By Kristóf Szombati
Hungary’s April 2026 parliamentary election presents the first serious challenge to Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year rule. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, built on technocratic populism and a clean break from the discredited old opposition, leads Fidesz by roughly ten points among committed voters. This analysis examines the roots of Fidesz’s vulnerability, the dynamics of a campaign dominated by economic grievances and a series of scandals, and the scenarios that could yet determine the outcome.
Stakes and Setup
Hungary’s parliamentary election on 12 April 2026 may prove to be one of the most consequential in recent European political history. For the first time in sixteen years, Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz (Alliance of Young Democrats) faces a genuine challenger: a united, well-organized, and popular opposition that has consolidated the anti-Orbán vote into a single vehicle. The challenger is the Tisza (Respect and Freedom) party, led by the charismatic technocratic populist Péter Magyar, a Fidesz renegade who has deftly channeled popular discontent into a centrist movement built on the opposition of a corrupt oligarchic elite versus the good, hard-working people.
The stakes extend beyond Hungary. Orbán has positioned himself as one of the leaders of the ‘illiberal International’. His fall would inflict a symbolic blow on conservative authoritarian nationalists across Europe and beyond. The collapse of the PiS (Law and Justice) led government in Poland’s 2023 election was significant, but this contest is at least as consequential. For the EU, it would mean the departure of the bloc’s most Russia-friendly government. For the global sovereignist movement, it would mean the loss of an icon, ideologue, and financial backer.
The Roots of Fidesz’s Vulnerability
The fuel feeding oppositional sentiment is the economy. Hungary has experienced three years of stagnation. High inflation – only recently beginning to subside – nullified minimal wage increases and eroded purchasing power. Housing costs in dynamic urban centers have become unaffordable for young people and low earners. After a decade of enforced austerity public services (e.g. hospitals and the railways) are on the verge of collapsing. These material grievances form the bedrock of discontent.
Against this backdrop, the recent child protection scandal proved devastating. Revelations of systemic sexual abuse and physical violence against young delinquents in decaying, defunded juvenile correction facilities punctured Fidesz’s carefully curated image as protector of the innocent. For years, the party had deployed what might be called ‘penal populism’, directing popular anger against pedophiles and, through association, LGBTQ people portrayed as threats to children and society. The recent scandal, following an earlier pedophilia-related one in 2024 (which prompted the resignation of the president, Katalin Novak) turned this weapon against its wielder.
Corruption has also remained at the top of the agenda, largely thanks to the painstaking work of journalists at Direkt36 and Átlátszó, campaigners like Péter Juhász, and independent MP Ákos Hadházy, whose in-person reports from the construction of the Orbán family’s estate in Hatvanpuszta have kept oligarchic enrichment visible. The theme is not new, but in a stagnant economy, corruption charges hurt far more than during the boom years of 2013–2019.
The Campaign So Far
As we enter the final stretch, Tisza is clearly the frontrunner. The latest polls show the party leading Fidesz by about 10 points among committed voters, a deficit that most public survey series suggest is the strongest challenge the governing party has faced this close to a national election in over a decade and a half. The campaign has been dominated by themes favorable to the opposition. A caveat is necessary: Fidesz has consistently outperformed polls in recent elections, and polling has not proved reliable during past elections. But the trajectory is unmistakable: the campaign has not gone Fidesz’s way.
Magyar has adopted what political scientist Eszter Kováts calls “technocratic populism”: combining anti-establishment rhetoric with competence-based signaling. He promises a return to efficiency and normality – a program sold as systemic change – based on a populist logic that constructs a “we” versus “them” divide against corrupt elites, but fills it with ideologically eclectic, technocratic content rather than left or right ideology. The slogan “not right, not left, but Hungarian” captures this catch-all approach which has attracted supporters from the right, center and center-left. The program is deliberately thin on specifics. Magyar’s 12 Points emphasize civic liberties restoration, a return to Western alliances, and zero tolerance against all forms of corruption, but avoid the detailed policy commitments that could fracture his heterogeneous coalition and call into question his ‘fiscal prudency’.
