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Hungary’s right-wing, nationalist Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, has been in power since 2010 – and for the first time, there is a chance he could be ousted in the upcoming elections. Given Orbán’s tendency to veto EU sanctions on Russia as well as his close support of Donald Trump, these elections will be decisive both for Hungarian and European politics. What are the main issues being brought up in the campaign, and just how would Orbán’s challenger, Péter Magyar – previously a member of the Fidesz inner circle – tackle the housing crisis, corruption, and the crumbling healthcare system in Hungary?
Forgotten workers and Fidesz
Dalma Vatai is a sociologist and journalist in Budapest. She writes about Hungarian politics and women's issues.
This April, Hungarians are preparing for what may be a historic election. Since Péter Magyar stepped up to become the head of the Tisza Party two years ago, it has felt like the country is embroiled in a non-stop campaign. For the first time in 16 years, Hungarian politics now has two dominant political forces facing off. Independent polls show Tisza in the lead, but they could very well lose to Fidesz, which has begun distributing election handouts such as a so-called 13th and even a 14th monthly pension, and introduced a lifetime tax exemption for mothers of two or more children. This is all part of the governing party’s long-standing strategy to offer cash incentives to voters in the weeks leading up to elections, to the detriment of long-term economic goals. Such measures do not meaningfully address the glaring inequalities built into the welfare system, nor do they tackle the significant poverty amongst the elderly, but they may be enough to improve general morale ahead of the election, potentially resulting in more votes for Fidesz.
Both the Hungarian and the international press like to emphasize that Orbán’s Fidesz party is massively corrupt; has dismantled the rule of law; and has characterized the LGBTQIA+ community, Roma people, and migrants as ‘the enemy’. These observations are certainly true. More rarely discussed, however, is the way the Orbán-regime treats the biggest clearly identifiable group of people in the country: workers. Perhaps nothing attests to Hungarian workers’ situation better than a recent scandal concerning a Samsung battery plant with long-standing pollution and worker safety issues. It was recently revealed that the company had most likely been poisoning workers at this plant with heavy metal gases, and that the government has known about it since 2023.
The findings caused widespread outrage and have since become a recurrent theme in the election campaign. They are, however, merely the newest example of Orbán’s tried-and-true strategy of prioritizing both state and corporate interests while leaving the average Hungarian to fend for themselves. Fidesz has accommodated German and, to a lesser extent, East Asian corporations’ need to relocate standardized segments of production to low-wage economies like Hungary, particularly in the car and electronic vehicle (EV) industries. Suppressing wages and increasing workers’ vulnerability to the whims of industry interests has been an economic priority. Orbán’s so-called ‘work-based society’ has even remodelled the welfare system so that it gives more to those with already decent wages, and leaves those behind who need state subsidies to live with dignity.
Fidesz’s campaign
For his part, Péter Magyar has successfully thematized the catastrophic state of healthcare, education, and public transport, asserting that the state in its current form is dysfunctional. However, Orbán’s campaign has been boosted by recent endorsements from Donald Trump, which has given him legitimacy as an internationally-recognised ‘strong leader’, while positioning him as someone with a clear vision. Given the highly uncertain state of the current world order, this is something which should not be dismissed. Orbán also relies on Trump for his central campaign message: that EU leaders, Ukraine, and their ally, Péter Magyar, are decidedly on the side of war, while Trump and Orbán are the only ones truly fighting for peace, and therefore the only ones able to guarantee the well-being and economic security of Hungarian families.
Such messages, disturbingly amplified in a recent AI campaign video depicting a Hungarian dad being shot in the head, have been complemented by a slew of welfare-adjacent measures. Aside from the handouts targeting families and pensioners, Orbán has also been trying to woo young people – as well as workers more broadly – through various government-assisted loans. So far, at least, measures targeting young people seem to be ineffective as according to the latest poll, Tisza is overwhelmingly in the lead amongst those below 30 while Fidesz remains crushingly unpopular in this age group.
Péter Magyar: “For a functional and humane Hungary”
In stark contrast to Fidesz’s war-focused campaign, the Tisza Party’s programme is entitled “For a functional and humane Hungary”. Importantly, Péter Magyar has chosen successful, well-known corporate higher-ups as new additions to the party, including István Kapitány, former global vice president of Shell, now the party’s economic development and energy expert, as well as Anita Orbán (no relation to Viktor Orbán), former senior advisor to Cheniere and former energy security envoy under Fidesz, now Tisza’s head of foreign affairs. While Orbán’s critique that Magyar is in cahoots with corporate capital is clearly hypocritical, these candidate choices are telling. The party proclaims, “there’s no left, no right, only Hungarian”, evincing a management-oriented attitude to politics according to which no ideological choices are necessary for governance, only competence and the right kind of expert knowledge. Such a technocratic attitude couples with the party portraying itself as embodying “the will of the people”, terms not dissimilar to those of Orbán. Given this, Eszter Kováts, a political scientist and researcher at the University of Vienna has referred to Tisza’s politics as technocratic populism.
While in recent years, technocratic governments across the region have spectacularly failed to deliver the changes they promised – in a language very similar to Magyar’s – it is understandable that such rhetoric would resonate with Hungarians. After all, the country has been run into the ground by a corrupt, incompetent, and inhumane system. After sixteen years of Orbán deepening inequalities, antagonizing racial and sexual minorities, and intimidating political naysayers, Hungarians have had enough of fearmongering and divisiveness. Functional and humane governance sounds promising, and Magyar, contrary to Orbán’s fear-based electoral message, has bet on hope. But beyond his word, what evidence do we have that large-scale changes are underway?
