By Bálint Madlovics and Bálint Magyar
Viktor Orbán’s removal from power did not occur because his regime suddenly became democratic: it happened because he lacked the capacity to deploy violence against already mobilized masses in the face of a devastating electoral defeat. In the second part of their two-part analysis, Bálint Madlovics and Bálint Magyar explain why the mafia state ultimately proved unable to escalate coercion further—and what democratic opposition movements elsewhere may learn from the Hungarian case.
Read the first part of the analysis here.
Constraints on escalating coercion
If authoritarian regimes fail to prevent mass mobilization, they may resort to violent repression. In Belarus, following the stolen 2020 election, the regime of Alexander Lukashenko responded to nationwide protests with a massive crackdown involving excessive force, arbitrary arrests, torture, and intimidation, effectively dismantling the protest movement and driving much of the opposition into exile. In Iran, during the 2025-2026 uprising, the authorities went even further, deploying lethal force on a large scale, killing thousands, arresting tens of thousands, imposing internet blackouts, and carrying out executions to terrorize society into submission, treating the protests as an existential threat to regime survival.
Such a scenario may seem unthinkable in an EU member state. Yet
the Orbán regime itself created the legal framework that makes it possible to use open coercion against the public.
In 2015, citing mass migration, the government declared a state of crisis, followed in March 2020 by a state of emergency justified by the COVID-19 pandemic and, in 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war—all of which remained in force. Under this emergency, governance by decree replaced normal parliamentary constraints.
More importantly, the regime felt necessary to further expand this power by the ninth amendment to the Fundamental Law, taking effect in late 2022, allowing the government to declare a state of emergency even in response to nonviolent protests “aiming at altering the constitutional order” and to deploy the military domestically.
Beyond these formal provisions, the pre-election deployment of state agencies also signaled a willingness to escalate. In addition to the police and intelligence services, institutions such as the National Tax and Customs Administration (NAV), the Counter Terrorism Center (TEK), and the Hungarian Defense Forces (MH) became parts of the Fidesz campaign staff.
As the regime framed Tisza as a foreign-backed operation orchestrated from Brussels and Ukraine, authorities acted accordingly: in March, they stopped a convoy linked to a Ukrainian bank and seized cash and gold shipments, alleging they were intended as funding for Tisza. The government also claimed that Ukraine was preparing to attack Hungary; to reinforce this narrative, troops of MH were deployed to guard critical energy infrastructure.
In addition, several violent incidents occurred that bore the hallmarks of Russian-backed false-flag operations. In January 2025, bomb threats forced the evacuation of more than 200 schools, with technical traces linked to Russian infrastructure, including Yandex-based accounts. In June, a Greek Catholic church in Transcarpathia, a region with a significant Hungarian minority in Ukraine, was set on fire; while the government blamed Ukrainian nationalists, the evidence suggested prior knowledge—or even complicity—on the Hungarian side. Then, on Easter 2026, just weeks before the election, explosives were discovered near the Balkan Stream gas pipeline in Serbia. The government again pointed to Ukraine, but experts described the incident as a likely provocation aligned with Russian intelligence interests. Reporting by the Washington Post further indicated Russian involvement, noting the presence of political technologists in Hungary and GRU-linked advice on potential acts of violence, including a staged assassination attempt against Orbán.
While this was ultimately prevented by the above-described strategy of preemptive exposition, the very possibility of such actions, the involvement of Russian assistance, and the regime’s previous conduct all indicated that those in power had no moral reservations about employing Russian-style methods in the Hungarian elections.
These developments significantly nuance the narrative of peaceful transfer of power. The regime demonstrated both the capacity and the willingness to deploy state security and even military assets in the fight against its political opponents. Under the state of emergency, the legal tools existed to go further—to postpone the elections or annul the results on the grounds of foreign interference, following the Romanian precedent.
That it did not do so reflects not a commitment to democratic norms, but a calculation of limits: the regime lacked the capacity to suppress the mass protests that such steps would have triggered. Unlike regimes in Belarus or Iran, it could not rely on the unconditional loyalty of its security forces.
Signs of this constraint had already emerged earlier. In 2025, the Pride parade was banned and hundreds of thousands of people marched the streets of Budapest nevertheless, the police proved unwilling to enforce the ban through violent confrontation with the masses. Before the election, Captain Bence Szabó and Captain Szilveszter Pálinkás defected, signaling that even within the security apparatus there were limits to compliance; Pálinkás publicly claimed that 90% of personnel favored political change. The recruitment of former Chief of Defense Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi into Tisza was but an early indicator of discontent among the armed forces.
The lack of loyalty can be explained by the fact that, under the Orbán regime, the security forces were not among the primary beneficiaries of the mafia state. The government attempted to secure their allegiance through ad hoc rewards—most notably, granting police, intelligence, and military personnel the equivalent of six months’ salary just before the election. Yet unlike the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or Russia’s siloviki, they were not integrated into a system of sustained enrichment. Without a continuous flow of corrupt bounty, they had no direct financial stake in the regime’s survival—and thus little incentive to defend it against a mobilized public. A more plausible outcome was that they would side with the protesters, as parts of the armed forces had during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
This dynamic—unconstrained by moral limits but structurally restricted—ultimately left the Godfather with no viable option but to relinquish power. The option for his clan, the adopted political family, in turn, is exit.
