Fidesz’ electoral law is now almost complete and most of the crucial details have been submitted in a bill to Parliament. Most of these details reflect the trends we outlined a couple of weeks ago in our analysis of the bill’s rough draft. The most important novelty – and the one we focus on in our review below – is that Fidesz has also designed the new district boundaries.
As we noted a couple of weeks ago, there was a significant risk of Fidesz using the opportunity of having to redraw constituency boundaries to gerrymander the districts. As it happens, that is exactly what the political cartographers did. Though some strict rules Fidesz fortunately retained considerably limited the leeway the government’s experts had, they made the most of the possibilities available and gave Fidesz a not so insignificant boost for 2014.
Policy Solutions' analysis on the new district boundaries presented in the final draft of the electoral law can be downloaded from here.
Policy Solutions is a progressive political research institute based in Budapest. It was founded in 2008 and it is committed to the values of liberal democracy, solidarity, equal opportunity, sustainability and European integration. The focus of Policy Solutions’ work is on understanding political processes in Hungary and the European Union. Among the pre-eminent areas of our research are the investigation of how the quality of democracy evolves, the analysis of factors driving euroscepticism, populism and the far-right, and election research.
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