Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has announced the final results of the so-called VOKS 2025 national consultations on Ukraineʼs accession to the European Union. He claims that 95% of those who voted are against Ukraineʼs accession to the EU.
This is reported by the Hungarian media outlet Telex.
The Hungarian government sent out ballots for a national consultation from April to June, asking Hungarians whether they supported Ukraineʼs membership in the EU. Orbánʼs team campaigned to vote against Ukraineʼs accession, saying it would negatively affect the lives of all Hungarians and cause huge losses for the country.
Parliamentary State Secretary of the Cabinet Office Balazs Hidvegi stated that 2 million 284 thousand citizens, or 29% of the voters, participated in the national consultations. Such a survey has no binding legal force and can only be used as a political tool.
There are doubts about the reliability of the results, since it is known that a person could vote several times in online questionnaires from different email addresses. In response, government spokesman Gergely Gulyas said that printed ballots are checked by a notary, and online voting is also supposedly certified by him. However, he could not say whether the system filters out people who voted both on paper and online. According to him, 10% of those who participated in the national consultation voted online.
The government information center believes that people did not want to cheat, but only to express their opinion.
The Hungarian government has put a lot of effort and money into getting as many people as possible to participate in Voks2025: they plastered the country with posters, advertised on public television during football matches, sent emails with information about vaccination, promoted it in a free newspaper for pensioners, and sent circulars to employees of ministries and the military.
Viktor Orbanʼs Fidesz party stated that if Ukraine becomes an EU member, Hungary will be flooded with infectious diseases, Ukrainian criminals, stores will be full of low-quality products, the 13th pension will disappear, as will cheap energy, Hungary will lose EU agricultural subsidies and will be forced to enter a war from which dead Hungarian soldiers will return in coffins.
- Earlier, opposition Hungarian politician Peter Magyar criticized the “national consultations” organized by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s team and called them a failure. Magyar said that at most 600 000 Hungarians took part in the survey, which is the lowest figure in the history of national consultations. And “tens of billions of forints” were spent on it.
- The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine reacted to the Hungarian national consultations on Ukraineʼs accession to the EU and stated that "the real goal of this anti-Ukrainian hysteria is to shift the attention of Hungarian society from the failures of the governmentʼs socio-economic policy to an imaginary external enemy".
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