By Bálint Madlovics and Bálint Magyar
Sixteen years after Viktor Orbán transformed Hungary into what authors describe as a “mafia state,” his regime was defeated through elections. In the first part of their two-part analysis, Bálint Madlovics and Bálint Magyar examine how a mass democratic movement was able to emerge within an authoritarian system designed precisely to prevent such a challenge, and why the Orbán regime ultimately proved unable to stop it.
Political scientists have long classified Hungary under Viktor Orbán as authoritarian. In our own work, we have developed the concept of patronal autocracy: a regime that constructs a dense network of dependencies, binding not only political actors but also wide segments of the economy and society to the ruling elite. Relying on the monopoly of political power achieved through seizing a supermajority, autonomous positions defended by formal institutions are systematically replaced by informal patron-client relations. The result is a single-pyramid hierarchy in which rival centers of power are marginalized, subjugated, or eliminated.
We have further described the Hungarian case as a subtype of patronal autocracy—a mafia state—in which this hierarchy takes on a clan-like structure. Organized as an “adopted political family,” the Orbán regime fused the concentration of power with personal enrichment, to which every nominally independent institution was subordinated. From the parliament to the tax office and prosecution,
the entire state machinery was run as a criminal organization under the direction of the autocrat, the chief patron—Orbán—who combined the roles of the Prime Minister and the “Godfather.”
Against this background, Orbán’s removal appears, at first glance, to follow a familiar democratic script. The ruling party, Fidesz, lost support amid inflation, economic stagnation, and mounting scandals. A new opposition force, Tisza, led by Péter Magyar, capitalized on this decline, mobilizing new segments of the electorate—especially younger voters—through more effective campaigning than its predecessors. While Fidesz focused on consolidating its core base, Tisza expanded the electorate. The outcome was record turnout and the government’s defeat in the April 12 election, after which Orbán readily conceded.
By a cursory look, the story resembles not an autocracy but the logic of a competitive political marketplace: governments lose support and are replaced by more popular challengers in peaceful contest.
Does Tisza’s victory invalidate the structural interpretation of the Orbán regime? Was it never an autocracy, but merely a dominant party system awaiting a credible challenger? Such an interpretation would be a mistake.
Magyar’s victory was not the normal operation of the system—it was the anomaly. That is why it took sixteen years to happen.
The mafia state stood defenseless in the face of a democratic breakthrough through elections. This is what demands explanation: why the Hungarian autocracy failed to defend itself, and what sets it apart from other patronal systems operating similar mafia states—such as Russia—that have so far repelled internal democratic challenges.
Our central argument is that the regime missed its window of response, allowing a mass movement to take shape. It did attempt to deploy anti-democratic measures, but these proved ineffective or constrained, in part by Hungary’s EU membership. In the end, the system lacked the coercive capacity to carry out open repression against a mobilized society and thereby secure its hold on power.
The Hungarian case offers lessons about the fragility of autocratic systems, while a careful reading of Magyar’s strategy may suggest possibilities for opposition movements elsewhere—provided it is understood within the specific environment in which it emerged.
Opposition mass movement in an autocracy—how is it possible?
In post-Soviet autocracies, opposition movements are suppressed before they can reach mass scale.
This is done through three main mechanisms: the general constriction of political space, targeted harassment of viable challengers, and the cultivation of a domesticated “opposition” that simulates competition without posing a real threat.
In Russia, candidates have been excluded from elections on administrative grounds, party formation tightly regulated, and most media brought under state control, denying opposition figures access to a national audience. Alexei Navalny’s movement was systematically dismantled through arrests, politically motivated charges, the labeling of his organizations as “extremist,” and the destruction of his regional network. Boris Nemtsov faced similar pressures in his later years, including restricted demonstrations and sustained administrative harassment. At the same time, critical activists and journalists have been imprisoned or killed, while regime-loyal “opposition” parties have been allowed to operate. Together, these mechanisms have prevented the Russian opposition from crossing the threshold of mass mobilization, as it has encountered constraints and state intervention at every stage of its development.
