Region: Hungarian Election Makes One Party All Powerful

The centre-right party Fidesz secured the unprecedented two-thirds majority that it had hoped for Sunday, when it secured 263 of 386 seats in Hungary’s next parliament with 98 per cent of second round votes counted. Fidesz leader Viktor Orbán fought back a wide grin as he stood before a jubilant crowd that filled Vörösmárty tér in the centre of the capital and chanted “Viktor, Viktor!” as the prime minister elect prepared to speak. “We have been able to bring about a great change through democratic means that previously we could only have done with a revolution,” Orbán said.

The “supermajority” it has secured will give the centre-right party the power to implement deep structural changes that in previous parliaments would have required a hard-to-imagine cross-party consensus. Fidesz has already signalled that it intends to alter the parliamentary and local council systems by cutting in half the number of lawmakers. Orbán referred several times to building a “new system” in Hungary. This was a reference to the collapse of communism in 1989 and the subsequent switch to free elections, events which Hungarians refer to as the “change of system”. Orbán told his supporters that Fidesz will “rebuild” a country that had been “ruined” by “oligarchs abusing their power”…

Read more at The Budapest Times.