Results of Orban’s “referendum” on support for Ukraine’s accession to the European Union announced
Hungary has reported on the results of the government’s “referendum” on Ukraine’s future within the EU. According to official information released by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, more than 2.2 million citizens of the country took part in the vote. Of these, 95% allegedly spoke out against Ukraine’s integration into the European Union, while only 5% supported this idea. Such results caused a significant resonance and cast doubt on their objectivity and honesty. According to the official report, about 29% of Hungarian voters who registered as potential participants in the European Parliament elections last year were covered during the vote — approximately 7.8 million people. According to data reported by Telex, the voter turnout amounted to more than 2.2 million votes, and it is this number that supposedly sums up the results of the survey. However, experts and independent sources warn that the results may be inaccurate, in particular due to the possibility of the same person voting twice, who used different email addresses to log in to the voting system. Government spokesman Gergely Guias, in comments at a recent briefing, emphasized that printed ballots are notarized and supposedly impossible to falsify. He also reported that additional verification of electronic votes is underway, without specifying whether the system is able to detect cases where the same voter voted multiple times if he used a paper ballot and remained virtually registered. The official noted that electronic votes make up about 10% of the total number and that overall the results do not show signs of falsification. The background to this vote is a sharp political struggle between the opposition and the authorities. One of the leaders of the opposition party "Tisa", Peter Magyar, stated that the actual turnout was significantly lower - approximately 600 thousand people, and that the "referendum" was in fact a failure and politically motivated. At the same time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine expresses concerns that the Hungarian government has made maximum efforts to achieve the desired result, especially during the consultations within the framework of the VOKS2025 project on the future accession of Ukraine to the EU. Thus, the official data from Hungary do not leave much room for optimism and raise questions about the fairness and transparency of the process. Further international and independent investigation may confirm or refute the true picture of how many Hungarians actually support or reject Ukraine's integration into the European Union.