»When Blair won re-election and a huge majority in what was called the "quiet landslide", nobody called it unfair. Recall that on April 6, Fidesz-KDNP won 96 out of 106 districts, more than 90 percent. The fact that Hungary has a mixed system - the remaining 93 seats elected from the party list vote - reduces the majority to 67 percent.
But what if the rules had not been changed for this election? What would have happened then? Hungary's Nezopont Institute ran the April 6 results through the old system and found that Fidesz-KDNP would still have won an overwhelming majority of 61 percent of seats. It turns out to be higher according to the new rules because a larger percentage of parliamentary mandates are elected from the single-mandate districts. Again, like in the British system, the parties have to be able to win the first-past-the-post races. The far-right Jobbik failed to win any of those races, so while they won a larger percentage of the popular vote than in 2010, their percentage share of parliamentary mandates is smaller.
In 2005, Hungary's Constitutional Court ruled that the electoral districts had to be redrawn because they were too disproportionate. In a later ruling, the Court annulled the old districts. There was no other alternative; the system had to have new districts. The charges that these were gerrymandered have proven flimsy. Critics claimed that opposition strongholds were deliberately placed in larger districts (in terms of voters), thereby diluting those opposition votes, but data from the April 6 results how this to be simply false.
We would have a hard time finding another example of European voters re-electing a government by such a huge margin. But there is nothing wrong with the Hungarian voter, nor the country's election rules. Hungarians re-elected Orban because a weak opposition failed to offer a credible alternative when, more importantly, his government has given voters reason to believe that Hungary and its economic prospects are turning around.”