In the Orbán regime, all three instruments were present. Its level of coercion did not reach the intensity seen in Russia, but it did not need to: until 2022, the domination of the media landscape, the unilateral rewriting of electoral rules, selective investigations and fines by the State Audit Office (ÁSZ) against challengers, as well as the emergence of fake parties and the marginalization and “domestication” of more deeply embedded opposition parties, were more than sufficient to ensure the uninterrupted reproduction of power.
However, autocratic consolidation is dynamic: it is a continuously recalibrated equilibrium in which the degree of repression must adapt to emerging challenges and risks in order to preserve the monopoly on power.
After 2024, this equilibrium began to break down, as the Hungarian regime was unable to expand its toolkit of repression as quickly as the opposition challenge was growing.
Considering the narrowing of political space, the regime’s most consequential failure lays in its inability to fully control the online media sphere. While it rapidly consolidated traditional media—state broadcasters, major private outlets, and regional press—by the early 2010s, channeling vast public and oligarchic resources into a pro-government media empire, it never succeeded in closing off the digital space. Although significant funds were also invested in online propaganda, independent platforms remained accessible, allowing an alternative public sphere to emerge. Influencers, YouTube channels such as Partizán, and major independent news portals like Telex, 444, Válasz Online and Klubrádió reached wide audiences with critical reporting and investigative content. Only in 2025 did the regime seriously consider cutting off all independent funding sources for media citing sovereignty concerns, but this step was ultimately postponed until after the election.
At the same time, latent social and financial resources still existed outside the regime’s control. Local entrepreneurs, for instance, had been incorporated into the system during the years of EU-funded growth, benefiting as the oligarchs’ subcontractors in a corrupt version of “trickle-down.” After EU funds were effectively cut off in 2022, however, this pattern reversed: as the ruling family continued to concentrate resources, those lower in the hierarchy were left with diminishing returns. This shift—from trickle-down to “trickle-up”—generated discontent among people with available capital that could be redirected into political mobilization.
Magyar was able to channel the resources of emerging discontent into a grassroots network, the “Tisza Islands,” comprising more than 2,000 local groups and over 100,000 participants who mobilized for a nationwide campaign of regime change.
Micro-donations were collected on a monthly basis from over 33,000 people who purchased a virtual “Regime Changer’s Card.” In short, despite more than a decade of systemic closure, the Orbán regime had not reached Russia’s level of autocratic consolidation: sociological foundations for mass mobilization were present, lying dormant until a credible figure emerged around whom civil actors could coalesce in a largely spontaneous, bottom-up process.
The emerging movement faced targeted state harassment, but it was limited and ultimately came too late. Initially, the regime pursued a strategy of deliberate silence, treating Magyar as politically irrelevant—Orbán himself avoided mentioning him for an extended period. When this approach failed, it reverted to tactics that had worked against the old opposition: character assassination (“chernyi piar,” or black PR, in Russian political parlance). State-aligned media amplified allegations from his former wife, Fidesz’s resigned justice minister, including claims of domestic abuse, while also accusing Magyar of corruption and insider trading related to his previous positions.
Yet these efforts failed to gain traction. Within four months of his emergence, Tisza became the largest opposition force in the June 2024 European Parliament elections, marking a decisive—and, for the regime, surprising—breakthrough.
It was at this stage that the authorities moved to discredit both Magyar and his party. Following an altercation at a nightclub—during which Magyar threw a man’s phone into the Danube after being filmed—the regime sought to turn the incident into a criminal case that could have, in the longer run, justified his exclusion from the election. The police deployed disproportionate resources, even sending divers to retrieve the device, while Fidesz officials called for a full investigation. What ultimately prevented escalation was Magyar’s position as a Member of the European Parliament, which granted him immunity that the EP refused to waive. In other words, Hungary’s EU membership—and Magyar’s tactical use of it—shielded him from a Russian-style show trial.
Meanwhile, the Hungarian secret service attempted to penetrate the Tisza from within. This was revealed by whistleblower Captain Bence Szabó, who disclosed before the election that Magyar’s former girlfriend had received substantial payments to record him, with the material later disseminated by pro-government media.