What concrete pledges exist include: recovering the roughly €20 billion in EU funds withheld on rule-of-law grounds, committing to Euro adoption, making the presidency directly elected, introducing a two-term limit for the prime minister, and restoring the popular ‘KATA’ small business tax. On social policy, Magyar has strategically neutralized Fidesz’s welfare attacks by endorsing the government’s new flagship 3% mortgage program and guaranteeing the inflation-adjusted protection of pensions. At the same time, in a bid to reassure markets and investors, he has carefully avoided priced pledges on state investment into crumbling public services, apart from a significant annual 1.25 billion EUR infusion into state healthcare.
Fidesz has responded with two weapons. First, a spending spree: increased pensions, lifetime income tax relief for mothers with two or more children, and the 3% housing mortgage targeting the lower-middle class. Second, a fear campaign centered on the threat of Hungary drifting into the Ukraine war under an inexperienced leader. A recent video featuring Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel, Benjamin Netanyahu, Javier Milei and other sovereignist leaders portrays Orbán as the safe pair of hands in a turbulent world. The message: in a highly unstable geopolitical situation, choose experience over charisma.
This marks a notable shift. Gone is the image of the populist leader at one with his people, a symbolic mantle Magyar has claimed through his extensive foot campaigning across the countryside. Orbán, as sitting PM, cannot compete with Magyar’s touring, and is no longer at his best. Hence Fidesz’s investment in the “Digitális Polgári Körök” (Digital Civic Circles) for online mobilization. But here too, Tisza’s presence appears fresher and more energizing.
Fidesz has also suffered unforced errors. Transport minister János Lázár – one of the few politicians Fidesz can rely on as a ground campaigner – made degrading remarks about Roma citizens, saying that the country needs them to fulfil unwanted jobs such as cleaning toilets on trains. This was not the first time that Lázár has proven inept at concealing his racism. While perhaps not fatal on its own, the gaffe will be painful for Fidesz, as it has relied on Roma voters (who had positively responded to the party’s utility price freeze, public works program, and the creation of tens of thousands of industrial jobs in regions that had borne the brunt of post-socialist deindustrialization) in the past, particularly in economically depressed regions.
Why Tisza Is Different
What distinguishes Tisza from the failed 2022 united opposition? Three factors stand out.
First, leadership legitimacy. As analyst Zoltán Lakner observes, Magyar’s former insider status gives him credibility with disillusioned Fidesz voters who could never have crossed to the left-liberal Democratic Coalition or the liberal Momentum party. Magyar speaks the language of the right-wing political community, understands its reference points, and uses its symbols. He reclaimed the national flag rather than ceding it to Orbán. This made the crossing possible for voters whose disillusionment with Fidesz was real but who could not identify with the old opposition.
Second, organizational model. The 2022 opposition was a fragile coalition of parties with competing interests and no unified command structure. Its most electorally toxic figure, Ferenc Gyurcsány (about whom more below), remained a liability no actor could credibly remove. By contrast, Magyar paired centralized, professional communications with the horizontal “Tisza Islands”: a network of local activist groups. Many of these were led by small business -owners alienated by recent tax changes and by the drying up of EU development funds following the Commission’s rule-of-law decisions. These are not merely supporters but active citizens: they organize events, recruit candidates, and provide the ground game that other opposition parties have lacked.
Third, strategic clarity. Magyar explicitly refuses cooperation with the “old opposition,” turning what could be a liability into an asset: he cannot be tarred as restoring the pre-2010 order. This is not mere positioning. The Fidesz hegemony rested partly on the fact that government-critical voters found the opposition insufficiently credible, strong, or capable. Magyar’s rejection of the old players addressed this directly.
