One-third of voters cast their votes in the government's advisory poll, 95 per cent against Ukraine's EU accession

“I was almost swept away by the public anger”, Viktor Orbán said in a video uploaded on X about the reception he received at Thursday's summit of EU heads of state and government. On his arrival at the meeting, the prime minister presented the results of the national consultation on Ukraine's EU membership, which showed that 95 percent of the more than two million responses received rejected the candidate country's admission.

He said that his EU counterparts received the announcement with “undivided disapproval”, because they believe that Ukraine's membership of the EU and then NATO is “good and desirable”, whereas the former would mean the accession of the war to EU together with Ukraine, and the latter “would mean the start of a third world war”. For former Soviet bloc countries such as Hungary, the order was reversed because the EU is not a military alliance and cannot defend the borders, he argued. Only the Slovak and Hungarian governments believe that there is no solution on the battlefield.

For the third time in a row, only 26 members – including Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico – issued conclusions on Ukraine without Orbán. Among other things, it was noted that, on the basis of the European Commission's assessment, the conditions are in place to open the first of six groups of chapters in the accession negotiations, which deals with the fundamental issues. Like other important steps in the accession process, opening and closing each chapter requires the unanimous agreement of the governments of the member states, while Ukraine must adopt the EU acquis in the relevant part.

Viktor Orbán announced the final results of the Voks2025 consultative poll on Ukraine's accession to the EU ahead of the EU summit on Thursday. The Prime Minister said that a total of 2 million 278,000 people voted, of which 2 million 168,000, or 95 percent of those who cast their votes, voted against Ukraine's accession to the EU, while the remaining 5 percent voted in favour of Ukraine.

Balázs Hidvéghi, Parliamentary Secretary of State in the Prime Minister's Office, said on Tuesday that 2 million 284 thousand people had voted. In last year's EP elections, 7.8 million people were on the electoral register, meaning that 29 percent of voters expressed an opinion only in this poll, while more than 5 million adult Hungarian citizens did not.

Even so, Voks2025 was the government's second most successful national consultation, only 72,000 completions behind the national consultation on the Soros plan, which attracted 2,356,000 respondents. However, Voks2025 easily beat the national consultations on Covid and Stop Brussels, with 1.68 million respondents.

This time again, it was not a referendum, just an opinion poll like the national consultations, which has no legally binding force and can only be used as a political tool. An important question is how credible the data on the number of respondents and the yes/no answers can be considered at all. It has already been shown that in online questionnaires, one person could vote several times with different email addresses. Government spokesman Gergely Gulyás said at the last government briefing that printed voting forms are checked by a notary and cannot be used to cheat, and online voting is also certified by a notary. However, Gulyás could not say whether the system would filter out people who voted both on paper and online. Gulyás tried to belittle the problem by saying that online votes only accounted for roughly 10 percent of the more than 2 million votes cast.

In response to doubts about the credibility and reliability of the poll, the Government Information Centre told Telex that the government does not assume that people want to cheat, but that they want to express their opinion, as evidenced by the number of voters. Online voting was made possible because of more than 20,000 complaints about lost or stolen voting forms. The voting forms were printed on security paper so there could be no misuse of them.

Ukraine has become the bogeyman

The government made every effort to get as many people as possible to participate in Voks2025. It has been billboarded across the country, promoted on public TV during football matches, sent to vaccine-info email addresses, advertised in free newspapers for pensioners, circulated to ministry employees and even to the army, encouraging them to complete the form of a government political campaign, Voks2025.

As if that wasn't enough, Fidesz rounded up a massive campaign around Voks2025, the likes of which the country has perhaps not seen since the refugee crisis of 2015. The stakes of last year's EP elections were already life or death, according to Fidesz, but they managed to surpass even that. Ukraine has become the bogeyman: if Ukraine becomes a member of the EU, the country will be flooded with infectious diseases and Ukrainian criminals, the shops will be full of low-quality food, the bonus one-month pension will go down the drain, cheap energy will be gone, we will lose EU agricultural subsidies, and Hungary will have to join the war from which dead Hungarian soldiers will return in coffins. "There is no solution on the battlefield, only destruction and death; we need a ceasefire and peace. We do not want to die for Ukraine, we do not want our sons to return in coffins. We don't want an Afghanistan next door", Viktor Orbán said at the Patriots' rally in France.

