Abstract
Fidesz won every Hungarian national election from 2010 to 2022, and from 2015 migration was central to its campaigns. I use 66,587 posts from the Facebook pages of seven Hungarian parties and two party leaders, Viktor Orbán and Ferenc Gyurcsány, from January 2014 to September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle, to ask three descriptive questions. First, did Fidesz's share of Facebook engagement match its share of the vote? In the 60 days before the 2014 and 2018 parliamentary elections and the 2014 and 2019 European elections, the Fidesz party page drew between 0.87 and 1.00 times its vote share among the lists compared, and between 1.02 and 1.20 times when Orbán's page is counted with the party. Smaller parties diverged much more, in both directions. Second, who carried the party? Orbán's page drew 25% of the interactions on the two Fidesz pages in 2014 and between 41% and 56% in each year from 2015, and Gyurcsány's page followed a similar path within the Democratic Coalition. Third, where did migration appear? Between 31% and 41% of posts on the Fidesz party page mentioned migration in each year from 2015 to 2019, against under 4% on Orbán's page, whose captions are short. Migration posts drew about the same engagement as other posts on the Fidesz page and about 1.5 times as much on Jobbik's. Results allow for a change in CrowdTangle's capture of photo posts in May 2015. The pattern fits a division of labour: the party page carried the written message, the leader's page the leader.
Questions this answers
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). The Party Page Carried the Message: Fidesz, Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian Opposition on Facebook, 2014 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23419881