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 barely two weeks before the election.
Clocking in at just under an hour, the film makes up with investigative brawn what it lacks in formal polish. The filmmakers travel through Roma villages in the nation’s countryside —hard-core Fidesz strongholds — to uncover a wide network of bribery and blackmail.
As a series of whistleblowers reveal, a highly developed system of Budapest-based operatives promise (and deliver) everything from food packets to 20,000 forint notes (about $75) to those who vote for Fidesz. The operatives accompany people to the voting booth and, using a loophole that allows them entry, ensures the voters choose Fidesz. (Other parties have tried this too, the film reports, but at nowhere near the level of scale or skullduggery.)
Meanwhile at the local level, the film alleges, mayors loyal to the government often go a step further: they threaten public employees and others to vote for Orban’s party.
“You don’t get public work, you can’t go to work, you can’t do this, you don’t get that, they take away your housing subsidy,” says one whistleblower who used to work to bribe and intimidate on behalf of the party. Added a second whistleblower: “There are so many things they could do to hurt these families.” Among the most draconian: threatening to kidnap children.
These tableaux help explain how Orban stayed in power so long. And their exposure, especially on the eve of an election, may have ensured his time has now ended.
Price of a Vote was showed in a Budapest movie theater last week and also released on YouTube; the two platforms cannily circumvented Orban’s largely state-controlled television news. In just two weeks the film has garnered 2.2 million views on YouTube. (You can watch it below.)
While there’s little evidence it stopped the network of goons from operating again, the film may have helped motivate people to vote against Orban who otherwise would have stayed home. Turnout in Hungary Sunday hit a post-Iron Curtain record of 74 percent, or an eye-popping 6 million people, which means as many as a third of all voters watched the movie. (Such a percentage would equate to more than 50 million people in the U.S.)
The film was directed by a collective of some 20 people from a group called the DeakcioKozosseg, which roughly translates as Community Counter-Action. (Aron Timar, a young software engineer who is among the filmmakers, did not respond to a request for comment at press time.) On its YouTube Channel, the group said that “When we started filming six months ago, we only intended to make a documentary about vote-buying. We received information from 14 counties, conducted more than 60 interviews, and traveled 20,000 kilometers. According to our interviewees, the lives and votes of people in rural areas are influenced not only with money, but also through drugs and intimidation.”
The defeat of Orban is a blow to the Donald Trump administration, which has long been in in league with the Hungarian ultra-populist. Last week, with Orban’s chances dimming, U.S. vice president J.D. Vance traveled to Hungary to meet with and endorse the leader; he echoed the ultra-natonalist’s line that it was the EU, and not Fidesz’s own leadership, that had ruined Hungary’s economy. As Vance was speaking at a Fidesz rally Trump called in to tell the crowd “I love the Viktor…he’s a fantastic man.”
Both the loss and the potential role of Price of a Vote calls attention to the bid by U.S. documentaries to change the course of elections here, particularly to try to defeat conservatives. Such efforts date back to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, to try to stop the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, and the release of Errol Morris’ anti-Trump immigration-themed doc Separated as the ex-president ran again in 2024.
Both Trump and Bush would go on to win — the latter despite the massive popularity of the Moore film. On Sunday, however, a Hungary doc did what no U.S. film ever could.
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