BUDAPEST: Hungarians were voting on Sunday (Apr 12) in an election that could end Prime Minister Viktor Orban's 16-year hold on power, rattle Russia and send shockwaves through right-wing circles across the West, including US President Donald Trump's White House.

Orban, a eurosceptic nationalist, has carved out a model of an "illiberal democracy" seen as a blueprint by Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement and its admirers in Europe.

But many Hungarians have grown weary of Orban, 62, after three years of economic stagnation and soaring living costs, along with reports of oligarchs close to the government amassing more wealth.

Opinion polls have shown Orban's Fidesz party trailing Peter Magyar's upstart centre-right opposition Tisza party by 7 to 9 percentage points, with Tisza at around 38 to 41 per cent.

RECORD TURNOUT

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Pollsters predicted a record voter turnout and data at 1300 GMT showed 66 per cent of voters had cast their votes, up from 52.75 per cent at the same time in the 2022 election. Television footage showed long queues outside some voting stations in Budapest.

Magyar, after casting his vote in Budapest, said Hungarians would write history as they choose "between East and West", and urged voters to report any irregularities.

"Election fraud is a very serious crime," he added.

Magyar expressed confidence about the outcome, saying the only question was whether Tisza won a simple majority or a two-thirds majority in the 199-seat parliament that would allow it to amend Hungary's constitution.

Orban, who cast his vote in the same Budapest district and swept the last four elections, told reporters: "There is a constitution in Hungary and it needs to be followed. The decision of the people needs to be respected."

Four years ago, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights said that the ballot had been run professionally but that an uneven playing field could have impacted the result.

CHANGE OR CONTINUITY?

Casting his vote for Tisza in the Hungarian capital, Mihaly Bacsi, 27, said: "We need an improvement in public mood, there is too much tension in many areas and the current government only fuels these sentiments."

Another voter, 83-year old Istvan Stofka, said he wanted Orban to continue his welfare and family policies and voted for Fidesz to stay, saying: "This (Fidesz) is the only party, since the change of regime, that has fulfilled their promises."

Orban said the vote was a choice between "war and peace". During campaigning, the government blanketed the country with signs warning that Tisza leader Magyar would drag Hungary into Russia's war with Ukraine, something he strongly denies.

The vote is being closely watched in Brussels, with many EU peers criticising Orban, who has kept close ties with Russia and is a Trump ally, over what they say is an erosion of Hungary's democratic rule, media freedom and minority rights.

An Orban defeat would deprive Russia of its closest ally in the EU, while for Ukraine it could mean the release of a 90-billion-euro (US$105 billion) EU loan vital for its war effort that the Hungarian leader has been blocking.

PUBLIC DISCONTENT

Orban has won public endorsements from the Trump administration - culminating in a visit to Budapest by Vice President JD Vance last week - as well as from the Kremlin and far-right leaders in Europe.

But his campaign has been shaken by media reports alleging his government colluded with Moscow. Orban, who denies any wrongdoing, says his goal is to protect Hungary's national identity and traditional Christian values within the EU and its security in a dangerous world.

Meanwhile, former Orban loyalist Magyar, 45, has tapped into discontent over alleged state corruption and falling living standards, with young voters particularly eager for change.

Despite Tisza's poll lead, analysts caution that the outcome remains uncertain, with many voters undecided, a redrawing of the electoral map in favour of Fidesz and a high proportion of ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring countries, who mostly support the ruling party.

If Tisza does win, unwinding the legal and institutional changes Orban has made may prove daunting for a new government if it has a simple majority in parliament.

Polling stations close at 7pm.

SAN FRANCISCO: AI industry insiders want workers to code smarter, think harder and lean into their humanity - but still dodge the question of how many jobs artificial intelligence will destroy.

The reassurance rang out across HumanX, a four-day conference drawing some 6,500 investors, entrepreneurs and tech executives, even as a blunt advertisement at the entrance set the tone: "Stop hiring humans."

On the main stage, May Habib, chief executive of an AI platform called Writer, told the audience that Fortune 500 bosses are having a "collective panic attack" on the subject.

The anxiety is well-founded. More and more companies are directly citing AI in announcing job cuts.

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High-profile examples are on the rise: Salesforce laid off 4,000 customer support workers, saying AI now handles 50 per cent of its work.

Block chief Jack Dorsey announced plans to cut the company's headcount nearly in half, citing "intelligence tools" that have fundamentally changed how companies operate.

Not all claims have gone uncontested - some economists say firms are pointing to AI to rationalise layoffs that are really about past overhiring or cost-cutting ahead of massive infrastructure investments.

OpenAI's Sam Altman has spoken of "AI-washing", and most speakers at the San Francisco event similarly dismissed the invocation of AI as a false pretext for job cuts - even as they freely predicted disruption was just around the corner.

