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
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