The Collapse of the Left
While Tisza’s rise dominates headlines, the fate of the “old opposition” has already been decided. The centrist and left-liberal parties that worked together (unsuccessfully) to unseat Fidesz in four previous elections have been abandoned by voters migrating to Tisza. The Democratic Coalition (which as the leading opposition party had polled above 10 percent and hoped to bring smaller parties under its command) has collapsed to around 1–3%. Although the party has built genuine grassroots structures that should, in theory, guarantee at least minimal representation, its chances of overcoming the 5% parliamentary threshold appear to be dwindling. This speaks to the gravity of the moment, with oppositional voters swinging in droves behind the dominant contender, Tisza, in a determined bid to end the Orbán era. This exodus has already forced the green LMP and liberal Momentum to fold, with both parties deciding not to take part in the election. The leadership of the once-formidable Socialists is on the brink of doing the same, as the party has dipped to 1 percent in the polls. Of the smaller parties, only the racist-extremist Our Homeland appears to have a realistic chance of parliamentary representation, while the satirical Two-Tailed Dog Party (polling around 3 percent) waits on a miracle.
This extinction of left-of-center progressivism as a political force brings Hungary further along a path already visible in Poland and other Central European countries, where the left has been confined to the political margins. The puzzle deepens when one considers that Fidesz’s social model has decimated public services (hospitals, schools, railways) while presiding over rampant inequality and frozen social mobility—conditions that should, in theory, provide fertile ground for leftist politics.
The explanation lies in what Gábor Scheiring and I have elsewhere called the “structural trap” of labor politics in Hungary. From 2006 onwards, Ferenc Gyurcsány’s left-liberal government pursued ‘neoliberal disembedding’: privatization, welfare retrenchment, and wage suppression to attract foreign direct investment. This generated working-class discontent. The second problem was that under Ferenc Gyurcsány’s leadership, the Socialist Party had followed Tony Blair’s example, adopting Third Way centrism and quietly abandoning trade unions. While these shortcomings were initially papered over by the promises of European accession, when the global economic crisis hit in 2008, voters abandoned the Socialists in droves.
Fidesz then rearticulated working-class grievances in nationalist terms, offering a minimum of social protection and a sense of belonging that the neoliberalized left never provided. Through “authoritarian re-embedding” – combining pre-emptive repression with authoritarian populism – Orbán foreclosed the organizational space for alternatives. By the time new forces might have emerged, the structural trap had closed.
The personal factor matters too. Instead of leaving politics, Ferenc Gyurcsány (a former nomenklatura member who amassed a smaller fortune during the ‘spontaneous privatization’ in the early 90s and crashed the economy as Prime Minister in the 2000s) and his wife Klára Dobrev (the daughter of a high-ranking communist official) left the Socialist Party and founded the Democratic Coalition. While the pair proved tenacious and invested considerable energy into the building of grassroots party structures, the power-couple overshadowed the left, bestowing a flair of betrayal on everything connected to left-wing politics.
Two Scenarios
A Tisza Victory. While speculation about a prospective government’s policies is necessarily tentative, Magyar’s selection of István Kapitány (former global Shell executive) and Anita Orbán (Cheniere Energy, Vodafone) to lead on economic and foreign policy suggests a technocratic team oriented toward reopening sectors where Fidesz shifted the balance toward Hungarian oligarchs (banking, telecoms) or Russian-Hungarian interests (energy) to Western capital.
Such a government would likely parade the return of EU funding as vindication while further pursuing a corporate-modernist economic model resembling the technocratic management of the pre-2010 era, with targeted state interventions to pacify critical social sectors. The setup resembles the Polish political scene, which I sketched as an option back in 2018. A Magyar government would thus be vulnerable to the critique of “selling the country to foreign capital”, a Fidesz counter-narrative waiting to be deployed.
Stability would be questionable. Not only because this social-economic model has already been resoundingly rejected by voters, but because Fidesz will hand over empty coffers and retains control of key political positions: president, prosecutor general, constitutional court. Even if Magyar wins, the state apparatus – packed with Fidesz loyalists over sixteen years – could quietly sabotage governance from Day 1. This institutional guerrilla warfare could paralyze reform efforts through procedural obstruction (e.g. prosecutorial discretion or constitutional court rulings), selective enforcement, and coordinated resistance across state apparatuses.