Tisza’s programme: Welfare, the economy, and the rule of law
Magyar has definitely promised a lot: guaranteeing the independence of the judiciary, doing away with the myriad sectoral taxes that, under Fidesz, have created an overly bureaucratic and unpredictable economic environment, and, most significantly, investing in health care, education, and the welfare system. According to these promises, Tisza would undertake important tasks in terms of the welfare state: doubling universal family allowance – which has remained the same since 2008 – and universal childcare, increasing pensions relative to inflation and wage growth going forward, and, most famously, introducing a 1% wealth tax on those with more than 1 billion forints in assets (approx. €2,6 million).
As Eszter Kováts highlighted recently, a similar proposal has been made by Germany’s Die Linke, but no other parties have expressed support for it. Within Germany, the policy remains a decidedly, perhaps even radically left-wing bid. Tisza, however, clearly identifies as “ideology-free” and therefore not left-wing. This comparison exposes how the very labels “left-wing” and “right-wing” are contextually embedded and may mean very different things depending on the country. In Hungary, the attractiveness of such a proposal might be partially due to the association between the top 1% of earners and the Fidesz oligarchy. Even more generally, however, there are high levels of support for redistribution in the country. Magyar says that alongside the 1% wealth tax, the financial resources necessary for their programme would be generated by bringing home EU funds that were frozen due to rule-of-law violations and corruption, as well as reducing spending on propaganda.
Tisza’s budget would also include building public housing units – long overdue and deeply necessary in a country where young people and workers face a serious housing crisis, especially in Budapest. Nonetheless, its programme would not sufficiently address the precarious situation of workers. While demolishing the Fidesz oligarchy would be welcome, Tisza’s solution – that market-based mechanisms would have to be rebuilt in areas where Fidesz-friendly contractors have been favoured – does not confront the ways in which workers have been exposed to the whims of capital. Much like workers’ rights, Roma people, LGBTQIA+ people and women also remain underrepresented in the party programme, although equal opportunities for women and Roma people appear as a goal. As some noted, Tisza does not see women solely as mothers, which is already a step-up from Fidesz’s narrative.
Tisza: Fidesz after Fidesz?
But Tisza would not depart significantly from many of Fidesz’s signature economic measures, such as massive debt constructions that channel resources towards well-off families. In essence, Magyar proposes this: “We would keep everything Fidesz has done well, do away with all the bad things, and do more good things”. But the state budget has limits, and choices will have to be made. Mothers’ tax exemptions may not be feasible alongside the proposed lower taxes for those earning below the median wage. And while Magyar promises to strengthen NATO and EU ties, he also emphasizes national sovereignty and opposes sending aid to Ukraine: a problematic stance in the eyes of EU leaders, and one which mirrors Fidesz’s attitude. Yet Tisza’s caution with regards to domestically touchy subjects appears to be rational. Fidesz’s massive propaganda machine has been known to destroy a politician, often based on nothing more than an ill-considered half-sentence.
Still, Tisza will have to choose whether to become a Fidesz 2.0 or forge a new path. The latter requires that its position on relevant matters be formulated independently of Fidesz’s priorities. It is not surprising, though, that Tisza has been accused by some of being a Fidesz 2.0: Magyar himself is the ex-husband of former minister of justice Judit Varga, formerly one of the most prominent woman politicians of Fidesz. Péter Magyar decided to leave the Fidesz circle when Varga resigned in connection with a presidential pardon for a man enabling child sexual abuse, and spoke up, saying, “I do not want to be part of a system for a minute longer where the real culprits hide behind women's skirts. (…) For a long time, I believed in an ideal, in a national, sovereign, civic Hungary. However, (…) I have come to realise all this is indeed just a political product”. With Anita Orbán also having previous ties to Fidesz, concerns abound over whether the regime change Tisza promises would indeed cause a rupture with Fidesz rule.
Tisza, national symbols, and Fidesz’s mistakes
Importantly though, Magyar’s emphasis on national sovereignty and his conscious strategy of reclaiming national symbols, for long an exclusive rhetorical field of Fidesz, differentiates him from liberal politicians. The latter’s cosmopolitan, pro-Western stance had alienated them from millions of Hungarians for whom international mobility and ‘Westernness’ appeared distant and suspicious. This was not because the average Hungarian is violently opposed to supposedly ‘Western values’ such as LGBTQIA+ rights or the rule of law, but because, historically, the promise of ‘catching up with the West’ had not delivered for the large majority of Hungarians.
Indeed, Magyar’s ability to speak to the concerns of the average person and successfully build a broad voter base is something anti-Orbánist voices have been awaiting for sixteen years. Additionally, Hungarians’ extremely low level of trust in politicians has helped Magyar’s anti-political, managerial stance seem attractive. Fidesz, while outwardly confident, is aware of the new predicament. As a result, it appears unsure of itself and has been amassing mistakes.
From minister of construction and transportation János Lázár’s statement that “the Roma should do jobs Hungarians don’t want to do”, such as cleaning train toilets, through the Samsung battery plant scandal, to revelations of child abuse at state-run institutions, it is clearer than ever that the Orbán regime is not protecting the most vulnerable. This has been the case for a long time, but absent a significant, competent political force to offer an alternative, many have continued to vote for Orbán. Now, a regime change could be underway that would not only shake Hungary itself, but would also shape the EU’s future trajectory. Nevertheless, without a coherent ideology, Tisza is a mish-mash of various promises intended to attract the largest number of voters possible. While many of these aim to better the lives of those betrayed by basic state services, in order to overcome the highly unequal and exploitative ‘work-based society’ Fidesz has developed over the previous sixteen years, more – much more – will be needed.
