Ruling party’s push to extend citizenship and voting rights to ancestral Hungarians reaches a milestone.

The one millionth person to receive Hungarian citizenship on the basis of ethnic Hungarian ancestry was honored at a ceremony over the weekend attended by Hungarian President Janos Ader and Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Index.hu reports.

The new citizen, Miklos Lajko, a farmer from Vojvodina – Serbia’s semi-autonomous northern region with a large Hungarian minority – wrote a personal statement for the occasion, read out by Ader at the ceremony in Budapest:

“My Hungarian citizenship is an emotional question… I want to be a true citizen of Hungary, as my forebears were.”

“Today [Lajko and his family] have shown what it means to be Hungarian … they are Hungarian citizens because they consider themselves Hungarian, speak Hungarian as their mother tongue, attend Hungarian schools, and have Hungarian ancestors,” Ader said.

Since the conservative Fidesz party came to power in 2008, Orban has made the inclusion of ethnic Hungarians – what he calls the “ancestral nation policy” – a central part of his platform. In 2011, the Fidesz-controlled parliament passed a citizenship law that made non-residents who could prove Hungarian ancestry eligible for Hungarian citizenship, and for voting in national elections.

The offer was taken up in large numbers by ethnic Hungarians in the lands of the old Hungarian kingdom in Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine – who by default received European passports and access to the Schengen zone – a development that ruffled feathers in these countries’ governments, who worried the law would lead to a sharp increase in emigration by the Hungarian minority into Hungary and encourage nascent separatist movements.


Hungarian minority regions in Hungary's neighbours based on data compiled in 2009. Image : Laszlo Sebok / Wikimedia Commons

While Fidesz is a hot candidate to retain its dominant position in the upcoming parliamentary elections in spring, the new citizens lend the government an added political advantage at the ballot box. At the 2014 national elections, non-residents granted voting rights under the citizenship law backed Fidesz at a rate of 95 percent, according to Bloomberg.

While Hungarian citizens abroad are only able to vote for party lists, in contrast to resident Hungarians who vote for party lists and individual candidates, citizens in neighboring countries can cast their vote by mail or register at their local office with little regulatory oversight – a system ripe for abuse which lends an unfair advantage to the incumbent government, according to the Hungarian constitutional expert Kim Scheppele, cited by the Hungarian Spectrum blog.

In contrast, expatriate Hungarian citizens – who tend to vote for the opposition parties – have reported steep obstacles to voting from abroad and cannot do so by mail.

In 2014, 8.2 million Hungarians were eligible to vote, including almost 194,000 ethnic Hungarians living abroad, according to the website of the National Election Office, cited by Bloomberg.

• The citizenship law is also controversial within Hungary. A recent poll conducted by the IDEA institute found that 76 percent of respondents believe that voting rights should accompany the obligation to pay taxes in Hungary, reports HVG.

• The 2011 citizenship law was passed during Fidesz’s period of supermajority from 2010 to 2014, when it and a coalition partner held more than two-thirds of parliamentary seats, allowing them to pass hundreds of new laws and enact 15 changes to the constitution.

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