Electoral Panorama / Panorama Electoral

Portfolio.hu reports that Hungarian President László Sólyom has set the date of Hungary's regularly scheduled parliamentary election to April 11 and 25. An election campaign is now underway in the Central European country, and recent polls indicate that Hungary's main opposition party, the right-of-center Fidesz remains set to score a landslide victory over the ruling, post-communist Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) - which has been in deep trouble for most of the past four years, as I've noted in my previous blog postings on Hungary over at Global Economy Matters (available here and here).

Hungary's 386-seat unicameral National Assembly is elected by one of the world's most complicated electoral systems, combining French-style runoff voting in single-member constituencies with regional-level party-list proportional representation and a cumbersome top-up national list that partially compensates parties for the disparities between votes and seats introduced by runoff voting at the constituency level and (to a lesser degree) PR at the county level. Nonetheless, if opinion poll figures hold, Fidesz's already enormous popular vote would in all likelihood translate into a parliamentary supermajority of two-thirds or more.

Elections to the Hungarian National Assembly has detailed results of parliamentary elections in Hungary since 1990, as well as a review of Hungary's electoral system; see also my comments on a discussion of electoral reform in Hungary at Fruits and Votes.