Hungarian PM Orbán said it was “a dream come true” to give a speech at the Republican Party’s conference, CPAC in Dallas on the 4th of August. Some of his statements are recurrent topics in his speeches. In this article, Lakmusz looked into those claims that can be clearly confirmed or disproved with data.

We examined Orbán’s following statements:

“During the great migration crisis of 2015, 400,000 illegal migrants arrived at our borders. (…) After we built the wall, we managed to reduce illegal migration to zero. There have already been 160,000 illegal border crossing attempts this year.”

In October 2015, when “migration pressure” was at its greatest at Hungary’s southern borders, a total of 433,000 illegal border crossings were registered. A total of 1,822,000 illegal border crossings took place during the entire year. This number gradually decreased in the years following the refugee crisis (a total of 125,000 cases were registered in 12 months in 2020)

but it was never possible to reduce illegal migration to zero.

We covered this topic before, here.The misleading statement that illegal migration “immediately dropped to almost zero” after the construction of the border fence was also mentioned in Tucker Carlson’s video about Hungary, also fact-checked by Lakmusz.

The construction on the Hungarian-Serbian border section was completed on September 17, 2015, while on the much longer Hungarian-Croatian section it was completed on October 21. And although, according to data provided by Frontex, the number of illegal border crossings on the Western Balkan route has indeed decreased significantly, even in December 2015, nearly 100,000 illegal border crossings were registered:

In January 2015: 12927

In September 2015: 141207

In October 2015: 205703

In November 2015: 163879

In December 2015: 97,200

All we know about this year’s number of 160,000 mentioned by Orbán, is that in 2022, according to police statistics, a total of 136,161 illegal border crossing attempts took place until the 31st week of the year (beginning of August). These data do not show the number of people attempted to cross the border illegally, but the total number of attempts – including those who may have tried to cross the border more than once. See more in our related article.

"Russia's attack on Ukraine has so far forced nearly one million people to flee to Hungary. Currently, more than ten thousand refugees arrive every day. Most of these refugees go on to other European countries, but the arrival of a million people in a country of ten million, well, that's a lot.”

Since the outbreak of the war, a total of 3.7 million refugees from Ukraine have registered for temporary protection in various EU member states according to the latest statistics of the European Council.

Based on the data available until the 2nd of August, out of the neighbouring countries of Ukraine, most people registered for protection in Poland (1,250,000 people), while Slovakia registered almost 87,000 people and Romania almost 51,000 people.

In Hungary, 27,657 Ukrainian citizens registered for temporary protection.

There were a lot more applications in the Czech Republic (over 400,000), Germany (670,000) and Italy (almost 150,000).

According to the data provided by the Hungarian Police, roughly 5-7 thousand people entered the country every day at the Hungarian-Ukrainian border in July. A separate graph shows the number of people entering the country at the Hungarian-Romanian border section declaring that they came from Ukraine (on average, we can see a daily average of 6-8 thousand people here as well) - thus, it is true that more than ten thousand people arrived from the war-torn neighbouring country every day.

However, the number of 1 million highlighted by the Prime Minister does not mean that this many Ukrainian refugees actually were in Hungary at the same time.

There are no exact data on how many of those who arrive continue their journey immediately, and in which direction. On the other hand, the fact that less than 30,000 people applied for temporary protection in Hungary since the outbreak of the war suggests that Hungary is not the primary destination of those coming from Ukraine.

"During the long history of Hungary, there has never been a referendum where such a huge majority of people said “no” to something - in this case to gender!"

On the 3rd of April, a so-called “child protection referendum” was held in Hungary, on the same day as the parliamentary elections. The referendum was eventually unsuccessful, so government communication sources began to talk about the fact that never had so many people voted "in one direction" on a referendum in Hungary.

Minister of Justice Judit Varga, among others, put it this way when she posted on Facebook: in her opinion, a direct message was sent to Europe and the world: "Hungarian parents have their exclusive right to raise their children." However, as we have written before, Judit Varga was not right: there had already been a referendum in Hungary in which more voters voted "in one direction" before.

It was the first national referendum in Hungary on November 26, 1989, where “Yes” answers overwhelmingly won in three among the four questions. For the second question, 4,088,383 people, for the third question, 4,101,413 people, while for the fourth question, 4,054,977 people said “Yes”.

In this year's referendum, however, the majority of valid and "one-way" votes came on question 2, saying “Do you support the promotion of gender reassignment treatments for minors?” and 3,721,934 people voted against it.

Orbán has already extended the statement when he claimed that never before have so many people said “No” to a referendum question, and this is true: since the majority of validly registered votes in the 1989 referendum were “Yes”. However, it is worth looking at the numbers as a whole.

A total of 8,215,304 people were eligible to vote in this year's referendum.

Overall, there are more people who did not vote, invalidly voted, or voted “Yes” than those who voted “No” on all four questions.

Due to the high number of non-voters and invalid voters, the entire referendum became invalid. In other words, although it has never happened before that as many people voted “No” on the questions asked in a referendum as they did this year, based on the will of the majority, the country overall did not say “No” to gender.

"In the last 10 years, Ladies and Gentlemen, the number of marriages has doubled and the number of abortions has halved in Hungary."

According to the data provided by KSH (Central Statistics Office) 35,812 marriages took place in 2011, and 72,030 in 2021, this number has indeed doubled. The number of marries stood at this level last time in 1986 (72,434 marriages); since then, a continuous, slow decrease can be observed until the lowest point in 2010 (35,520 marriages).

According to another KSH statistics, there were 38,443 abortions in 2011, and 21,907 in 2021, i.e. the number of abortions decreased by about 43 percent in 10 years.

At the same time, since 1990, the number of abortions in Hungary has been decreasing continuously on a roughly similar scale. While there were 90,394 abortions in 1990, there were only 56,404 in 2001. Data shows that the number of abortions is decreasing at roughly the same rate every year, regardless of who governs the country.

5. How about a nice walk in the evening?

"Hungary is the safest country in Europe. By the way, Budapest is one of the very few European capitals where you can walk safely even at night.”

According to Numbeo's constantly updated survey, in which more than 120,000 people have so far evaluated various countries of the world in terms of crime and sense of security experienced in cities, Hungary indeed performs at the top of the field. When asked how safe they feel when walking home alone in the middle of the night, 61.9 percent of respondents considered Hungary to be safe. However, our neighbors such as Slovenia (78.4) and Croatia (77.4) are ahead of us by more than 10 percentage points.

According to Eurostat's 2020 statistics, the number of robberies reported to the police in Hungary is really low compared to other EU member states (6.2 violations per 100,000 people), Slovakia and Albania are the only ones ahead of us in this field - where this ratio is lower.

Only violence against women shows a relatively higher value in an international comparison: more than 40% of all intentional homicides in Hungary are directed against women.

Written by: Nóra Diószegi-Horváth, Szilvi Német
Translation: Hanna Solti
Cover photo: Brandon Bell / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP

Lakmusz.hu is the first dedicated fact-checking website in Hungary. It is part of the Hungarian Digital Media Observatory, an anti-disinformation initiative co-funded by the European Commission.

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