Viktor Orban's Fidesz government in Hungary stands accused of mass voter intimidation in a film released on Thursday ahead of 12 April parliamentary elections, in which the ruling party is trailing in the opinion polls.

The Price of the Vote documentary film, which aired on Thursday evening at a Budapest cinema and on YouTube, presents the results of a six-month investigation by independent filmmakers and reporters.

In the film, voters, mayors, former election officials and a police officer claim that large sums of money and even illegal drugs are being offered to pressure people to vote for Fidesz.

Fifty-three of Hungary's 106 individual constituencies and up to 600,000 voters are targeted, the film alleges – potentially 10% of the expected turnout of six million.

After 16 years of Fidesz rule under Orban, most recent polls indicate that the party is trailing Peter Magyar's centre-right opposition party Tisza by at least that margin.

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All the constituencies involved are rural or small-town communities, increasingly dominated by Fidesz since 2010.

The film portrays a rural Hungary made up of a patchwork of poor villages, home especially to the country's large Roma minority.

Local mayors exercise an iron grip over daily lives, providing work, firewood, transport to polling stations and, in one case, even access to medicine, in exchange for the "correct" vote on election day, according to claims made in the film.

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The sheer extent of the practice, and the similarity of the stories in villages tens or hundreds of kilometres apart led the filmmakers to conclude that the action is planned by senior Fidesz officials.

"In the beginning, we thought the key piece of this process is vote-buying. But then we realised that the money is just the icing on the cake. The key word here is dependency and vulnerability," Aron Timar, one of the filmmakers, told the BBC.

"The money comes in on a pretty serious scale, and with quite a large entourage," says one interviewee, a serving police officer whose face and voice is disguised, in the documentary.

"I didn't become a police officer to serve a corrupt system. To help cover things up."

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For voters offered money, the sum mentioned is usually 50-60,000 forints (£110-£133) per vote - a significant sum in communities where child benefit is only £26-£43 per child per month.

But the filmmakers emphasise that what they describe is far more than a vote-buying operation.

At previous elections, some of the villages cited in the film have recorded votes of 80%-100% for Fidesz.

Practices alleged by characters in the film include the provision of cars and minibuses on election day, voters pretending to be illiterate in order to obtain a "companion" in the voting booth, photographs of voting slips to prove a vote for Fidesz, and chain voting.

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Independent media, and the opposition Tisza party, allege Russian involvement in support of Orban, who is seen as Vladimir Putin's closest partner in the European Union.

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