As predicted, Fidesz - the Hungarian Civic Union - have won the country's parliamentary elections.
Commenting on Fidesz's victory in the early hours of this morning, President Laszlo Solyom rightly noted that it was "unprecedented for a winning party to secure such a clear and broad-based mandate" and that their victory "signals fundamental shift in Hungarian politics". He's right.
While counting is still going on, the party have secured an outright first-round victory in 119 of 176 constituencies and appear to have secured more than half of the 152 proportional representation top-up seats. In power since 2002, the Socialists have been reduced to a rump of only 28 seats - two ahead of the ultra-nationalist Jobbik Party who secured 26 mandates. It was a painful night for the once-powerful Hungary Democratic Union, our party's allies in the European Parliament, who failed to clear the 5% electoral threshold for representation in the Országház.
The challenge for Fidesz in recent months has never been winning the election - but rather about articulating a convincing plan to pull Hungary out of its current malaise. Preferring platitudes and outlining only the vaguest of policies, this is something Prime Minister-elect Orbán and his party have sadly failed to do.
Fidesz inherit a shattered - even bankrupt - country.
As a result of his own electoral strategy, Viktor Orbán is likely to quickly find himself a victim of what can loosely described as an "expectations/delivery deficit".
At present, Hungary is bound by more than €20 billion of loan obligations to the European Union, World Bank and International Monetary Fund - loans conditionalised on the basis of the country committing to a austerity programme which has been implemented by outgoing Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai and his predecessor Ferenc Gyurcsany.
Publicly, Orbán has denounced the current loan agreement which limits the country's targeted deficit to 3.8% per annum, pledging to negotiate international agreement to increase this figure to 5.5%. Public spending programmes, Fidesz has promised the Hungarian public, will be ring fenced. Even if - and it is far from likely - Orbán obtains permission for such a deficit increase, economic realities will leave his government with no option other than to renege on their manifesto commitment not to implement savage public spending cuts. Their hands are tied.
Hungary's economic problem are matched only by the scale of social problems manifesting themselves in an increasingly ugly fashion on the streets of Budapest, Debrecen and Szeged.
There can be no better illustration of these social problems than the 17% vote for the Jobbik Movement for a Better Hungary yesterday. Jobbik, with their anti-Roma, anti-Semitic, xenophobia rhetoric, fits every possible stereotype of a far-right Eastern European party.
While weak in the liberal urban centres, Jobbik came from nowhere to secure a strong second-place finish in the largely impoverished rural areas along the country's eastern borders with Romania and the Ukraine.
Support for Jobbik, just as with support for all other far-right nationalist movements in Europe, has little to do with racism and far more to do with frustration with the political process and established politics. The party has successfully skewered both the ruling Socialists and Fidesz for perceived corruption, the vagaries of their public spending policies and their failure to offer solid commitments on job creation.
Jobbik are thugs. For starters, their leader Gábor Vona has already vowed to wear the sinister uniform of the outlawed Hungarian Guard to Parliament.
In the Országház Jobbik will care little for the niceties of parliamentary democracy, instead preferring to focus "salty" personal attacks on Orbán and his supporters. If, as expected, Orbán is forced to slash public spending and fails to speedily turn around the economy, we can only expect Jobbik's cancerous influence on the Hungarian political process to continue to grow.
Fidesz have been handed a powerful mandate for change and enter office with a burden of expectation entirely disproportionate to what they are likely or able to achieve. For now, Orbán’s challenge must be to manage those expectations.
Fidesz face an unhappy challenge in the months ahead for which I can only wish them the very best of luck.