The campaign somehow missed the fact that in the weeks after the outbreak of the war, the government was still supporting Ukraine's accelerated accession to the EU, and there was little mention of the fact that the government could have stalled the accession process before, but did not. In fact, when EU leaders agreed on the terms of Ukraine's accession process last June, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó communicated that the Hungarian government had succeeded in protecting the rights of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia.

Fidesz has never been a stranger to hate campaigns like this, but whereas in the past it was certain social groups that were to be feared, now an entire country is being targeted. A country that has been fighting its war of defence against Russia for more than three years, and which is also a neighbour of Hungary, with a significant Hungarian minority.

The idea of a public opinion vote was proposed by Orbán after the extraordinary EU summit on 6 March, but there was no mention of Ukrainian mafiosi or organ traffickers then. The Prime Minister argued that the cost of supporting Ukraine and its membership of the EU would be beyond the means of the EU and Hungary's economy. “I think that in the coming weeks and months we will be able to sort out all the consequences of a possible EU membership for Ukraine, we will be able to sort it out and discuss it,” he said at the time. Now, however, we have Viktor Orbán showing Hungarian soldiers with bleeding heads and a room full of coffins in a video made with artificial intelligence, and Fidesz politician Alexandra Szentkirályi scaring people about Ukrainian organ traffickers while standing next to a man tied up in a trunk, who is a colleague of Antal Rogán in the Prime Minister's Office.

Voks2025 can be compared to the previous national consultations because it was essentially the same, but under a different name and with a different design, its delivery and political communication, however, followed the same familiar recipe. The government has been organising national consultations since 2010, and, in the first place, the questions are asked in a way that gives answers that reflect their views. The point is to be able to say that the overwhelming majority of Hungarians support their policies.

This “overwhelming majority” in the latest national consultation on the government's new economic policies, for example, was 1.35 million people – just 16% of those eligible to vote in 2022 – who answered the highly targeted questions and supported 95-99% of the government's measures. In the 2022 election, 8.2 million people were eligible to vote, meaning that close to 28 per cent participated in the current Voks2025.

Gergely Gulyás said at the government briefing that the final result of the vote would determine the government's position at the EU summit of heads of state and government on Thursday, where the new sanctions package and European defence policy will be discussed alongside Ukraine's accession conditions. However, the government has already made it clear what it thinks of Ukraine's EU membership, but at least Mr Orbán can tell the EU talks how much support he has for it. And that is what happened: ahead of the summit, the Prime Minister posted that he could take on the fight in Brussels with the “opinion of the Hungarians” in his pocket. "We have a tougher battle ahead of us in Brussels. Fortunately, by the morning, I will have the opinion of the Hungarians in my pocket. The result of VOKS2025 is coming", he wrote on his Facebook page.

The fact that online voting can be hacked, however, casts serious doubts on the credibility of the result. In the first place, it was always the government that announced where the vote stood, and there was no independent source to verify these figures. It was also not clear how double or fake votes were filtered out, or whether they were cancelled afterwards.

The linking of the Tisza Party with Ukraine is in full swing

It is not yet clear what else the government will use Voks2025 for. Based on the past few weeks, it seems that Ukraine has become Fidesz's top priority. Everything has been framed around this, and the Tisza Party, the leading opposition force, is also being discredited with it. Now it is not only Brussels that is plotting against Hungary, but also Kyiv. Alongside the well-known arch-villains Ursula Von der Leyen and Manfred Weber, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been brought into the picture.

At one point, the constant mention of Ukraine coincided with the political campaign against Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party: they started attacking the strongest opposition force by claiming that they were in the service of Ukraine, working to get Ukraine into the EU as soon as possible. On 6 June, the Prime Minister said on state radio that “Brussels and Ukraine are jointly building a puppet government” to change Hungary's policy towards Ukraine after the next elections. “They were looking for a candidate for prime minister, a party leader, and now they have found a minister of defence as well,” he said.

