Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party won a landslide victory in Hungary’s election on 12 April, ending 16 years of rule by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz. Zsófia Barta and Jan Rovny reflect on what the party’s victory means for Hungarian politics.
After 16 years of uninterrupted Fidesz rule under Viktor Orbán, Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party won a landslide victory with an estimated 53% of the vote. (Minor changes in the results are still possible as mail-in ballots and votes cast in embassies are still being counted).
The election brought a record turnout of 80% and handed more than two thirds of the parliamentary seats to Tisza. Fidesz received 38% of the vote and little over a quarter of the seats. The extreme-right Mi Hazánk also cleared the parliamentary threshold with 6% of the vote and won 6 seats. Although it had been feared that Fidesz might dispute unfavourable results, Viktor Orbán conceded defeat unreservedly early in the evening.
The fall of Fidesz
Two main factors contributed to the fall in Fidesz’s popularity and the rise of Tisza. The first is a series of scandals that profoundly undermined trust in the Fidesz government.
One string of interlinked scandals started in February 2024, when it came to light that the President of the Republic secretly pardoned a public servant who had been convicted of covering up abuses in a children’s home. News of the pardon triggered immense outrage and large demonstrations and dealt an important blow to the image of the government that had constantly used “child protection” as a pretext for PR-campaigns and legislation against homosexuals.
The pardoning scandal – which was followed by a steady stream of disturbing revelations about the state of the child protection system, including systematic practices of prostitution, physical and sexual abuses – led to the resignation of the President of the Republic and the Minister of Justice, who countersigned the pardon.
The latter was the ex-wife of Péter Magyar, who gave an incendiary interview to an opposition news outlet in the wake of the scandal and launched Tisza as his own party soon afterwards. Besides expressing resentment that formal signatories were made to take the fall for a decision made by others, Magyar also made references to corruption and the abuse of legal and administrative powers in the interview, and he soon published a secret recording of his ex-wife talking about such abuses in a widely known corruption case that is currently in court.
This, again, struck a raw nerve amongst the public, because the conspicuous enrichment of government-linked economic circles had produced an oligarchy whose flashy lifestyle generated a constant source of irritation, while the latest corruption scandal uncovered the disappearance of several billions of forints (hundreds of millions of euros) from the Hungarian National Bank.
To top it all off, a series of news stories revealed that the government had turned a blind eye to serious environmental and health misconduct in battery factories, which (as the flagships of the government’s economic strategy) were allowed to settle all over the country despite vocal local opposition.
A struggling economy
The scandals hit Hungarian public opinion at a moment when discontent had been brewing due to the exceptionally weak performance of the Hungarian economy during the Fidesz government’s last term – with inflation around double the EU average and growth practically zero.
This weak performance – the second major factor in Fidesz’s declining popularity – was the result of more than a decade of mistaken economic policies that left the country defenceless to a series of external shocks since 2020.
From 2010, successive Fidesz governments pursued aggressively expansionary policies – to create a so-called “high-pressure economy” where increasing demand calls to life new productive capacities and leads to the creation of an “indigenous capitalist class”. Although these policies initially helped to get the economy out of the post-financial-crisis slump, they were not accompanied by investment in human capital and innovation that could have put Hungary on a longer-term trajectory of growth.
This was not for the lack of funding: European grants flowing abundantly into the system in the 2010s were complemented by heavily subsidised loans – but the corrupt allocation of such funds undermined their potential to put the Hungarian economy on a more robust economic footing.
Meanwhile, little effort was made to reduce the heavy dependence of the Hungarian economy on the German economy and its auto industry, on the one hand, and on Russian energy, on the other hand, limiting the longer-term growth and modernisation prospects of the country. In the absence of economic upgrading, expansionary policies led to the deterioration of the trade balance, as well as to budgetary and inflationary pressures – leaving the country in a weak position by the time the shock of COVID-19, oil price rises and higher interest rates hit.
Combined with the current withholding of EU cohesion fund grants (a penalty for violating EU treaty obligations, particularly the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary), the ability of the Fidesz government to keep up the living standards of key constituencies significantly declined, while high inflation undermined the purchasing power of wages. A third of the population now lives in poverty.
Polarising foreign policy
On the foreign policy front, the choices of successive Fidesz governments were polarising rather than universally unpopular. While large sections of the population were dismayed at the increasingly hostile attitude of Orbán towards the EU, his arguments for getting into specific conflicts – to curb migration, to limit involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, to preserve EU funds for Hungary – had considerable traction among parts of the electorate.
Similarly, his attempts to reorient Hungarian foreign policy towards friendlier economic and political relations with Russia, China and Trump’s America have been divisive rather than universally condemned. That said, adherence to western Europe has been a strong point of consensus since the fall of the Iron Curtain, as has some degree of suspicion towards Russia.
The ratcheting up of conflict with the former (to the point of vetoing fundamental decisions like support for Ukraine and the triggering of the suspension of cohesion funds) and ever-more open deference to the latter (especially given the revelations that the Hungarian foreign minister was regularly reporting on EU-meetings to his foreign colleagues) was a risky strategy for the Fidesz government.
What can we expect from a Tisza government?
The winner, Tisza, is a relatively new actor on the scene. Launched in the wake of the pardoning scandal, the party secured almost a third of the votes in the European elections of June 2024 and garnered progressively growing support afterwards.
In the context of deep discontent, Tisza’s meteoric rise can be seen as the manifestation of the desire of many to oust Fidesz, but it is notable that Tisza is the first party in 16 years capable of mobilising large swathes of the population.
In fact, analysts have pointed out that the approximately 2.2-2.5 million votes that Fidesz is expected to win in the final tally would have been sufficient to eke out a win in earlier elections when turnout was much lower.
This success at mobilisation is partly attributable to the strategy of Magyar, who spent the last two years touring the country to signal his availability to voters, and partly to the catch-all character of the party that is yet to take clear stances on sensitive economic questions.
Given its historic mandate and more than two thirds of the seats, Tisza can now make constitutional changes. In the runup to the elections, Péter Magyar promised that they would restore the democratic system of checks and balances and that they would institute a two-term limit on the prime minister’s office.
At the same time, Magyar also clearly signalled that they will remove the current Fidesz-appointees from key offices that represent checks and balances, such as the presidents of the courts, the constitutional court, the audit office, the economic competition office and the media authority, as well as the attorney general and the president of the republic. He also promised to create an office tasked with clawing back wealth attained through corruption.
For the rest of the world, the most important implication of Tisza’s landslide victory is the reorientation of Hungary’s foreign policy, most importantly its relationship with the European Union. While Viktor Orbán has become known for his obstructionism in EU-matters, Magyar has reconfirmed his willingness to repair constructive relations with the EU (and in the process, free blocked cohesion fund payments).
He also reiterated his commitment to restoring Hungary’s commitment to ever-stronger European integration overall (joining the euro by the end of the term was among Tisza’s election promises) and to NATO, while he promised to reinforce Hungary’s cooperation with the Visegrád 4 – a grouping of central European countries that includes the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.
The seismic electoral change produced by this election is particularly notable for the global radical right conservative camp which considered Victor Orbán’s Hungary as an example to emulate. His dramatic electoral demise shows that even electoral engineering and media capture cannot protect would-be autocrats from political accountability.
However, as crowds in Budapest rejoice at the stunning victory of Magyar’s Tisza Party, the task of restoring democratic institutions with their checks and balances remains daunting.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
Image credit: Zoltan Galantai provided by Shutterstock.
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