On Sunday Hungary’s far-right leader Viktor Orban fell in an election after 16 years of some of the most bigoted and, by many accounts, corrupt rule in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.
And a documentary may have helped make it happen.
Peter Magyar’s center-right Tisza trounced Orban’s Fidesz in parliamentary elections by a margin of nearly three-to-one, a stunning turn after so many years of Orban consolidating power with extrajudicial tools like gerrymandering, court-packing and the co-optation of an independent media. Tisza won 135 out of 199 seats (Fidesz took just 55), giving the former a supermajority that will allow constitutional changes.
Many factors contributed to the polarizing prime minister’s loss, including an economy persistently among Europe’s weakest and a fatigue with the ruling party’s demagoguery, often deployed to cover up its own alleged corruption.
But Tisza also had a a secret weapon: an independent documentary called *The Price of a Vote *released just two weeks before the election.
Clocking in at just under an hour, the film makes up with investigative brawn what it lacks in formal polish. The filmmakers travel through the Roma villages in the nations’ rural countryside —hard-core Fidesz strongholds — to uncover a wide network of bribery and blackmail.
As a series of whistleblowers reveal, a highly developed network of Budapest-based operatives promise (and deliver) everything from food packets to 20,000 forint notes (about $75) to those who would vote for Fidesz. The operatives accompany people to the voting place and, using a loophole that allows them to be accompanied as they vote, ensures they place a vote for the right (Fideszian) candidate. Other parties have tried this too, the film reports, but at nowhere near the level of scale or skullduggery.
Meanwhile at the local level, the film alleges, mayors loyal to the government often go a step further: they threaten public employees and others to vote for Orban’s party.
“You don’t get public work, you can’t go to work, you can’t do this, you don’t get that, they take away your housing subsidy,” says one whistleblower who used to work to bribe and intimidate on behalf of the party.” Added a second whistleblower: “There are so many things they could do to hurt these families.” Among the most draconian: kidnapping their children.
These tableaux helped explain how Orban stayed in power so long. And their exposure, especially on the eve of an election, may have ensured that time has now ended.
*Price of a Vote *was showed in a Budapest movie theater last week and also released on YouTube; the two platforms cannily circumvented Orban’s largely state-controlled television news. In just two weeks the film has garnered 2.2 million views on YouTube. (You can watch it below.)
While there’s little evidence it stopped the network of goons from operating again, the film may have helped motivate people to vote against Orban who otherwise would have stayed home. Turnout in Hungary Sunday hit a post-Iron Curtain record of an eye-popping 74 percent, or some 6 million people, which means as many as a third of all voters watched the movie (a number that would equate to more than 50 million people in the U.S.)