Tisza won a landslide victory in the 2026 Hungarian elections, removing Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz from power after sixteen years in government. Aliz Tóth presents three insights from the election using data on party support at the settlement level.
The evening of 12 April 2026 marked the end of sixteen years of rule by Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party in Hungary. The new opposition party, Tisza, led by former Fidesz insider Péter Magyar, was handed a resounding victory, with Tisza winning 69% of seats in parliament, only four years after Orbán won the 2022 election with a supermajority.
Fidesz experienced a complete collapse across the country
How did this happen? First, election results at the settlement level show that Fidesz’s collapse happened everywhere across the country, from large cities to even smaller rural villages. Figure 1 maps the change in Fidesz’s vote share between the 2022 and 2026 elections at the settlement level.
Figure 1: Change in vote share for Fidesz in the 2022 and 2026 Hungarian elections
Source: Compiled by the author.
Fidesz has traditionally performed better outside of Budapest, in the east and northeast of the country. These are areas that tend to be more rural, less educated and more dependent on the state. In prior years, Fidesz has also often claimed the Budapest suburbs, which are more upwardly mobile, middle-class areas.
This year, Fidesz lost support everywhere compared to 2022, including in the eastern part of the country that show some of the starkest declines in vote share in Figure 1. In contrast, as Figure 2 shows, Tisza dominated Budapest and the larger cities, but its vote share also hovered around 40-50% across the country.
Figure 2: Vote share for Tisza in the 2026 Hungarian elections
Source: Compiled by the author.
Even when we break down this analysis by settlement type, we see near uniform Fidesz losses. Figure 3 shows Fidesz losses since 2022 and Tisza’s performance by settlement size.
Figure 3: Change in Fidesz support and support for Tisza at the 2026 Hungarian elections
Source: Compiled by the author.
Although Fidesz managed to retain its advantage in smaller settlements, these are also the places where Fidesz’s vote share compared to 2022 has eroded the most. Although Fidesz still had a strong performance in mid-size towns in 2022, by 2026 Tisza was able to win these places and retain the opposition’s advantage in larger cities.
There was strong mobilisation on both sides
In prior elections, Fidesz could rely on a strong turnout machine, particularly in rural areas, whereas opposition parties struggled to reach voters outside of larger cities. To counter this disadvantage, Tisza’s goal was to have three volunteers working in each polling station catchment area, which would have required 30,000 volunteers. According to the party’s statements, they had 50,000 volunteers mobilising throughout the campaign.
Figure 4: Change in voter turnout in the 2022 and 2026 Hungarian elections
Source: Compiled by the author.
It is not clear how this volunteer network was distributed across the country, but Tisza was clearly successful in motivating its voters to turn out. On election day, Hungary experienced a record turnout of 79%. Figure 4 shows that turnout surged across the country compared to 2022, rather than being concentrated in specific regions. This surge in turnout reflects the first truly competitive election since 2010, with both parties showing strong mobilisation.
Local economic conditions had little impact on the result
While Hungary’s struggling economy and underfunded public services have surely shifted many voters towards Tisza, we know less about how local economic conditions have shaped these shifts. This is a particularly interesting question as prior research has argued that Fidesz’s resilience was built on a system of economic dependence.
For example, research shows that Fidesz has drastically cut municipal funding and used EU funds to motivate mayors to politically cooperate with the government. At the same time, mayors’ discretionary power over local social programmes meant that many rural voters became tied to the state for jobs and income. If Fidesz’s resilience depended on these patronage networks, we may expect to see more moderate losses in places with higher levels of dependence.
However, Figure 5 once again shows striking uniformity in Fidesz’s losses in vote share, irrespective of local economic conditions. Fidesz’s vote share decline hovers around 16-18% across local unemployment, income tax base per capita and university graduate share quintiles.
Figure 5: Vote share for Fidesz by local economic quintile
Source: Compiled by the author.
The results also show that Fidesz saw more moderate losses in places with the highest share of over-65s, one of its traditional support groups, while its decline in vote share compared to 2022 was somewhat lower in places with the highest share of prestigious jobs and lowest share of substandard housing, likely because these settlements tend to be larger cities where Fidesz already had lower support.
Overall, this implies either that Fidesz’s political control of more economically-dependent areas has been overstated or that abysmal economic growth and the drying up of EU development funds – imposed as a result of Hungary’s rule of law violations – have made it much more difficult for Fidesz to sustain these patronage networks.
If the latter is true, Fidesz’s decline fits neatly with the collapse of other hegemonic party regimes which were unseated not by democratic aspirations, but rather by economic recessions that had eroded the regime’s patronage networks of poorer voters and the middle class’s confidence in the government’s management of the economy.
Taken together, this provides evidence of a broad rejection of sixteen years of Fidesz government in Hungary. Although Tisza should be given credit for emerging as a credible challenger within a few years of its establishment, these results also imply that the opposition’s victory does not necessarily lie in cleverly and deliberately stitching together a necessary winning coalition.
Rather, it is more likely that voters across the country have been angry about a stagnating economy, high inflation, a dysfunctional health care system and a government riddled with scandals and corruption.
To many, this will bring to mind Labour’s win in the United Kingdom in 2024. Just like Labour, Tisza will have to govern a country that has nearly two decades of underinvestment in public services, an ageing population and a struggling economy.
They have a broad mandate to bring change, to forge closer relations with the EU and to fix democracy. If they succeed, much like in the UK, they could forestall a resurgence of the far right. Whatever happens now, one thing is certain: Hungary’s newly energised electorate will be watching closely.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
Image credit: Blue Corner Studio / Shutterstock.com
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