A Magyar government would nevertheless open the political field and restore civic freedoms, potentially reducing pressure on universities, cultural institutions and other sectors which have suffered under Fidesz’s policy of reserving funding for friendly institutions and actors ready to practice self-censorship. But centralized governance – a feature since the Gyurcsány years – is unlikely to be abandoned, even if the government decides to hand some powers and revenues back to subdued municipalities. Key ministers’ connections to the fossil industry, combined with the demise of green parties, suggest no significant departure from the extractivism and deregulation pursued by Fidesz. Based on Magyar’s public statements that a Tisza government would be “a government of tax cuts”, the substantial revitalization of decimated public services also remains questionable.
A Fidesz Victory would mean Hungary’s continued slide into authoritarianism, the persistence of economic arrangements within a stagnant economy, and the continuation of emigration that is creating significant labor-market bottlenecks. As Scheiring has shown in his book The Retreat of Liberal Democracy, Fidesz has not even attempted to build a developmental state. Its ‘accumulative state’ serves regime-connected capital accumulation rather than broad-based development.
A Hung parliament cannot be excluded. If neither camp obtains a clear majority, this will benefit Fidesz: Magyar needs decisive control to confront the deep state. A three-way parliament would also elevate Our Homeland, which has at times operated as a de facto Fidesz satellite, attacking the opposition while sparing the government from serious criticism. If Fidesz loses its majority, a coalition with Our Homeland becomes the true nightmare scenario: a far-right government in an EU member state, combining Orbán’s authoritarian machinery with openly racist and irredentist forces.
Wild Cards
Two external factors could reshape the race. First, Fidesz retains a superior ground game. Local mayors have previously been mobilized to deliver votes, and the party’s organizational machinery should not be underestimated. Second, geopolitical shocks could intervene. A dramatic move by Trump on Ukraine before April 12 could tilt sentiment toward Orbán’s ‘peace candidate’ positioning. Putin could provide covert support through provocations – whether airspace violations, cyber incidents, or diplomatic signaling – that Fidesz could portray as Ukrainian interference. Orbán has already positioned Ukraine as a threat, claiming Hungary is forced to pay for “Ukraine’s war” and that Zelenskyy is trying to influence the election. In the remaining nine weeks, Fidesz will surely intensify this narrative. The effectiveness of this fear campaign should not be underestimated: even if Orbán is less popular personally than he once was, geopolitical anxiety could drive voters back to perceived safety. Orbán does not need to be liked to win; he needs to be needed.
Conclusion
Neither outcome is palatable. A Tisza victory would likely mean politics shaped by competition between corporate globalist capitalism and national capitalism: more of what we have seen, with both models revealing their limitations. The absence of the left from parliament will allow three right-wing parties – Fidesz, Tisza, and Our Homeland – to dominate discourse on economic, social, cultural and foreign policy. This does not bode well for addressing vast inequalities in income, opportunity, and wealth, or the ecological crisis which is already depleting the country’s water reserves and hitting agricultural production.
Yet a clear Tisza victory remains preferable for Hungary’s long-term prospects. It would open civic and political space, and lift authoritarian pressure, allowing society to breathe more freely. For the European Union, it would remove the most obstructionist member state. And globally, it would deprive the illiberal International of a leader.
The outcome remains uncertain. But the first leg of this campaign has demonstrated something important: Fidesz’s hegemony, once seemingly unassailable, can be challenged. What happens in the final nine weeks will determine whether that challenge succeeds.
Kristóf Szombati is Editor for Political Economy and Inequalities at the Review of Democracy. His scholarly research focuses on right-wing movements, anti-Gypsyism, authoritarian state-making and the political economy of Hungarian illiberalism. He is the author of The Revolt of the Provinces: Anti-Gypsyism and Right-Wing Politics in Hungary.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
