pro-regime actors are emphasizing the importance of local elections as opposed to the national vote, the former being the possibly key to Orbán’s re-election.

Pulai clarified to Átlátszó that their research shows both Fidesz and Tisza winning swing districts, although Tisza tends to underperform locally compared to national polling, the reason for this is uncertain according to the director. He also confirmed our suspicion about the wild swing seen in the Index polls, saying that

they did not poll any local districts where Fidesz gained support, meaning that political support shifted relatively consistently all over the country.

ulai added that Fidesz lost the biggest share of voters in Eastern Hungary, which is somewhat consistent with some of the Index polls, and lost relatively fewer in districts in Southern Hungary where they have a traditionally strong base.

Pulai also said that Tisza’s strength comes from the ability to build a coalition between to voter groups: “those open to post-material values like democracy and civil rights, and those open to social populism.” He said that in the past, the latter group formed the bulwark of the voting base of Jobbik in its zenith. Jobbik is a far-right populist party that was strongest in the early 2010s, peaking at 20,3% nationally before fracturing and fading into irrelevance in the last few years.

“Tisza primarily gained strength where Jobbik had a large base in the early 2010s. Meanwhile, Fidesz largely retains its strength in typically more rural constituencies where neither Jobbik nor the left has ever been strong” – Pulai said.

Home field advantage

Despite this, Fidesz has somewhat of a home field advantage in many districts. Even though they are running an unprecedented number of newcomers in 2026, most of their candidates will still be incumbents. Tisza meanwhile has not yet announced any of their candidates, who will be picked in a series of primaries in the Autumn. However, it is expected that none of Tisza’s candidates will have held any political office in the past – this risky move is supposed to prevent Tisza getting associated with the older, failed opposition parties.

Pulai also said that named hypothetical Tisza candidates (picked from a list of most active party members in the area) tend to perform worse than the generic Tisza ballot.

Fidesz may also change the electoral system again, as they did so in 2021 just six months before the last parliamentary election, further gerrymandering districts and disadvantaging the opposition.