ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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On 12 April 2003, a referendum was held in Hungary on the country’s accession to the European Union. With a turnout of 45.6 percent, 83.8 percent of the voters approved EU accession, which then took place in the context of the EU’s eastward enlargement in 2004.

Prehistory

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc after 1989, Hungary began to orient itself towards Western Europe. In 1993, the representatives of the EU member states at the EU summit in Copenhagen officially invited the former Eastern bloc states to join the EU, provided the necessary conditions were met. The EU provided funds and aid programmes to help the former Eastern Bloc countries align their economic systems with EU standards. In March 1998, accession negotiations began with six countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Cyprus). By December 2002, these negotiations had been concluded and, in April 2003, accession treaties were signed with the candidate countries, including Hungary.

All the major parties in Hungary were in favour of holding a referendum on EU membership. The result of the referendum should be binding. The legal requirements for holding referendums were precisely defined by a constitutional reform in Hungary in 1997. Thus, in a referendum, Parliament had to determine beforehand whether this should be binding or only consultative in nature. For a referendum to be valid, a voter turnout of at least 50 percent was necessary. If this was not achieved, the referendum could still be valid if at least 25% of the eligible voters had voted “yes”. Before 1997, a strict 50% minimum voter turnout was necessary.

The main proponents of EU membership included all four parties represented in Parliament (the governing Socialists and the Alliance of Free Democrats, as well as the opposition parties Fidesz and the Hungarian Democratic Forum). However, the two conservative parties, in particular Fidesz under Viktor Orbán, were noticeably more Eurosceptic than the governing parties. Trade unions and business associations also supported membership. The Communist Hungarian Workers’ Party revised its initial “no” to EU membership, arguing that the EU could better be reformed from within. The far-right Hungarian Truth and Life Party spoke out clearly against EU membership. Surveys showed that voters’ main concerns were job security, price stability, levels of pensions and wages, etc. In part, the question of the loss of sovereignty was also raised.

Question of the referendum
The question on the ballot papers was:

The question was with Igen