According to Szabó, efforts were also made to breach the party’s IT systems in order to sabotage them at a critical moment. Indeed, user data from Tisza’s mobile application was accessed and leaked, with personal information of around 200,000 supporters published on a searchable map by propaganda outlets. The operation did not only aim at intimidating citizens seeking to support the opposition discreetly, but it also demonstrated that the regime was willing to use intelligence tools against its political rivals. Investigative journalists found that the Hungarian Constitutional Protection Office (AH) wiretapped the phone conversations of a businessman linked to Tisza, monitoring discussions related to his efforts to build networks for the party.
These instruments went beyond the logic of democratic competition, and even beyond the notion of an “uneven playing field.” Categories such as “free but unfair elections” are generally applicable to cases where state propaganda or patronage disproportionately favors the incumbent government over the opposition. In contrast,
in Hungary, the regime exercised autocratic control over the coercive institutions of the state and deployed them for political purposes against democratic competitors.
It was in such a hostile institutional environment that Magyar had to ensure that his movement could neither be blocked nor undermined from within. He did not found the Tisza party: it was a politically inactive organization he took over, thereby avoiding administrative obstruction that could have delayed a new party’s registration beyond the EP elections just three months away in 2024.
Lacking an established base of loyalists, he introduced open, democratic primaries to select candidates—while conducting background checks to guard against infiltration by regime-linked actors. At the same time, he developed a strategy to counter official harassment by consistently turning to the public through social media, preemptively exposing anticipated leaks resulting from coordination between the secret services and pro-government media. In some cases, this neutralized attacks altogether—for example, when the release of a secretly recorded adult tape was announced but ultimately never carried out—but more broadly, it discredited such operations in advance, framing them as politically motivated and anti-democratic.
In the face of an aggressive propaganda machine that misrepresented and amplified every bad sentence, Tisza had to maintain a high degree of discipline in the communication of its members. During the elections, given the widespread practice of voter intimidation and vote-buying in favor of Fidesz—especially in smaller settlements—a network of observers had to be organized to monitor and deter such abuses.
This, on the one hand, illustrates just how undemocratic the electoral environment was in which the Tisza Party had to be built. On the other hand,
effective adaptation to an autocracy would not have been possible without the relatively free online media sphere, as well as Tisza’s nationwide network and financial resources—nor if the regime had acted in time, before the movement was able to achieve mass scale.
Orbán’s circle underestimated Magyar, a miscalculation rooted in their experience with the previous opposition. Similarly to Russia, Hungarian opposition parties had been weakened and corrupted, integrated as functional elements within the regime’s politico-criminal ecosystem. Repeated electoral victories against these actors fostered a false sense of security: Magyar was dismissed as just another short-lived “messiah,” following figures such as Gordon Bajnai, László Botka, Gergely Karácsony, and Péter Márki-Zay, all of whom ultimately failed to mount a sustained challenge.
The domestication of the old opposition worked in Magyar’s favor in another sense as well: it created a vacuum in the political representation of social discontent—one he was able to fill. By domesticating its own opposition, the mafia state inadvertently created the conditions for Magyar to advance a coherent alternative: a regime change involving the removal of both Orbán and his opposition.
(This is the first part of the article. The second part examines why transfer of power happened peacefully, and what lessons oppositions in other authoritarian regimes can draw from the success of Tisza.)
Bálint Madlovics is a political scientist, economist, and Junior Visiting Researcher at the CEU DI in Budapest. He has taught at several Hungarian and international universities since 2022 and is the co-author, with Bálint Magyar, of major works on post-communist regimes, including The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes and A Concise Field Guide to Post-Communist Regimes.
Bálint Magyar is a sociologist, former liberal politician, and Senior Visiting Researcher at the CEU DI in Budapest. A former anti-communist dissident, Member of Parliament, and twice Minister of Education of Hungary (1996-1998, 2002-2006), he has published extensively on post-communist regimes since 2013, including books like Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary and several influential co-authored volumes with Bálint Madlovics, like The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes.
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.