AI is going to "transform every single company, every single job, every single way that we do work", said Matt Garman, chief executive of cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services.

"PRETTY UNSETTLING"

The debate remains heated. Two years ago, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang declared that the ultimate goal was to make it so "nobody has to programme" or code.

"We will look back on that as some of the worst career advice ever given," Andrew Ng, founder of training platform DeepLearning.AI, shot back on Tuesday.

In his view, coding is not an obsolete skill - AI has simply made it available to more people.

Another argument has taken hold in Silicon Valley: interpersonal skills will become more valuable than ever, with some voices going so far as to tout a humanities education as sound tech career preparation.

"As AI can do more of a job, the things that will distinguish and differentiate a given employee are going to be the human skills - critical thinking, communication, teamwork," said Greg Hart, chief executive of training platform Coursera, which has seen enrollment in its critical thinking courses triple over the past year.

Florian Douetteau, chief executive of Dataiku, a French company specialising in enterprise AI, agreed.

The real human added value, he told AFP, is the "capacity for judgment".

He described a world in which an AI agent works through the night, its human counterpart reviews the results in the morning, and then the agent resumes working autonomously during the lunch break.

But the entrepreneur nevertheless expressed unease.

"We are going to have a generation of people who will never have written anything from start to finish in their entire lives," he said. "That's pretty unsettling."

"MISTAKE WAS NOT PREPARING"

All of this advice risks ringing hollow for a generation already struggling to land a first job.

AI has automated entry-level tasks that once served as on-the-job training. Hiring of candidates with less than one year of experience fell 50 per cent between 2019 and 2024 among America's major tech companies, according to a study by investment fund SignalFire.

"We should be preparing for the loss of knowledge work jobs in a number of categories," warned former US vice president Al Gore.

As the week's lone genuinely dissenting voice, Gore called for a real action plan to map threatened jobs and prepare workers for career transitions, so as not to repeat the mistakes of the globalisation era.

"The mistake was not globalisation. The mistake was in not preparing for the consequences of globalisation," he said, drawing a parallel with the deindustrialisation that followed the offshoring wave of the 2000s.

"Maybe we don't want to talk about it," he added, "because it may slow down the enthusiasm for the technology."

SYDNEY: Cyclone Vaianu made landfall in New Zealand's North Island on Sunday (Apr 12), triggering floods, power outages and forcing hundreds to evacuate.

The cyclone crossed the coast near the Maketu Peninsula, packing destructive winds exceeding 130kmh, heavy rain and large swells, national weather provider MetService said, describing Vaianu as a "life-threatening" system.

Authorities have placed several regions under emergency declarations and issued "red" level wind warnings, which are reserved for only the most extreme weather events.

The cyclone was tracking towards the fringes of the North Island, sparing Auckland, the country's most populous city, from the worst conditions, said Emergency Management Minister Mark Mitchell. But stronger winds and swells were still expected after its afternoon landfall.

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"It’s moved more to the fringes and more to the east, which means that we haven't quite seen the intensity that we had prepared for or that we thought we were going to get hit with. So that is good news," Mitchell said.

"In terms of what we're going to expect over the next 12 hours is we are going to see a bit more of intensification, as the cyclone starts to come down and get closer."

The combination of the afternoon's high tide and large swells from the storm could trigger coastal inundation, Mitchell warned.

"The concerning time is really from 2pm this afternoon (4pm, Singapore time) onwards when we've got high tides combined with those big swells," he said.

The cyclone has forced hundreds of residents to evacuate and knocked out electricity to 5,000 homes, with power restored to roughly 2,000, he said.

Authorities in the coastal Whakatane District reported a significant amount of damage as Vaianu passed through, with mandatory evacuations carried out at 270 properties.

New Zealand Defence Force members and heavy equipment have also been deployed to assist with evacuations.

MetService said it had recorded 130kmh wind gusts in some areas, 24-hour rainfall totals of more than 100mm in the city of Whangarei and wave heights exceeding 6m.

Air New Zealand said in a statement that it had cancelled more than 90 turboprop flights, primarily out of regional North Island airports.

"Domestic jet and international services are operating as scheduled, although there are some delays due to the weather conditions," the airline said.

Fire and Emergency New Zealand said it responded to more than 100 calls for assistance relating to wind damage and surface flooding.

Conditions will ease as Vaianu works its way down the North Island before exiting on Sunday evening at Hawke's Bay, MetService said.

"Things do improve from tonight and tomorrow, but at the moment this is still a life-threatening weather system," said Heather Keats, MetService head of weather news.

Vaianu has conjured up memories of 2023's Cyclone Gabrielle, which killed 11 and displaced thousands in one of New Zealand's biggest natural disasters this century.