All 27 EU Member States held European Parliamentary elections on Sunday, 9 June. We have final (or near final) results from 26 of them, the sole exception being Ireland, where the count adjourned on Sunday night, without reporting any results.
Still, we have a pretty clear picture of Europe, and thus we can put Fidesz’s victory into a broader context.
Prior to the election, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called on his supporters to give his party the largest margin victory in Europe in order to more effectively counter the pro-war voices in Brussels. That was not achieved by his party.
The highest margin of victory came from Romania last night.
There, the grand coalition of PSD-PNL beat second-place finisher AUR, a right-wing nationalist-populist party, by 38 points. PM Orbán still had some good news come out of our neighbours to the east as well. The ethnic Hungarian party RMDSZ, as we reported earlier today, managed to pass the five-per-cent threshold, and will delegate two members to the European Parliament.
The French right-wing populist party Rassemblement National also outdid Fidesz in terms of margin of victory. However, PM Orbán is hardly distraught by that, given that RN is led by his long-time ally Marine Le Pen. Her party got 31.37 per cent of the popular vote, 16.77 points ahead of Besoin d’Europe’s 14.60 per cent. President Emmanuel Macron of France even called a snap election in the wake of the results.
Fidesz-KDNP’s 14.96-point margin was the third largest of last night in Europe.
As for vote share, Fidesz was also ranked third. The long-ruling party of Hungary got 44.64 per cent of the popular vote. Although it is a significant dip from five years ago, when they got 52.5 per cent, they still increased their vote total, from 1.824 million in 2019 to 2.018 million in 2024.
The only two parties in Europe that managed to get a higher vote share are the aforementioned PSD-PNL big tent coalition in Romania, which got 53 per cent; and the centre-left Partit Laburista (Labour Party) in Malta, which got 45.26 per cent. However, due to the bipolar nature of Maltese politics, PL only beat their opposition, the conservative Partit Nazzjonalista (Nationalist Party) by a little over three points.
A 15-point loss for the main opposition force being covered as a hopeful, confidence-inspiring result is a phenomenon very unique in Hungary. For a little more perceptive: that margin would be the largest in US presidential elections in the 21st century. Even Democrat Barack Obama beat Republican John McCain by ‘only’ 7.2 points in 2008, and he was the first African American candidate nominated by a major party, running in the midst of a financial crisis that happened under a Republican administration. Overall, it would be ranked 19th out of the 59 US presidential elections held so far in terms of popular vote margin.
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