The research also revealed that the opposition would rather tie the right to vote to education than the Fidesz party. Commissioned by the CEU Democracy Institute, Závecz Research conducted a post-election poll between April 25 and May 4, 2022, which was published by Telex.
In it they write: the narrative that Fidesz won the election in the last 1-2 weeks has spread in the public discourse of the past few weeks, i.e. in the last, intense period of the campaign, masses could decide to leave and vote for the governing parties as a result of the powerful government campaign .
However, according to research by the CEU Democracy Institute, electoral intentions can be considered quite stable. More than 80 percent of the voters stated that they decided which party or party alliance they would vote for even before the election campaign, or even years before. At the same time, 1-2 months of the election campaign could affect every fifth citizen. Within this, 10 percent indicated that they decided to vote in the last 1 month, and another 9 percent in the last week.
Pure and equal choice
According to the research, preliminary expectations regarding the exact outcome of the 2022 parliamentary election were highly scattered, but almost everyone was sure that the losers would dispute the results. The unexpectedly large superiority of Fidesz, as well as the large number of vote counters and foreign observers delegated by the opposition, weakened the "the vote was rigged" narrative.
The research also addressed the narrative that the influence of poor and uneducated people, and in some cases "buying" them, caused the success of Fidesz. According to the research, a third of today's Fidesz voting base has completed at most 8 classes, but
Fidesz also won among graduates.
According to the research, this narrative may have contributed to the fact that the vast majority of society agrees with the statement: the right to vote should be tied to completing primary school. 68% of the opposition respondents agree with this, while among Fidesz voters this proportion is 59%. As Telex writes, this level of restriction of civil rights was once one of Jobbik's main demands, and recently Mi Hazánk also warmed up to it.
The data collection of 1,000 people, based on personal inquiries, took place between April 25 and May 4, 2022, in 103 settlements and districts of Budapest. The respondents collectively represent the country's adult population, according to gender, age, education, region and type of settlement. In the case of random samples of this size, the margin of error in terms of the basic distributions of all respondents is ± 3.1 percentage points. The methodology typical of this research combines the logic of quota and random sampling, so the margin of error is one to two percent higher.
Featured image: Nézöpont Institute/MTI
