标题: 2022.04.02匈牙利的菲迪兹党难以被赶走 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-3-31 23:41 标题: 2022.04.02匈牙利的菲迪兹党难以被赶走 Stacking the deck
A wild gerrymander makes Hungary’s Fidesz party hard to dislodge
Opposition voters are packed into a few large constituencies
APR 2ND 2022
In an upcoming election a populist conservative party is poised for victory. It leads polls by mid-single digits. It is also aided by gerrymandered districts, drawn after it won an election in 2010, which should secure its majority today even if its opponents get more votes. The party is not America’s Republicans, who lead polls by just two points and whose advantage in gerrymandering has dwindled. Instead, it is one that some Republicans cite as a model: Fidesz in Hungary, led by Viktor Orban, which faces voters on April 3rd.
Hungary has a mixed-member parliament. Just over half of mps represent geographic districts; the rest come from party lists allocated in proportion to the national vote. Academics often praise this method. But Hungary’s version is warped.
First, rather than having independent experts draw districts, Fidesz drew them itself. Legislators in many American states do this, too. But in America, constituencies must have nearly equal numbers of people. In Hungary, by contrast, their populations can vary by up to 35%. This lets the party in power pack opposition voters into a few heavily populated districts, and spread out its own among lots of less-populous ones.
Fidesz has deployed this tactic deftly. When it took power in 2010, it fared similarly in the least- and most-populous districts. At the next election in 2014, after it re-drew the borders, its vote share was six percentage points higher in districts with fewer than 70,000 eligible voters than in those with at least 80,000. As a result, Fidesz won 91% of constituency seats and a two-thirds supermajority overall, despite getting just 45% of the vote. In 2018 it won 67% of seats again, with 49% of the vote.
This time, Fidesz’s rivals are better organised. Six parties have joined forces as the United Opposition. Had their votes been combined in 2018, Fidesz would have won only 104 of 199 seats. However, many voters who in 2018 backed Jobbik, the only conservative party in the alliance, have defected. As a result, Fidesz leads polls released in March by 50%-44% on average.
This lead is too small to ensure that Fidesz will get the most votes. But thanks to gerrymandering, the opposition probably needs 54% of votes to control parliament. Fidesz can hold on with just 43%. By contrast, at the peak of American Republicans’ gerrymandering in 2012, they needed 48% to win the House of Representatives. ■
Sources: The Constituency-Level Elections Archive; The Economist
