Hungary, Serbian Leaders Set to Win Sunday Elections

Hopes have faded for the opposition parties ahead of Sunday's elections in both Serbia and Hungary with longtime rulers Viktor Orban and Aleksandar Vucic poised to win.

• With little hope of winning Sunday's presidential or parliamentary polls, and amid complaints that voting conditions are even worse than in 2020, Serbia's opposition is pinning its hopes on the capital.
• In the presidential race, current President Aleksandar Vucic, whose Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, has run a country for more than a decade, is expected to win more than 50 per cent of the votes and so triumph in the first round.
• The parliamentary elections will be extraordinary, since the previous ones in 2020 were boycotted by the majority of the opposition, leaving Serbia's parliament without an opposition.
• Unlike the parliamentary and presidential elections, the opposition still has a chance to win in the capital, where 1,600,214 citizens have the right to vote and 12 lists are on the ballot. Voters will elect 110 councilors to the Belgrade Assembly, who then elect the mayor.
• Polls in Hungary point to a fourth consecutive victory for PM Viktor Orban but a united opposition, the war in Ukraine and worries about the direction that Orban's Fidesz party is taking has added a frisson of excitement to the race.
• The atmosphere ahead of the vote has been tense: lies, fake news and toxic propaganda abound, and in the week before the election, both sides were already accusing each other of electoral fraud.
• Government-allied pollsters regularly predict a comfortable 5-7 per cent lead for the government over the united opposition. Yet op-eds in the many government-loyal media outlets reveal some anguish, if not outright panic, in the Fidesz...