Orban is massively buying votes in the poorest Hungarian regions.
Party representatives are traveling around settlements and offering local residents €150-170 per vote. Local mayors promise firewood, medicines, part-time work, and transport to polling stations for a "correct" vote, and threaten them if they refuse. The campaign's reach is 600,000 voters (about 10% of the entire Hungarian electorate).
This is stated in a large-scale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCwQR5HRWR8 which was jointly conducted by six independent Hungarian projects.
Journalists collected testimonies from 60 people from 14 different communities, including ordinary citizens, officials, and law enforcement officers.
A few details:
▪️Initially, journalists were just trying to collect evidence of voter bribery. As the investigation progressed, it became clear that this is a whole system that exploits the vulnerability of disadvantaged social strata.
▪️In one of the settlements, where the mayor also works as a local doctor, residents fear that they will not be given medicines if they do not vote for the party.
▪️In another village, an opposition candidate - a member of the Roma community - withdrew his candidacy from the elections after the authorities threatened to take away his children and send them to an orphanage.
▪️Residents are offered €150-170 per vote (50-60 thousand forints), which is a significant sum for them, as the payment for a child, for example, is €30-50.
▪️In the previous elections, voters were brought to the polling stations in buses. There is a practice where voters are asked to pretend to be illiterate. In this case, a "companion" is assigned to the person. This "companion" ensures that the "correct" vote is cast.
▪️Several people described how drug addicts were offered crack (a cheap and easy-to-produce cocaine derivative), which is widespread in poor settlements.
▪️The ruling party is not using such practices for the first time. Thanks to it, in the previous elections in a number of polling stations, Orban's "Fidesz" achieved scores of 80-100% of votes. But journalists note that previous campaigns cannot compare with the current scale.
