PM Orbán Wins 2021 “Facebook Likes Championship”

Hungary Today 2022.01.06.

News portal Telex followed the likes and interactions Hungarian politicians received last year and made a list of those who got the most reactions on social media.

Telex had also been sharing the results of the “likes championship” weekly during 2021.

The Prime Minister won the year with a relatively comfortable lead, and by posting far fewer posts than his main opponent in this race, Jobbik president Péter Jakab (704 and 1,095 posts respectively). Behind them, there is a huge gap followed by a close “fight” for third place between Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony and Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó, with the former’s lead at the end of the day being four thousandths.

Fact

Telex says about their method that the data was provided by Crowdtangle, Facebook’s statistics platform, and reflects events between January 1st and December 31, 2021. Interactions mean the sum of likes, comments, and shares on posts on politicians’ official pages, rounded to the nearest 10,000. This number is not the same as what a Facebook page administrator sees under Insights, because that statistic counts a lot of other things as interactions as well.

Here is Telex‘s list with the top 15 names (the first column shows the yearly interactions, the second one the number of likes/posts):

PM Viktor Orbán (Fidesz) (Interactions: 12,280,000; Likes/post: 17,400)
Péter Jakab (Jobbik president) (11,130,000; 10,200)
Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony (Párbeszéd) ( 7,560,000; 6,800)
Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó (Fidesz) (7,530,000; 3,900)
Justice Minister Judit Varga (Fidesz) (7,020,000; 7,400)
Ákos Hadházy (Independent MP) (6,370,000; 4,900)
Tímea Szabó (Párbeszéd) (5,160,000; 4,800)
Klára Dobrev (DK MEP) (4,530,000; 4,000)
Ferenc Gyurcsány (DK president) (4,300,000; 8,100)
Máté Kocsis (Fidesz group leader) (3,680,000; 6,900)
Dóra Dúró (Mi Hazánk) (3,450,000; 2,100)
István Ujhelyi (MSZP MEP) (3,290,000; 1,800)
Dániel Z. Kárpát (Jobbik MP) (3,000,000; 1,300)
Barna Pál Zsigmond (Fidesz) (2,940,000; 1,500)
András Fekete-Győr (Momentum’s former president) (2,610,000; 2,500)

What might come as a surprise is that the oppositions’ joint candidate for prime minister, Péter Márki-Zay, did not make it to the list. Even though when Márki-Zay won the opposition’s primary elections, Telex partly contributed it to his communication skills, his constant online presence, including his heavy use of Facebook, and his appearance on popular political channels on YouTube. However, as Telex now notes, Márki-Zay’s page was blocked for a couple of months, during which he used a different channel – if one adds up the interactions of the two, one gets a result of around 3.8 million, which would be enough for 10th place on the above list.

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Telex says that Orbán’s strength shows on the likes/posts column, which is that whatever he posts, it certainly gets 5-10,000 likes almost regardless of the content. The Prime Minister also has the most followers, and second place goes to Péter Jakab in this regard as well.

Featured image: Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (on the right) on a telephone conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Carmelite Monastery in Carmel on April 29, 2021. On the left sits the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Péter Szijjártó. Photo by Vivien Cher Benkő/Prime Minister’s Press Office/MTI