"I am confident," Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has been in power for 12 years, said on Sunday morning after casting his ballot outside his polling station in the Zugliget district of Budapest.
"It is a strange election ... because of the war [in Ukraine] we have to deal with issues of war and peace," he said to journalists.
Orbán is seeking a fifth term in office, and the fourth in a row. Opinion polls recently put his right-wing nationalist Fidesz party a few percentage points ahead of the alliance of six opposition parties.
This is the first time such an alliance has been formed. The alliance of left, green, liberal and right-wing conservative parties wants to optimize its chances of defeating Orbán.
The leading candidate of the opposition alliance, the independent conservative Péter Márki-Zay, called on citizens to vote out the Orbán government in a Facebook video on Sunday morning.
"Let's vote for a better world, a happy Hungary," he said outside his home in the small south-eastern Hungarian town of Hódmezővásárhely, where he has been mayor since 2018.
He himself would go to the polls after attending Mann, the practising Catholic declared.
