On What Doesn’t Matter
Among the hype and noise surrounding Péter Magyar, one might get away with the conclusion that Fidesz is doomed. Yet the data doesn’t seem to suggest that.
Péter Magyar is hailed as the new centrist saviour of the Hungarian opposition. If you can believe polling – and that is a big if in Hungary – his new Tisza Party might already be the largest force of the opposition. According to the pollster Medián (generally considered to be the most reliable, although with a history of overestimating centrist saviours in polls) Tisza Party holds 24% while the joint list led by Ferenc Gyurcsány’s DK (the largest opposition force between 2019 and 2024) is at 9%. The Fidesz list is at 46%.
We see similar numbers in a recent poll by Iránytű, a company associated with Jobbik, although they estimate Fidesz’s vote share to be slightly higher, 49%, among voters with party preferences. (Hungarian pollsters usually publish three figures: vote shares in the general population, among those who have party preferences and among voters who are certain in their vote.)
What these numbers suggest is that Péter Magyar is not able to significantly bite into Fidesz’s vote share. Indeed, despite showing a historic decline in polling, Fidesz is not seriously endangered. To start with, parties tend to poll badly in the middle of parliamentary terms. Hungary has lived under economic turmoil and a cost of living crisis for two years, Hungarians are significantly poorer than they were in 2022, when Fidesz secured a fourth consecutive parliamentary supermajority with historic margins.
In February, a major scandal broke out after it was revealed that then-President Katalin Novák, with a little help from then-Justice Minister Judit Varga, pardoned Endre Kónya, a man with links to Orbán’s circles and sentenced for complicity in sexual assault against minors. Novák and Varga, two of the leading faces of the latest incarnation of Fidesz (Novák symbolising Hungary’s alleged pro-family policies while Varga leading Fidesz’s European Parliamentary list) left politics disgraced. Varga’s former husband, Péter Magyar entered Hungarian politics by storm and, at the very least, has energised opposition voters who had been in deep apathy before the Kónya scandal.
Fidesz has lost control of the political narrative for months, which, according to pro-opposition know-it-alls, is supposed to be a key to its political success. Would you not be, if you were Viktor Orbán, extremely happy with a projected 40-45% of vote share in the European Parliamentary elections and a polling average of around 40%?
So far, Magyar was able to mostly grow at the expense of other opposition parties, likely giving a deathblow to liberal Momentum, to the small right-wing parties trying to capture the anti-Orbán conservative phantom vote and, at the very least, set back the ambitions of the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party (MKKP), previously favoured to pick up much of the disillusioned opposition voters. More interestingly, both pseudo-social democratic DK and far-right Our Homeland (MH) have seen significant setbacks if you believe polling.
This is surprising both for ideological reasons (Magyar positions himself as a militantly anti-Gyurcsány right-liberal) and because I previously assumed that these two parties fare much better at creating strong party attachments (more on this later) than Momentum or even MKKP. I would not yet bury these parties, however. While I honestly have no high hopes for Momentum, if there was one great lesson of these 14 years is that you underestimate Gyurcsány or MH-leader László Toroczkai at your own peril.
Therefore, if anything, the past months have shown Fidesz’s resilience, not its weakness. It would indeed be foolish to believe that a month-old political project will be able to dismantle Fidesz’s well-integrated political machinery, as opposed to keeping a number of uncertain Fidesz voters home. (And even so, one might think that those voters would skip European elections anyway.) The anti-Orbán discourse, of course, has no shortage of fools who will either convince themselves that Orbán doing relatively badly in an election is a sign of the fall of the regime, or loudly proclaim that Hungarians are brain-washed by Orbánist propaganda and this country is hopeless, depending on the final results and their personal dispositions.
But this should not worry us, and nor should it worry Péter Magyar. The challenge for him, and indeed for anyone trying their luck in Hungarian politics, is to break the hegemony of Fidesz over Hungarian society. Can Magyar live up to it?
Despite some anecdotal evidence to the contrary, the polls so far only indicate that Magyar was able to bite into Fidesz’s vote only marginally, if at all. (And anecdotal evidence is an even worse measure than polls.) And it makes sense. Fidesz has a tightly integrated voter base with an effective and predictable mobilisation machine. (It is well known in political circles, for example, that in municipal byelections, Fidesz is expected to mobilise around 65% of its voters compared to normal municipal elections.) Meanwhile, the opposition has a radically unintegrated and very fluctuating voter base. Municipal by-elections are also a great example of this. While in most cases, the opposition was significantly less good at mobilisation in the byelections following the 2022 National Assembly elections (not surprising in the wake of a historic election defeat), there were also cases of opposition campaigns beating Fidesz in mobilisation.
Fluctuation in voter mobilisation is one thing, but opposition voters also have fluctuating party preferences. For example, in 2019, we saw the breakthrough of DK and Momentum in European Parliamentary elections, both of whom were able to increase their number of votes (!) compared to the parliamentary elections a year before, despite much lower turnout. This meant that DK was able to cannibalise on the traditional vote of the Hungarian Socialist Party, while Momentum managed to mobilise the urban liberal and progressive vote that a year prior supported the green party LMP which managed to commit political suicide after the election by infighting.
