So far this year, government-affiliated institutes have published only one party preference poll. That, too, was months ago: in March, Nézőpont Institute measured a ten-percentage-point Fidesz lead ahead of Tisza – the same situation as in December of the previous year.
Regarding the reasons for the silence, Ágoston Sámuel Mráz, director of Nézőpont, said on Partizán that they will only publish data when they have something new to say. In his view, the radically contradictory surveys published last autumn led to a loss of credibility for the profession. He confirmed that they are continuously polling, and although they are not making the data public, Mráz did reveal in April that the governing party is in the lead, but “the gap is closing” between Tisza and Fidesz. This is peculiar, because Nézőpont’s previous poll from just one month before had concluded that Tisza had peaked and begun to decline.
In 24.hu’s analysis programme last November, Gábor Török already said that institutes considered pro-Fidesz due to their government contracts cannot afford to publish data favouring Tisza ahead of the 2026 elections. Mráz, on the other hand, believes that seeing numbers unfavourable to the governing parties might actually mobilise Fidesz’s voter base, grown weary over the past three difficult years. He also promised that by next year’s election, they will publish figures even if they are unfavourable to Fidesz.
While we cannot pass judgement on the issue, we did ask the institutes regarding the reason behind the lack of publications, and we looked into how unusual this voluntary silence from pro-government pollsters is compared to past experience.
Pride and Kinga Kollár were surveyed
Last autumn, polls by pro-government and independent institutes began to describe diametrically opposed political realities. It was 21 Research Centre – the organisation that had predicted the results of last year’s EP election the most accurately – to first indicate that Tisza had taken the lead, albeit within the margin of error. This was later confirmed by other polling institutes as well. In contrast, pro-Fidesz pollsters kept claiming that no overtaking was happening at all: Tisza’s growth had plateaued at 35 percent, while Fidesz was maintaining a lead of around ten percentage points. We provide a detailed explanation of the phenomenon in this article.
The last time a party was measured to enjoy levels of support similar to Fidesz’s was MSZP in spring 2012, while the opposition alliance was indicated to have somewhat of a lead in 2021, at the peak of the COVID crisis and during the primaries. Since Viktor Orbán began his tenure in 2010, there has never been a case where a challenger managed to stabilise their lead. And yet, the circle of independent pollsters has been consistently reporting an increasingly confident lead for Péter Magyar’s camp. In the spring, 21 Research Centre measured a 14-percentage-point lead among voters who were certain to participate, which has since been confirmed by other institutes: according to Republikon‘s most recent poll, the lead is nine points, IDEA and Publicus report seven, while Závecz measures five percentage points. Such a prolonged, seemingly stable disadvantage is unprecedented in the history of the Orbán-regime. What’s more, data released on Wednesday by Medián shows a 15-point Tisza lead among certain voters, and even across the general population, Péter Magyar’s party leads Fidesz by ten percentage points.
Compared to the situation back in last autumn, the difference is that the contradictory narrative is no longer being told:
the pro-government institutes — Nézőpont, Századvég, the Hungarian Society Research Institute, Real-PR 93, and the Centre for Fundamental Rights — have fallen completely silent, with the exception of the aforementioned March data release by Nézőpont.
It is not only their proximity to the governing party that suggests the silence is not due to a lack of funding, since these institutes continue to publish surveys regularly — just not on the state of the party race. And their findings consistently support government policy: they have measured that the majority of Hungarians disagree with Kinga Kollár of Tisza, whom Fidesz accuses of pushing for the suspension of EU funds, but they do agree that Ukraine’s fast-tracked EU accession would be disadvantageous for Hungary, and — unsurprisingly — they support income tax exemption for mothers with two or three children. Over the past six months, polls have also shown that Hungarians overwhelmingly reject drug dealers, Pride, foreign funding of media and politics, and the EU’s push to break away from Russian gas. So, according to these results,
the overwhelming majority of Hungarians agree with the fundamental policies of the government — yet these institutes still provide no indication of how many would actually vote to keep them in power.
As for the political atmosphere, all we learn from Nézőpont’s 20 March survey is that the Prime Minister remains by far the most popular politician (Medián’s poll, released the same day, came to the opposite conclusion, as did the April data set from the 21 Research Centre identifying Péter Magyar as the winner in that comparison, first published in our paper). Meanwhile, a study by the Society Research Institute found that most Hungarians do not believe there will be a change of government next year.
No more party preference polls
Compared to last year, the single party preference poll published over a six-month period is a very small amount:
the five institutes mentioned above released a total of 27 surveys on the state of the party race in 2024, 15 of which were published in the first half of the year.
As in previous years, it was Nézőpont to publish the most, with 11 polls last year. In certain months, they released not one, but two such studies – in September, for example, they assessed the impact of flood defence efforts on party popularity (naturally, their results favoured Fidesz).
It is a fact, however, that two important elections were held in Hungary in June 2024, which increased interest in the competition between parties. Therefore as a reference, we also looked at 2023: although fewer surveys were conducted — eight in total — seven of them were published in the first half of the year.
We also checked how frequently polls had been published in the years leading up to the last two parliamentary elections — that is, in 2021 and 2017. According to our calculations, during the year of the COVID crisis and the opposition primaries, the five pro-government institutes published 16 party preference polls, four of which were in the first half of the year. In 2017, only Nézőpont and Századvég among the examined institutes were polling party preferences. They released 14 polls, five of them in the first half of the year. In both cases, Nézőpont published the most: nine times in 2021 and ten times in 2017.
