‘Alternative referendum’ is a phrase I learnt from a Facebook ad posted by the progressive activist group aHang in October 2023. The basic premise was that, since the National Election Commission did not approve any of their seven questions for a referendum regarding public education in Hungary, they ‘took the fight to the streets’ and decided to organize a vote on their own.

It was aHang’s way to highlight the ‘oppressive Orbán regime’ narrative—never mind the fact that the last time referendum questions proposed by the opposition did get the green light from the executive branch, it even failed to collect the 200,000 signatures required to hold a referendum… The opposition coalition endured this fiasco in an election year, nonetheless.

So, that is how we got to an ‘alternative referendum’ in October 2023. Or, as one reasonably could call it, a glorified change.org petition. The organizers made sure to have very lax voting requirements in place. There was an eight-day period open for voting, and one could participate online as well. They also lowered the required age to 16, from the legal voting age of 18 in Hungary.

The effort must have been at least some level of funding behind this odd project, as frequent ads on Facebook called for 200,000 people to take part in the vote, as a show of force to the Orbán administration.

Mind you, for an actual referendum, at least 50 per cent turnout is required for it to be legally binding. As per the statistics from the National Election Office’s website, there are 8.215 million citizens eligible to vote in Hungary right now. That means that a little over 4.1 million people need to show up to the referendum to make it successful. And that’s another point: people actually need to show up to a polling place, as remote voting online is not allowed, and they have to do so on a single set date.

The organizers set their bar to around five per cent of a valid referendum’s turnout. And they still failed to meet their own threshold.

They managed to get around halfway through, with 114,914 people voting. The funny thing is, trying to collectively forget about the original goal they failed to meet, they posted this graphic with the caption ‘Victory!’ to celebrate crossing the 100,000 threshold.

Again, no mention of their original goal of 200,000 people—which, even if met, still would have been meaningless, given the lax rules for participation and minuscule level of turnout compared to an actual referendum.

If the organizers wanted to display a show of strength behind their cause, supposedly for public education, they managed to do just the opposite. This ‘alternative referendum’ showed that the left-wing opposition in Hungary does not even have the low-level support they anticipated for themselves.

A mitigating factor for the project’s failure is that there has been no massive push for major political figures on the left. However, Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony has appeared briefly in one of their videos, calling on people to visit the initiative’s website and vote.

After one objective failure, the same progressive action group aHang moved right on to the next one.

After failing to get 200,000 people to partake in their little shtick, they raised the stakes to 1 million all of a sudden. They set out to collect 1 million unfilled national consultation paper surveys, in an effort to show their discontent towards the Orbán administration. To be fair, if this had been actually achieved, it would have been an impressive feat. However, judging from the failure of their first project, most reasonable people could predict it is not going to happen.

And, lo and behold, they did not even get halfway to their goal. Even after allowing turning in your survey ballot ‘online,’ thus inflating their numbers. The final tally was 398,327, with no distinction between in-person and online submissions.

The left-wing opposition in Hungary is currently on a four-election losing streak. People born in the year of the last time a party other than Fidesz won, in 2006, will be old enough to vote in the next parliamentary election.

Can you really fault the dolts in charge of these failed initiatives for trying something creative in order to stop the losing streak?

There was some creativity behind them, that I give to them. So, to answer the question, I would fault them for their first try, since the entire premise was ridiculous. Had they been successful, it still would not have meant anything in the national discussion. The fact that they failed to reach their already unimpressive goal of 200,000, while suggesting that it is on par with an actual referendum, is almost pathetic.

There is an evident deficit in competence between the right-wing and left-wing organizations in this country.

Part of it has to do with competent, otherwise not ideological people gravitating toward the side more likely to win. In cases like this, the so-called ‘alternative referendum,’ that deficit is put on glaring display.