How Viktor Orbán Got Rolled by His Own Gerrymander

Steven Hill is the chief editor and contributor to the Substack DemocracySOS, where this article originally appeared.

Viktor Orbán’s brand of corruption, cronyism, and running what a former Hungarian education minister has called a “post-communist mafia state” finally caught up with him. But that was not the only factor in his stunning landslide loss to Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party, which won a two-thirds majority in Sunday’s parliamentary election.

Orbán got hoisted by his own petard, as they say, which is an old expression muttered by Hamlet describing a situation in which one’s own actions backfire and cause you harm. Orbán was able to rule as an illiberal prime minister for 16 years because of his clever ability to manipulate the rules of democracy as a vehicle for strangling democracy itself. Yet it was those very rules and manipulations of his “python democracy” that ultimately backfired on Orbán and his Fidesz party.

Allow me to explain. Hungary elects its National Assembly using two different methods simultaneously: multi-seat proportional representation to elect 93 out of 199 seats, and U.S.-style single-seat “winner take all” districts to elect the other 106 seats. Across four previous election cycles, Orbán’s secret sauce was manipulating Hungary’s “winner take all” district seats through two gambits: 1) extreme gerrymandering of the legislative district lines that make Donald Trump’s mid-decade gerrymanders look like child’s play; and 2) extreme malapportionment, in which Orbán allowed the population of the districts to vary greatly in population size by up to 35 percent (whereas in the U.S. the allowable variance is only 5 percent).

This second factor, malapportionment, has been even more instrumental for Orbán/Fidesz because it allowed them to pack voters from opposition parties into a smaller number of heavily populated districts, ensuring they would win fewer seats. And then spread out its own supporters among a great many less-populous districts, where their voting influence was maximized. This allowed even more extreme manipulation of gerrymandering techniques than those used in the U.S., such as “packing,” in which you cram as many of your opponent’s voters into one district as possible, thereby making sure they win fewer seats.

The result? In the previous election in 2022, Fidesz only won 54 percent of the nationwide popular vote yet ended up winning 82 percent of the single-seat “winner take all” district races. When combined with the proportional voting results, in which Fidesz won 51.6 percent of the seats—closer to its share of the national popular vote—overall Orbán won 67 percent of the seats, giving him his two-thirds majority needed to pass constitutional amendments focused on further eroding Hungarian democracy and cementing Orbán’s dominance.

In 2018, Fidesz won 49 percent of the nationwide popular vote, yet won 86 percent of the grotesquely gerrymandered and malapportioned “winner take all” district seats, and 67 percent overall legislative seats. In 2014, Fidesz won less than 45 percent of the popular vote, even as Orbán’s party captured an astounding 91 percent of the gerrymandered/malapportioned single-seat districts, and two-thirds of the seats overall. In 2010, which was the first election that kicked off the Orbán-ification of Hungary, Fidesz won about 53 percent of the nationwide popular vote but ended up with an astounding 98 percent of the district seats and a super majority of 68 percent of the overall seats.

That’s an impressive history of manipulating elections and Hungarian democracy through extreme gerrymanders and malapportionments. One can expect these types of manipulations in a “winner take all” electoral system where details like legislative district lines and packing of malapportioned district size can have enormous repercussions for representation. It is these “winner take all” dynamics that have been playing such a major factor in creating huge “votes to seats” distortions in Hungary’s single-seat districts. That in turn has allowed Orbán’s party to be vastly overrepresented, with two-thirds majorities in the National Assembly that have allowed him to pursue constitutional changes and further ensure his control of government.

Extreme pendulum swings in “winner take all” elections

It all worked like a well-oiled illiberal, authoritarian machine … until it didn’t. That’s because the “One Ring of Power”—i.e. the “winner take all” electoral system—turned on its master, Viktor Orbán.

It came crashing down during Sunday’s election because of the mercurial nature of “winner take all” elections in which the highest vote-getter wins in each individual district—so if the victory margins in a lot of districts are close enough, a swing of even a relatively small number of voters can result in a huge shift in election outcomes. That’s exactly what happened in Hungary. Let’s look at the numbers from Sunday’s election, which saw a record-high turnout of nearly 80 percent, the highest since the fall of Soviet communism.

Orbán/Fidesz had a popular vote meltdown, winning only 39 percent of the nationwide popular vote, its lowest in 16 years; its legislative seats more than chopped in half to only 56 seats from the previous 135. Meanwhile, the brand new political party Tisza won 52.4 percent of the national popular vote—about the same percentage of votes that Orbán used to win. Yet now it was the opposition’s turn to benefit disproportionately from Orbán’s strangely drawn and malapportioned districts.

The swing of support from Fidesz to Tisza resulted in the opposition winning 92 out of the 106 “winner take all” districts seats, or 87 percent. Overall, Tisza won 68 percent of the parliamentary seats, so now it’s Tisza that has the two-thirds super majority for constitutional change.

This kind of “sweep effect,” in which a small shift in the popular vote can result in a huge shift in the number of seats won, has manifested in US and UK elections as well. In the 1994 elections for the US House of Representatives, a shift of only 6.4 percent in the national popular vote resulted in a dramatic swing of 54 seats to Republicans, as the GOP won its first House majority in over 40 years. In 2010 during the Republican “Tea Party” wave, the GOP increased its share of the national popular vote by nine points and flipped 63 seats, one of the largest shifts in modern history. In 2018, Democrats took back the House during the first Trump administration, increasing their national vote share by six points, a swing of 41 seats and winning a 36-seat majority fueled by a modest vote swing in suburban districts.

One of the most extreme recent examples was the 2024 election in the UK. Prime minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party increased its nationwide vote totals by only 1.6 percent—yet it more than doubled its number of seats won from 202 to 411, while the ruling Conservative Party saw its number of seats collapse by 251 seats.

Could something similar happen to Trump and the Republicans this November? I haven’t done a thorough state-by-state analysis, but it certainly seems plausible. If their extreme gerrymanders in Texas and other states cut their vote margins down in a number of safe GOP seats in order to try and maximize the number of possible GOP seats, and if there is a significant anti-Trump wave the way there was against Viktor Orbán, MAGA might well be looking at a meltdown in the midterms this November.

“Winner take all” makes us all losers

These are the chaotic swings of district seats that often occur in a “winner take all” system in which you elect one single-seat district at a time. In contrast, proportional representation (PR) electoral systems are noted for their capacity to elect political parties in proportion to their voting strength at the polls. If a party wins 10 percent of the popular vote it gets 10 percent of the seats, and if another party gets 40 percent or 60 percent of the popular vote it receives 40 percent or 60 percent of the seats. It is a fairer system in that way, in that both majority and minority perspectives can win a place at the legislative table. You also don’t generally see wild partisan swings from right to left and back again. Without single-seat district lines to manipulate or malapportion, political parties in a PR system don’t have as many opportunities to manipulate election outcomes.

The “winner take all” electoral system is known for its various distortions and manipulations, which can often result in one party winning a disproportionate number of seats. These kinds of manipulations have long created both the perception as well as the reality of unfair and undemocratic distortions.

Representative government can only work if there is a modicum of fairness and respect for lawfulness built into not only most people’s attitudes and popular culture, but also the institutions that form the scaffolding. America’s founders wisely “constitutional-ized” into our political system a degree of separation of powers and checks and balances, but we also inherited from them an 18th century electoral system that is antiquated and easily manipulated. Most established democracies in the world don’t use it anymore. It’s well past time for the United States to adopt a more modern electoral system so that no political party—right or left—can benefit from the Orbán-ization of our politics.

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