Based on this, it can be stated that, compared to any previous period, the frequency of publications on party popularity has drastically declined over the past six months.
“We have every right to consider them propagandists”
Political scientist Gábor Tóka analyses, compares, and averages Hungarian opinion polls on the Vox Populi website. In response to our questions, he said that there was a period in 2020 when the pro-government institutes did not publish any polls, but that did not occur during a politically tense period like the current one — at the time, they were polling well, and no one disputed their advantage. “The main reason this is unusual is that, in recent years, the trend had been in the opposite direction. Until 2021, only Századvég and Nézőpont were publishing data — and Századvég only rarely. But in the autumn of 2021, during the opposition primaries, the five research institutes held a conference and announced their collaboration, and all five began publishing election opinion polls” – Tóka said.
The momentum continued: last autumn, after 21 Research Centre was the first to report a Tisza lead on 23 October, the right-wing institutes responded with a deluge of polls measuring Fidesz’s advantage.
Tóka finds Mráz’s argument — that they don’t want to take part in the battle being played out in the public sphere — unconvincing. It’s conceivable that they don’t want to publish results that would, once again, go completely against everyone else’s findings and suggest a small or significant Fidesz lead, fearing they wouldn’t seem credible. At the same time, they also don’t want to post about a Tisza lead, as that could give Péter Magyar’s camp a communications boost — potentially further energising opposition voters, bolstering their belief and enthusiasm.
Mráz also argued that seeing negative numbers might actually help mobilise the seemingly passive Fidesz base, but Tóka doesn’t think opinion polls have such a direct effect. “Those who are interested enough in politics to read an opinion poll likely make up 20 to 30 percent of the population, and it doesn’t change their vote. I don’t know what pro-government pollsters believe about the effect of opinion polls. It’s possible they’re thinking more about what impact discouraging numbers might have on the parliamentary faction, entrepreneurs, or mayors” – he said.
According to Tóka, it’s unlikely that Nézőpont Institute would have deep ethical qualms about publishing data that doesn’t align with what they themselves believe to be true.
He recalled that in February, Máté Kocsis, the leader of Fidesz’s parliamentary group, had a discussion with Mráz in the Parliament’s salon, where the latter firmly stated that, in their measurements, the governing party generally leads by six percentage points. Yet, no poll had been published in previous months showing a Fidesz lead of less than ten points. According to Tóka, this is either a clear admission, or Mráz deliberately gave the Fidesz parliamentary group worse figures than what their actual data showed.
It’s worth recalling that in an interview given to Öt, Orbán said that during the 2021 primaries, they were trailing behind the six-party opposition alliance — even though, at the time, the pro-government institutes were consistently reporting a Fidesz lead.
Gábor Tóka publishes the average of pollsters’ measurements on the Vox Populi election guide website, believing that this approach brings us closer to reality than if we relied on the results of individual surveys. When asked how the silence from government-aligned circles affects his methodology, he said that publishing nothing at all is still better than lying.
We have every right to consider them propagandists, just look at the wording of their public opinion poll posts. We don’t know what they do as analysts or what they show Antal Rogán, but it’s clear that in public, they are conducting political propaganda activity as fighters in a political battle.
Tibor Závecz: There are competitors who do not have financial problems
We tried to contact Nézőpont, Századvég, the Hungarian Society Research Institute, Real-PR 93, and the Centre for Fundamental Rights, asking them why they haven’t published any party preference polls recently. We also asked whether they had conducted polls they chose not to release, how often this occurred, and why they decided not to make them public — despite having previously released regular results. Additionally, we asked when they expect to publish their next such poll. So far, we have received no answer. Nézőpont Institute was the only one to react to our queries, saying that if we are interested in public opinion data, they would be happy to provide a quote. (In the run-up to the most recent EP and parliamentary elections, our newspaper commissioned policy-related polls — not from Nézőpont, but from Závecz Research — editor’s note.)
But it’s not only the pro-government institutes that refrained from publishing new data – Závecz Research has not released any party preference figures since the end of March, either. Tibor Závecz, the institute’s director, told us that their preferred method of face-to-face surveying on a sample of 1,000 people is extremely expensive to conduct, and in recent months, they have not been able to secure the financial means to do so. Instead, they are attempting a larger-sample telephone survey, the results of which they plan to publish in late June or early July. Závecz considers this important primarily because, after a three-month gap, they want to return with fresh data of their own.
There are competitors out there who don’t have financial issues. Why they’re not releasing polls is another matter — it’s them you should ask about that
– said Závecz.
Face-to-face data collection is highly resource-intensive: if an interviewer receives just 2,000 forints per respondent, the survey already costs two million forints, and that’s without travel expenses. According to Závecz, representativity can be guaranteed through telephone interviews as well — since everyone has a phone — whereas online questionnaires, in his view, offer more limited coverage of the population, although there are statistical methods to correct for this. Despite increasing difficulty in organising face-to-face surveys, Závecz said they still hope to conduct one in the autumn.
The pool of potential clients for polling institutes includes market players, political parties, media outlets, foundations, and universities. “The real difficulty is that a single client’s request is usually not enough to fund a poll — so various questionnaires, taken at different times, have to be pieced together. It’s a bit like building with Lego” – Závecz explained.
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