Political scientists tend to avoid making explicit predictions about the future. Thus it with great pleasure that we present our newest “election report”:https://themonkeycage.org/election_reports/ recapping the first round of the “2010 Hungarian Election”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_parliamentary_election,_2010 with an explicit prediction of results – down to actual seat totals – from “Professor Ken Benoit”:http://www.kenbenoit.net/, who writes:
On April 11, Hungary went to vote in the first of two rounds of voting spaced two weeks apart. The election pitted the centre-right opposition party Fidesz against the incumbent centre-left Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP). Deeply discredited by a scandal related to disclosures by then-Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany that the Socialists had “lied”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5359546.stm in the 2006 campaign about the state of the economy, as well as an economic crisis that led Hungary to be the first European country to seek an IMF bailout to manage its debt, the Socialists were widely expected to be routed in the elections this month.
The expectation was squarely met. Fidesz, while not quite gaining the 59-60% of the vote predicted by pre-election polls, still managed 52.7% of the list vote compared to the MSZP’s 19.3%. Based on this astonishing result – astonishing because margins of this magnitude are rarely if ever observed in Western democracies – I am forecasting Fidesz to win more than the 258 seats needed to reach the critical “two-thirds” majority of seats in the 386-seat parliament. The two-thirds supermajority is significant because this is the threshold required for constitutional change or change to constitutional-level laws such as the electoral system.
Only two other parties managed to gain enough list votes to be eligible for seats in the electoral system’s list distribution: the far-right Jobbik (roughly, Movement for a Better Hungary) with 16.7% of the vote, and the liberal Lehet Mas a Politika (LMP) – meaning “Politics can be Different” – with around 7.5% of the vote.
The rule to elect Hungary’s 386-member parliament are complicated. The system is based on two ballots, one for direct election of MPs in one of 176 single-member districts, and one for lists in one of 20 list districts. Votes not used to elect MPs in each “tier” are pooled to distribute additional mandates from a national compensation list. Most importantly this means that from the single-member districts, candidates who do not win a seat have their votes pooled for the national list allocation. Originally this feature was designed to mitigate the disproportionality that might be caused by having 176 of 386 seats allocated from single-member districts.
The reason a second round of voting must be held on April 25 is that only candidates winning more than 50% of the vote in the first round of the single-member districts can be declared elected. Any districts where seats are not yet awarded in the first round are decided in a second round of voting two weeks later, in which the top three candidates, plus any other candidate winning at least 15% in the first round, may participate.
On April 11, Fidesz won 119 of the 176 single-member districts in the first round – the only party to do so. Moreover, it led in every undecided single-member district except for one (the Budapest 20th electoral district). Based on previous electoral patterns showing that second-place candidates almost never become first-place winners in the second round, it looks like Fidesz will win every single-member district except one. The last time that a party in Eastern Europe managed to accomplsh this feat, by the way, was when Solidarity contested the 1989 election against the incumbent Polish Communist Workers’ Party.
My forecast is the following, for the final award of seats following the voting to take place on April 25, 2010:
So Fidesz should win 264 seats, the MSZP 58, Jobbik 46, and the LMP 16. These results are not that different from “a forecast I published”:http://nol.hu/belfold/20100409-ez_valami_csoda before the first round predicting 271 seats for Fidesz, and 60 the the MSZP, although that forecast was based on Fidesz winning 59% of the vote rather than 53%.
If Fidesz should lose a second district – in this case the Budapest 19th electoral district where it is just barely ahead of the Socialist candidate – then interestingly, its total seats will be unchanged. This is thanks to the compensatory effect of the national list, since the votes of the additional losing Fidesz candidate return an additional seat in the national list distribution. (This is also why the national list can only be allocated following the second-round results.)
So if Fidesz loses an additional SMD, then its total seats will still be 264, while the MSZP will gain one more seat, and Jobbik will lose a seat.
To see how far this mechanism goes, I computed a scenario where Fidesz loses ten single-member districts. The ten that I took away from Fidesz were the Budapest 19th and 20th electoral districts, four additional Budapest districts where the MSZP candidates withdrew while encouraging (although halfheartedly) voters to elect the LMP candidates instead, and four additional districts where Fidesz had the narrowest leads (Csongrad 2, Borsod 5 and 7, and Szabolcs 3). The forecast shows that Fidesz will still reach the two-thirds majority, since even though it loses 10 single-member districts, it gains four additional seats back through the national list mechanism:
And it should be underscored that this is an impossible scenario: there is no way Fidesz will lose 10 of the remaining 57 single-member districts yet undecided.