Reports suggest that spoliation has begun in state ministries and oligarchs are moving vast assets abroad, amounting to tens of billions of forints. Orbán’s daughter and son-in-law—who became billionaires through state contracts—moved to the United States even before the election. Should legal accountability follow, Orbán himself may follow them, facing a similar path to that of other corrupt, ousted leaders: Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, Nikola Gruevski in North Macedonia, or Vladimir Plahotniuc in Moldova. In any case,
Magyar’s landslide victory, resulting in a constitutional supermajority, allows him to carry out a regime change maintaining legal continuity, in which the main actors of the mafia state are going to be targets of criminal procedures. This effectively destroys the moral basis of Fidesz,
making it nearly impossible to reposition itself as a credible opposition party.
From de-democratization import—to re-democratization export?
After 2010, Hungary became the EU’s only patronal autocracy, adopting post-Soviet methods of power for the construction of a single-pyramid network, suppression of opposition, and the accumulation of illicit private wealth. Yet
what was once an import of de-democratization—largely shaped by Russian models—may now be giving way to an export of re-democratization.
Hungary’s democratic breakthrough is expected by many to offer a potential template for opposition forces in other authoritarian contexts, from Georgia and Serbia to Turkey. However, to draw meaningful lessons, it is essential to understand the specific combination of factors that made this outcome possible.
The first factor is the regime’s limited capacity, which defines the structural space in which mass mobilization can emerge.
The second is the convergence of timing and leadership. As we argued in our pre-election analysis in Foreign Affairs, in early 2024 the regime was facing both economic and moral crisis, generating huge regime-changing demand that Magyar was able to meet with supply. The fact that the EP elections were only months away provided a critical opening, allowing Tisza to rapidly establish itself as the dominant opposition actor and sideline the domesticated parties. Combined with Magyar’s personal attributes—charisma, resilience, and tactical skill—this enabled him to build a mass movement and withstand increasingly aggressive attacks from the regime.
These factors are context-specific and are not necessarily present in more consolidated authoritarian regimes. There was, however, a third condition that carries broader strategic relevance:
Magyar adopted a regime critique rather than a government-critique paradigm. As a former insider, he understood that he was confronting not a flawed administration but a mafia state. He campaigned and structured his movement, accordingly, rejected all ties with the co-opted opposition, and consistently made clear that his conflict with the system was not about simply policy differences but about its legitimacy.
In established democracies, focusing criticism on the government rather than the system is often taken as a sign of institutional consolidation, implying that democracy is accepted by all major players as the “only game in town.” But when facing an autocracy, the opposite holds: the opposition must signal that the existing system is not the only game available—and that it must be replaced, not merely reformed.
The regime-critique paradigm rests on four elements:
1. targeting the autocratic system itself rather than the government of the day;
2. focusing not on the stated ideological aims of policies, but on how they serve the concentration of power and the accumulation of corrupt wealth;
3. mobilizing society along a new dividing line—not left versus right, but citizens seeking democratic accountability versus an elite that plunders its own nation;
4. encouraging civil actors to align with the opposition against a ruling group that has dismantled democratic institutions.
This framework was first articulated by one of the present authors in 2014 and later developed in our 2020 and 2022 analyses of post-communist regimes. Magyar not only followed this approach but became the first major opposition figure in Hungary to consistently adopt the “mafia state” terminology we introduced.
This became the language of the regime change: by linking everyday problems—from failing healthcare and education to deteriorating infrastructure—to the system’s mafia-like operation, Magyar reframed public discourse.
By January 2026, a majority of Tisza supporters identified the system in these terms. This regime-focused language enabled Magyar to build a broad electoral coalition spanning liberals, the left, and the right, while undermining the perception of inevitability that had long sustained Orbán’s autocracy.
Ahead of the April 12 election, Orbán openly outlined a program of further autocratic consolidation. Following the Russian model, he pledged a crackdown on so-called foreign agents and even cast doubt on Hungary’s continued place in the EU. This trajectory pointed toward the logical culmination of the past sixteen years: the “Belarusization” of Hungary.
In response, counter-slogans emerged—“Ruszkik haza!” (“Russians, go home!”, the slogan of the Revolution of 1956) and “Most vagy soha!” (“Now or never!”, echoing the spirit of the Revolution of 1848 crushed by the Russian Empire)—framing the election as a decisive historical moment. Magyar made clear that this was a last chance, for the foreseeable future, to redirect Hungary toward a Western path. That this effort succeeded, and that Orbán was unable to carry through with autocratic consolidation, does not mean Hungary had been a democracy all along. Rather, it demonstrates that
in an autocracy not yet fully consolidated, a democratic force that accurately diagnoses its environment and acts strategically can achieve regime change—against the odds.
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.