In the meantime, they also started to build up the espionage case at full blast: the Minister of Defence and the government accused Romulus Ruszin-Szendi, who is now a member of the Tisza Party, of not having represented the government's “pro-peace” position in NATO when he was Chief of General Staff, and of having been in contact with a Ukrainian spy. Because of this, the Defence and Law Enforcement Committee was even convened.

After the Defence Council meeting on 13 May, Viktor Orbán accused the Tisza Party outright that the Ukrainians wanted to use them to disrupt the Voks2025 poll, and “in order to carry out this operation, they have also revived their contacts in Hungary and launched an attack on the Hungarian Defence Forces with the help of a Hungarian party”. It was not clear from Orbán's words what he meant by 'disrupt', perhaps that they wanted to sabotage the result with yes votes, as the pro-government daily Magyar Nemzet claimed. Back at the launch of Voks2025, Péter Magyar's party was accused of stealing voting forms from post boxes, but no evidence of this has been presented to date.

They needed something, because peace did not come, and neither did the flying start

But the year did not start with Fidesz expecting everything to be about Ukraine. You may remember that Viktor Orbán talked about a flying start and a fantastic year, and the good-news campaign was roaring. The government kept talking about the fact that with the election of Donald Trump, peace would come overnight, and that a new golden age would dawn in Hungarian-American relations.

Ukraine was only mentioned in passing in the Prime Minister's annual State of the Nation address on 22 February: the permanent income tax exemption for mothers of three, the spring clean-up of NGOS and press critical of the government, the ban on Pride and the great war on drugs were the main messages. Orbán's speech on 15 March is also remembered for mention of ‘stinkbugs’, for his renewed declaration of war on civilians and the independent press with a frankness and a harsh style, unusual even for him.

Then it soon became clear that the promised flying start was not going to happen, and Trump will not bring the long-awaited peace anytime soon. In the meantime, the opinion polls published consistently showed that the Tisza Party had not only caught up with Fidesz in terms of support, but had even overtaken it.

Viktor Orbán and Fidesz will not necessarily use Voks2025 only to trumpet the result in Brussels. Speaking in the Parliamentary Salon to a restricted audience, the Prime Minister said that the opinion polls showing the Tisza Party in the lead are not true, that the governing party is in a much stronger position, and that he believes Voks2025 is important because it is the only credible measure of the real political power situation.

After the publication of the Medián poll showing a 15 percentage point Tisza advantage, Fidesz also posted that "twice as many people participated in the Voks2025 poll as in the Tisza Party poll. These are the real numbers, the rest is fake." Now, let's ignore the fact that it is difficult to compare the two votes, since Voks2025 was pushed by the government on every available platform, while Tisza obviously had no such opportunities. It is telling that the government has communicated until now that Voks2025 is a platform for Hungarians to express their views on a major issue. Orbán's words, however, show that the whole vote was more about Fidesz shaking up its own voters and showing strength towards them.

We don't know whether they are so keen to link Peter Magyar's party to Ukraine because it works with their voters or because there is nothing better at the moment. For example, they failed to trap Péter Magyar with the Pride issue, just as the Tisza Party leader refused to be dragged into the issue of the bill that they called the transparency bill, which, in fact, aims to make it impossible for NGOs and the independent press to operate. It is another matter that Fidesz finally got the proposal off the agenda, citing internal disputes. Let us add that the link with Ukraine may also work because Péter Magyar's party also asked about Ukraine's EU membership in their Voice of the Nation poll, and more than 58% of their supporters voted in favour. Fidesz can easily point to this when it calls Tisza pro-Ukrainian.

Linking up with Ukraine could be a viable topic for Fidesz because Ukraine's accession to the EU is likely to be on the agenda for a while, and can be brought up after every EU negotiation. Moreover, even opposition voters are not united on the Ukraine issue. In the Voice of the Nation poll, the ‘yes’ vote on Ukraine was by far the lowest. It was no coincidence that Péter Magyar declared on 18 June that, unlike the majority position of the People's Party, the Tisza Party does not support the fast-track admission procedure for Ukraine. To be a member of the EU, a country needs to close all accession chapters.