Closing remarks on FreeVote’s weekly social media campaign monitoring briefs published during the 2026 elections

Léna Perczel, Kramer Péter

With the 2026 elections now concluded, we are wrapping up the social media monitoring we conducted throughout the campaign. We launched our monitoring on January 19, 2026, one month before the campaign officially began, and followed the online presence and activity of 859 political figures through April 19, when the vote count was finalized. It was fascinating to watch how events in the offline world – shifts in political support, emerging trends – were reflected in the online sphere. Our partner Lakmusz, an independent fact-checking outlet, helped us interpret the connections between the online and offline worlds and reach a broader audience with our findings. The technical and methodological backbone of the analysis, along with ongoing support, was provided by CEE Digital Democracy Watch, one of the leading watchdogs of digital democracy. 

In this closing report, we summarize the key findings from our weekly analyses. Our first analysis covered a full month, the 30 days leading up to the campaign period. Subsequent analyses took a weekly look at the data describing social media presence. Clear trends held steady right up until election day. Election day itself, however, broke the pattern. [1]

The pre-election period

While it was impossible to know whether this would translate into actual votes, the engagement data consistently showed Péter Magyar to be the undisputed winner of the campaign. He ranked first on virtually every leaderboard, typically outpacing Viktor Orbán by a factor of two to four despite Orbán posting twice as often. Greater posting volume simply did not pay off: Magyar generated a far stronger reaction from far more people. While both Tisza and Fidesz were clearly dominated by Magyar and Orbán respectively, the same pattern held in the broader contest between the two parties as well. Tisza politicians’ posts attracted significantly more interactions overall, even though the governing party’s politicians posted far more often. TikTok was the one platform where Orbán and the Fidesz politicians managed to keep pace with their rivals, though it should be noted that many Tisza TikTok accounts were only created later in the race. This phenomenon has been observed in other countries as well. [2]

Social media interactions also served as a real time window into which public events were capturing the national conversation. We tracked this through the lists of the ten most-engaged-with posts each week, which were dominated by Magyar’s content. It also became clear, however, that major political events were far from the only driver of engagement, and not even necessarily the biggest one. The top of the weekly lists was often occupied by posts with no political significance whatsoever: simply personal, charming videos, such as Magyar working out, making ice cream, or going about life like an ordinary citizen. Similarly, Orbán’s posts about traditional Easter water-sprinkling and cooking ham drew enormous reactions from users.

The impact of public events extended beyond individual posts. Follower counts and engagement metrics also shifted in response to events on the ground. For example, our weekly comparisons showed a notable spike in total interactions and new followers during the week of the Peace March (Fidesz) and the National March (Tisza) on March 15, the national holiday of the 1848 revolution in Hungary. These events visibly mobilized citizens on both sides of the political divide.

On the whole, Tisza politicians showed the fastest follower growth in our weekly tracking, which – despite their popularity – is not surprising given that they lack long political track records and mostly created their accounts on various platforms shortly before or during the campaign. What was striking, however, was that Fidesz politicians, who have been building their social media presence for years and came in with a more established, stable follower base, also saw notable growth spurts. We also observed that the data does not straightforwardly reflect popularity. János Lázár’s follower count grew relatively quickly, presumably in the wake of his racist, toilet-brush remarks at his Gyöngyös town hall event, which sparked widespread outrage. The data on follower growth, however, cannot tell us whether his audience grew because of new supporters, or because people who disagreed with him started following along to stay informed. 

Election day and the reversal

On election day, the prevailing trends shifted dramatically. Following its defeat, Fidesz retreated almost entirely from the online space. Not a single Fidesz politician, who had previously filled 85% of the top-20 most-posting list during the campaign, appeared on that list in the week after the election. Viktor Orbán’s total interactions, which had previously run at half or a quarter of Magyar’s figures, fell to a small fraction of them.

Tisza’s follower base grew dramatically in the week following the victory. During the week of the National March, their total follower count across the three platforms grew by approximately two hundred thousand, the highest single-week figure in our comparison period, where the average was around 110,000 new followers per week across the three platforms combined. In the week after the election, that number surged to 1.24 million. It seems as the reflection of the bandwagon effect (which Medián was already measuring a few days after the elections), however, people who were already Tisza and Magyar Péter voters may also have started following Tisza politicians after the win. During the monitoring, week over week, Tisza politicians gained on average two and a half times more followers in total than governing-party politicians.

Interestingly, Viktor Orbán’s Facebook follower count also grew considerably even after the defeat suggesting that his base was being mobilized online either by schadenfreude-driven curiosity or by a rallying energy around regrouping.

Closing remarks

While social media activity does not necessarily reflect actual voter intent, interactions reveal a great deal about what is on the political community’s mind and how specific events resonate with citizens. These three months have offered many lessons, but perhaps the most important is that social media has become a genuine political arena in Hungary. For that reason, regularly monitoring its various metrics can make a meaningful contribution to public discourse during election campaigns and beyond.

The analyses are available here.

[1] While this analysis monitored politicians from all participating parties, it places particular emphasis on Tisza and Fidesz, and on Péter Magyar and Viktor Orbán, since the election was fundamentally a contest between these two politicians and their parties. That said, the role and impact of the other parties during this period also merited attention.

[2] Geerlings, J. (2024, December 17). Analysis: German far-right party dominates on TikTok ahead of election. BBC Monitoring. https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/b0002ycg; AFP. (2024, June 21). How France's far-right is winning the TikTok battle. France 24. https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240621-how-france-s-far-right-is-winning-the-tiktok-battle