Details
Long-time autocrat Viktor Orbán has suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of challenger Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party. Tisza won by a landslide, winning 53 percent of the vote while Orbán’s Fidesz party got less than 39 percent. Due to the peculiarities of the Hungarian electoral system, which amplifies victories, Magyar’s party now has over 70 percent of seats in parliament — 141 out of 199 — a constitutional majority that will allow the party to overturn anti-democratic Fidesz laws.
Dalma Vatai is a sociologist and journalist in Budapest. She writes about Hungarian politics and women's issues.
The resounding victory was keenly felt in the streets. The mood in Budapest at Tisza’s election watch party was downright euphoric: thousands of young people celebrated into the early hours of the morning throughout the city, creating a carnival-like atmosphere. Singing and chants rang out from crowded trains and buses. People danced in the streets, on the roofs of bus stops, and on balconies, shouting “Happy regime change!” to one another. Many cried and said they still couldn’t believe they were a part of this historic moment in Hungary.
Orbán Defeated by Democracy
It is indeed a historic moment: the longest-reigning Hungarian prime minister has been ousted from power through an election with the highest voter turnout ever recorded (almost 80%). Not just that, but Magyar’s Tisza Party won the largest number of votes any party has ever won in Hungarian democratic elections.
Government sympathizers were understandably shocked: for months, they were misled by the governing party through spurious polls that predicted another substantial Fidesz victory. But Tisza voters were similarly stunned, first by Tisza’s overwhelming victory, and then by Orbán’s short and graceful concession speech. Many believed that the governing party would rig or delay elections, or simply refuse to hand over power. After all, notable anti-government commentators, journalists, political analysts, and opposition politicians had insisted for years that the Orbán regime could not be removed from power through democratic elections.
Clearly, this was wrong. And progressives have a lot to learn from these misinterpretations of the Orbán-regime, and ultimately from soon-to-be prime minister Péter Magyar’s politics as well.
Starting out with the fact that the Orbán regime could in fact be defeated democratically — it’s just that former opposition parties could not rise to the challenge. What has Magyar done differently? On the surface, there were significant similarities between Tisza’s and previous opposition parties’ campaigns: the focus on infrastructure, healthcare, and education as well as endemic corruption, violations of the rule of law, and the hostile relationship with the EU were all emphasized by both. To many, then, it seems that it was largely Magyar’s charisma and populist rhetoric that won people over rather than anything intrinsic to his politics. This is comfortable to accept for former leading opposition figures because it means that they failed not because of anything they did wrong, but rather because of their unwillingness to be populist, which they have worn as a badge of honour.
Tisza’s Innovations
However, Magyar’s innovations run deeper than his charisma or populist rhetoric. Covering Tisza’s rallies – of which there were many all across the country –, I have spoken to many supporters, young and old, men and women, urban and rural. While many of them had previously voted for opposition parties (meaning that they were already anti-government), some said they had not been convinced by Orbán’s previous liberal-centrist challengers. Many people emphasized that these former anti-Orbán forces were weak, fragmented, timid, and that they had not seemed set on victory.
Anti-Orbánist coalitions throughout the 2010s and early 2020s emphasized typical liberal talking points: minority rights (such as LGBTQ rights), women’s rights, anti-corruption, the rule of law, and Europe as a beacon of democracy and enlightenment. But in doing so, they fundamentally accepted the terms of the debate set by Fidesz. Fidesz argued that it represented the “national interest” and its enemies foreign interests, which these parties did not contest. Rather, they let Fidesz monopolize the nation-discourse while they emphasized the advantages of EU membership, among other things. Opposition parties were thus always on the defensive since Fidesz had a ready-made line of attack: if you support foreign influences, you are a traitor to this nation. This is where many people’s impression of these parties as weak and timid might stem from: they were never able to control the political agenda because they were busy reacting to the government’s accusations.
“Tisza sought to involve huge swaths of society in politics and in the campaign, meeting them where they lived, listening to them in order to understand their problems, and supporting them in building local communities.”
Péter Magyar pursued a different strategy. As a former Orbán loyalist and ex-husband of Varga Judit, the former minister of justice, he was more familiar with Fidesz’s strategic approach, which helped him avoid falling into political traps set by Fidesz. For example, unlike previous liberal challengers, Magyar did not broadly thematize the ban of the Pride parade that the Orbán-regime hinted at but ended up backing out of; Magyar merely responded by saying that the right to assembly would be restored by his government. Instead, he sought to prioritize society-wide, majoritarian issues such as frozen EU funds, healthcare, education, infrastructure, poverty, and the mass exodus of young people from the country. His campaign primarily focused on bread-and-butter issues, portraying the Orbán-friendly oligarchy as leeching off ordinary Hungarians. His real innovation, though, was refusing the anti-national, pro-Western position that previous anti-Orbánist forces had automatically assumed.