What we have seen is the emergence of a Generic Opposition Voter with some ideological attachment (e.g., centre-left or liberal) but with no partisan identity. These voters would then go on to choose the parties that they consider to have the highest chances to succeed in elections. In other words, to quote political sociologist Péter Csigó, parties have become speculative assets. And, as with other speculative bubbles like crypto, a truly toxic form of politics emerges: boom-and-bust cycles. Liberal media and the hope industry hype up messiahs with promises like ‘mobilising disaffected Fidesz voters in order to defeat Orbán’. This is followed by the burst of these bubbles, with liberal media and the resignation industry mocking these inflated hopes. Herein lies the magician’s trick: it’s the same liberal media, and the hope and resignation industries are the two sides of the same coin! (I borrowed this last point and these terminologies from Kamilla Vida.)
After the 2022 elections, many opposition voters became disillusioned with the traditional opposition parties (by that time de facto reduced to DK and Momentum). This resulted in the appearance of an assortment of centre-right microparties led by former Jobbik leaders Gábor Vona, Péter Jakab, as well as disgraced former opposition leader Péter Márki-Zay. MKKP also rose in polling, for the first time seriously expected to gain more than 5% (and, according to some polls, more than 10%) of the vote, the electoral threshold. They were even considered likely to win two European Parliamentary mandates out of just 21. LMP was attempting and failing a revival by positioning themselves as ‘reasonable opposition’.
Meanwhile, the main opposition parties struggled. DK was not able to achieve a second breakthrough to reach 20% in polls and thus become the unquestioned hegemon of the opposition. Their party trick of creating a shadow government did not succeed in creating the image of a government-in-waiting. Momentum was in a leadership crisis. First, they elected a bumbling idiot from the right wing of the party as their leader, due to various internal political reasons, who was quickly ridiculed. Then they bet all on their supposedly popular former (and current) leader, Anna Donáth. But her charm, too, has broken. All other parties would become laughing stock, with no clear path to 5% in the European Election.
The path was thus clear for a new asset to emerge and, to his credit, Magyar is much more successful than his predecessors, mobilising at least some undecided voters and even some Fidesz supporters. (Some of the undecided voters were probably previously undecided between opposition parties, but some were likely not to vote this time.) But the problem with being a speculative asset is that speculative bubbles are prone to burst. You cannot be the darling of the liberal media forever. We are yet to see if Magyar’s success is due to disaffection with others (as anecdotal evidence suggests), supported by hype and political momentum re-energising a disillusioned demos, and running at an election where protest votes are traditionally strong.
But will this last until 2026, let alone later? Will Magyar and his few supporters be able to create a political party worthy of that name?
Momentum is a cautionary tale here: Donáth, a one-time popular opposition figure is now struggling to reach her base. Vibes are one thing: deep down, politics is still about canvassing and reaching out to voters and creating political alternatives that integrate citizens into your party as opposed to mobilising atomised voters with fluctuating party preferences. Magyar doesn’t yet get that. He talks to voters – but importantly, only voters who voluntarily attend his events. He thinks that a strong social media presence is all it takes. And it takes you quite far, but the political challenge isn’t to win 26% of votes, it’s to win 50%+1. Behind the facade of social media hysteria still lies a social, or shall we say, material reality, where Fidesz has strongly integrated much of Hungarian society for its party political purposes. Magyar is yet to recognise, let alone solve, that challenge.
From a left perspective, of course, this is irrelevant. One should not worry too much about the electoral chances of another right-wing project. Indeed, the picture is even more dire. So-called Hungarian liberals are in awe of a rightwinger who often sounds less like a challenger of Fidesz and more like a presentable face of it. (Listen to what he has to say on Ukraine – virtually indistinguishable from Orbán’s position. The same liberals would call Orbán Putinist.) Years of antipolitical pseudo-resistance and mediatised hysteria, we reached the logical conclusion: Fidesz’s social vision, foreign policy, presented by the literal former husband of a leading Fidesz politician. As if the only point of politics was the person of the Prime Minister of Hungary.
Even if Magyar is able to seriously threaten Fidesz’s political position in the long term, from the left point of view, this at best is the better evil. But more concerningly, even if Fidesz’s position is shaken, the hegemony of the right is as stable as ever.
Things look grim. One might think that the above considerations, on the whole, don’t matter too much. There was a question posed by the Guardian for its Hungarian readers on what gives them hope. Frankly, I do not feel hopeful that a new face of right-wing hegemony is now available.
What gives me hope is my comrades at Szikra Movement who work tirelessly to win local elections, not on social media and not in the liberal press that is ignorant of this work, but by canvassing, talking to voters, and by solving their problems. Or the many other people doing the same; some of them in media highlight, like MKKP’s Gergely Kovács in the 12th District of Budapest, or other independent candidates in small towns and villages working to make their homes better places without much appreciation. What gives me hope is people who become teachers or doctors or social workers. People who wake up early, work till late and yet never lose their optimism. There is still a better Hungary out there.
One of the most telling stupidities of Hungarian liberals is to consider the fancy-sounding, yet completely bullshit positions at the European Parliament to be more important than that of a small-town mayor, or even a Budapest district councillor. But I like the local elections better. It’s about doing politics among the people. It’s about politics that really matters.
Iván Merker