: Hungary’s Prime Minister Orban Leads in Early Partial Vote Count #WorldNEWS BUDAPEST, Hungary — Early partial results in Hungary’s national election on Sunday showed a strong lead for

Hungary’s Prime Minister Orban Leads in Early Partial Vote Count #WorldNEWS
BUDAPEST, Hungary — Early partial results in Hungary’s national election on Sunday showed a strong lead for the right-wing party of pro-Putin nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban as he seeks a fourth consecutive term.
But many of the early votes came from the countryside, where Orban enjoys strong popularity and it was not clear if the strong advantage would hold. With 23% of votes tallied, Orban’s Fidesz-led coalition had won 60% of the vote while a pro-European opposition coalition, United for Hungary, had 29%.
The contest was expected to be the closest since Orban took power in 2010, thanks to Hungary’s six main opposition parties putting aside their ideological differences to form a united front against Fidesz. Voters were electing lawmakers to the country’s 199-seat parliament.
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Opposition parties and international observers have noted structural impediments to defeating Orban, highlighting pervasive pro-government bias in the public media, the domination of commercial news outlets by Orban allies and a heavily gerrymandered electoral map.
The opposition coalition’s candidate for prime minister, Peter Marki-Zay, wrote on his social media page to thank all Hungarians who cast a vote and the more than 20,000 volunteer ballot counters who opposition parties assigned to polling places across the country.
“I express my gratitude to the civilians who spent the whole day checking the cleanliness of the election and are now starting the count,” Marki-Zay wrote.
The Organization For Security and Cooperation in Europe sent a full observation mission to Hungary to monitor Sundays election, only the second time it has done so in a European Union country.
The six-party opposition coalition, United For Hungary, asked voters to support a new political culture based on pluralistic governance and mended alliances with the countrys European Union and NATO allies.
While Orban had earlier campaigned on divisive social and cultural issues, he dramatically shifted the tone of his campaign after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, and has portrayed the election since then as a choice between peace and stability or war and chaos.
While the opposition called for Hungary to support its embattled neighbor and act in lockstep with its EU and NATO partners, Orban, a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has insisted that Hungary remain neutral and maintain its close economic ties with Moscow, including continuing to import Russian gas and oil on favorable terms.
At his final campaign rally Friday, Orban claimed that supplying Ukraine with weapons — something that Hungary, alone among Ukraine’s EU neighbors, has refused to do — would make the country a military target, and that sanctioning Russian energy imports would cripple Hungarys own economy.