Chapter 12: The Parliamentary Representation of Minorities in Hungary

Abstract In its recent decision published on 11 November 2022, the European Court of Human Rights found that the preferential system that had been in practice since the 2014 elections to ensure the contribution of national minorities to the work of the Hungarian parliament had violated minority members’ voting rights. Considering the often-contentious nature of the main legal provisions and institutional solutions of the country’s minority policy, it is hardly surprising that the newly-established system of electing minority spokespersons and MPs in the increasingly illiberal regime has also triggered serious debates regarding their elections, status, and practical activities since even the early 2010s. Therefore, the questions arise as to how the Orbán regime designed and used this system of minority representation, whether it represents effective participation in public life in accordance with the international standards of minority protection, whether minority organizations themselves were interested in electoral mobilization, and how minorities perceive and approach these structures in practice. To address these issues, the major aim of the paper is to present and analyse this new field of ethnic voting in the parliamentary elections between 2014 and 2022, the key and controversial points, as well as the future prospects for the minorities’ parliamentary participation and preferential representation. In doing so, parliamentary electoral data are compared with the results of another main institutional channel of participation, the elections of the minority self-governments, which are the local variant of non-territorial autonomy in Hungary.