Instead, he placed great emphasis on national symbols, songs, Hungarian historical figures, and the Hungarian flag. This is important because in doing so, he chose to speak the language of the majority, no doubt partly due his socialization within Fidesz circles. Previous anti-Orbánist parties generally spoke the language of internationally mobile, well-educated middle-class progressives who identified strongly with the values of liberal democracy and were able to reap the benefits of Hungary’s integration into the EU and the global world order. For the lower-middle-class and poor workers reeling from the vicissitudes of neoliberal capitalism and all that it had brought – instability, replaceability, and a heightened vulnerability to the international economy – the framework of the nation has remained meaningful and a source of stability. These are the people that Magyar, in contrast to former liberal challengers, was able to address.
In previous elections, young people were also exceedingly passive. Now, at the street celebrations in Budapest, thousands of young people had the red-white-and-green national flag painted on their cheeks, waved Hungarian flags, and sang Hungarian folk songs. For them, Magyar had basically made the Hungarian flag trendy again. Rather than the archaic symbol of a bygone era forced on them by parents and teachers, or the exclusive symbol of the governing party, it has become something tangible and alive to many young people, associated with regime change and the will of the people.
It is not the specific details of the Tisza Party’s promises that had attracted people, however. Magyar has remained vague about the specific direction Tisza’s proposals would take beyond channelling resources into public services, nor has he indicated a departure from the Orbán-regime’s labour politics, made famous by the implementation of the so-called “slave law” in 2018. In fact, neither Fidesz nor Tisza met with the Hungarian Federation of Trade Unions to discuss the latter’s 10 demands to better the situation of workers in the country.
An Ideological Balancing Act
Many in the international arena — from Barack Obama to Ursula von der Leyen — have already heaped praise on Hungary and the Hungarian people for ousting an autocrat. And while their declarations of abstract, universal values such as “democracy”, “people power”, and “resistance” are certainly flattering, we have to go deeper to understand the phenomenon of Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party’s historic win. Only by identifying context-specific causes and effects can we attempt to clarify the lessons that progressive forces might learn from this election.
The key to Magyar’s victory was not just his relentless focus on majoritarian issues and broadly resonant rhetoric, but also the broad, grassroots social movement he created. The Tisza Szigetek (“Tisza Islands”, local activist groups supporting the Tisza Party) drew an unprecedented number of new people into politics, from middle-aged women through local businesspeople to young people. The Tisza Islands took part in organizing Magyar’s rallies across the entire country: the party leader has almost continuously toured the country for the better part of the last two years, organizing street rallies everywhere from small towns to bigger cities long considered to be Fidesz strongholds. According to journalist and political analyst Szabolcs Dull, Magyar’s tour of the country was highly successful as the electoral map shows a link between Magyar’s rallies in a given locality and the likelihood that they voted for Tisza there. Most of Tisza’s new parliamentary delegates are also political novices who might have earned people’s sympathy precisely because they come from outside the political elite, which many voters had completely lost trust in. And although it is clear that Magyar himself did not come from outside this elite, he was able to convince the majority of voters that he had left that political class to join the fight for the interests of ordinary Hungarians.
“A technocratic-conservative leader who seeks to rebuild parts of the welfare state and restore at least some democratic norms is a step forward compared to the violently anti-poor, autocratic and hostile Orbán and his oligarchs.”
Whether Magyar is able to do this remains to be seen – with a constitutional majority, the Tisza government will wield as much power as Fidesz had throughout the past 16 years. This will be necessary to tackle the Orbán-regime’s complete overhaul of the country’s democratic apparatus. Magyar and his Tisza government have been described as “Fidesz lite” because alongside their stronger focus on the social wage and their aim to strengthen democracy and EU ties, they intend to follow Fidesz in refusing both the EU’s migration pact and to fast-track Ukraine’s accession to the Union. Equally, they pledged to keep mothers’ tax exemptions and state-supported family loans which mainly target well-off families, promises that go against Tisza’s insistence on tackling poverty and raising universal benefits. The balancing act will be difficult, especially since Tisza lacks a unifying political ideology, but let there be no question about it: a technocratic-conservative leader who seeks to rebuild parts of the welfare state and restore at least some democratic norms is a step forward compared to the violently anti-poor, autocratic and hostile Orbán and his oligarchs.
The lessons that can be drawn from Magyar’s victory are summarized well in a new interview given by Márton Békés, Fidesz’s long-standing chief ideologue. In the surprisingly candid interview, he says that Fidesz had become estranged from the majority of Hungarians, and that focusing on international ties with Trump and Putin as much as the party had over bread-and-butter issues was a mistake. Békés argues, “It is the duty of the political right to understand public opinion and to present a platform that society can accept again.” This is precisely what Tisza was able to do – understand public opinion and methodically build a convincing platform based on it –, while Fidesz failed for the first time in 16 years. This is by no means a revolutionary recipe, but one that still bears repeating: if progressive parties want to build a strong movement and party, they have to back majoritarian causes, get people involved in politics, and speak the language of those they are seeking to convince rather than merely presenting themselves as morally and intellectually superior.
