Is This the Man Who Could Topple Viktor Orbán?
European elections have dramatically changed the political situation in Hungary.
“FORTUNE IS A LIBERAL MISTRESS,” Napoleon is reported to have said before his defeat at Borodino. “I have often said so, and now begin to experience it.” Words of wisdom, perhaps, for Viktor Orbán, who some have said suffers from bouts of Bonapartism. Since winning a landslide election in 2022, debilitating the opposition, and securing an intractable hold over the country, he has been wrestling with mounting difficulties that have finally exacted a domestic political cost. For the first time since coming to power in 2010, Orbán confronts a political opponent against whom he can find no kryptonite, a former member of his party’s inner circle who’s turned against him and upended Hungarian politics. That man is a 43-year-old political phenom named Péter Magyar.
Thanks to Magyar, Orbán’s party, Fidesz, suffered its worst showing ever in elections for the European Parliament earlier this month. The significance of what happened can easily be overlooked because Fidesz still achieved the highest voter share of all parties at 45 percent. But that’s much less than the 53 percent Fidesz achieved in 2019, the 51 percent it achieved in 2014, and the 56 percent it achieved in 2009.
Péter Magyar’s party, Tisza, didn’t exist a few months ago, but it finished this month’s election with just under 30 percent of the vote share. No opposition party has ever achieved anything near that level of success since Orbán came to power. This year, most opposition parties failed to cross the 5 percent threshold needed to secure parliamentary mandates. They are now at risk of extinction.
The most immediate effect of Magyar’s rise, therefore, has been the demise of the old opposition. This has caused concern among some observers, who are skeptical about the democratic credentials of anyone with deep roots in Fidesz. But as the liberal commentator Bálint Magyar1 pointed out, Hungarian history is full of reformers who turned against the system from which they emerged—one need only think of the Communists who led Hungary’s 1956 Revolution. There’s no way to know for certain what Magyar would do in power, unless he comes to power.
The demise of Hungary’s old democratic opposition is likely a good thing. Orbán achieved electoral dominance in part by imposing a winner-take-all electoral system, one effectively designed for two parties, on what had been a multi-party parliamentary democracy. The effect was to render the several opposition parties small and ineffective. Even after the opposition accepted that they needed to join forces if they hoped to beat Orbán, conflicting egos and interests made effective cooperation close to impossible. The parties behaved as if Hungary were a normal democracy, vying with each other for whatever power or privileges were available to them within Orbán’s system. In this way they became pawns in Orbán’s domestic political theater, helping to preserve the appearance of democracy instead of turning against the regime as critics.
By decimating the old opposition, Magyar has done away with the necessity of forging compromises among their competing factions. Although one party on the left remains standing (technically a coalition, but in reality dominated by DK) it is full of divisive characters, and this year finished with only 8 percent. With shocking rapidity, Magyar has become the opposition’s clear standard bearer. In the next election his party will present a clear choice to voters who want to get rid of Orbán. Nor is Magyar’s appeal limited to voters from the old opposition. He also has pull with disenchanted Fidesz voters. His party performed exceptionally well in Fidesz strongholds, and did best in places where support for Fidesz dropped most dramatically.
The ground under Orbán’s feet has started shifting. For anyone who’s been watching Hungary closely, Péter Magyar’s rise and transformation of the country’s politics has been astonishing.
ALTHOUGH MAGYAR MOVED in the inner circles of Orbán’s party, he was not known to the public before his defection from the regime in the wake of an explosive scandal. When Magyar first appeared, many people, myself included, considered him an interesting but passing phenomenon. What we failed to appreciate was how deeply Magyar’s message would resonate with the Hungarian people.
A lot of his appeal certainly rests on personal charisma, which derives from a combination of youthfulness, intelligence, wit, and Eastern European machismo. Magyar doesn’t wilt under attacks from state media, and he knows how to land counterpunches. In many ways, he resembles the young Viktor Orbán, an obvious parallel that makes tacit comparisons between the two men impossible to avoid. All of them work in Orbán’s disfavor. Like the young Orbán, Magyar is athletic and enjoys sports. The old Orbán is morbidly obese. Like the young Orbán, Magyar thrives at repartee and relishes argument. The old Orbán speaks in tired formulas and avoids debate the way a cat avoids water. Like the young Orbán, Magyar draws energy from a crowd. The old Orbán fears crowds, appearing before them only under controlled circumstances.
Still, Magyar has learned a few things from the old man about mass communication. He has been brilliant at reappropriating Hungary’s national symbols—something the liberal opposition could never do—in a way that stabs at the heart of Orbán’s image. And in at least one respect, Magyar has outperformed the master. Unlike Orbán, whose appreciation for Hungarian cultural achievements appears to end with Ferenc Puskás and the 1954 World Cup, Péter Magyar loves poetry.
And poetry, much more than soccer, plays an important role in Hungarian national identity. The language Hungarians speak is not Indo-European in origin, which separates it from every other European language but Finnish and Estonian. To cultivate Hungarian identity is to cultivate the Hungarian language, and poets are the best cultivators of all. Hungary’s great poets are national icons.
When Magyar first entered politics, he formed an organization named after a verse from a poem by Sándor Petőfi, who died in battle fighting for Hungarian freedom in the Revolution of 1848. Magyar later linked his organization to the political party that abbreviates its name as TISZA. Tisza is also the name of a major river in eastern Hungary, about which Petőfi wrote another poem. The Tisza river flows slowly along a low gradient, making it prone to flooding. In Petőfi’s hands, the Tisza became a metaphor for the Hungarian people, who can be misunderstood as pliant and passive.
Watching the sun set over the still river, the poet notices the light’s amber rays striking the trees, as if they “were burning and flowing with blood.” Turning to the river, he asks, “Ah poor Tisza, why do they mistreat you / and speak of you harshly / you are the gentlest river on earth.” When he’s awakened by the pealing of alarm bells a few days later, the narrator exclaims: “Here comes the flood! / And wherever I looked I saw a sea / breaking its banks in a rage …. Ready to swallow the world.” The Hungarian people, Petőfi suggests, are like the Tisza river, silent and long-suffering, until, mistreated enough, they rise up in rage like a flooding river.
That Magyar thought to link his party to Petőfi’s poem was a communications masterstroke. It captures perfectly the mood in Hungary. Despite his electoral dominance, Orbán is not well-loved. He draws a sizable portion of support from the perception that his regime is inevitable. This has led to political apathy and a feeling of resignation, an attitude not all that different from what existed in the later decades of communism. If a viable political alternative ever emerged in Hungary, it could profoundly alter the feeling in the country. If people start to believe they really can be freed of Orbán, they might indeed rise up like a raging river.
At Tisza party rallies, alongside a sea of Hungarian flags and the sound of folk songs, the crowds chant, “The Tisza is flooding” (Árad a Tisza), which rings nicely in Hungarian. Indeed, “Árad a Tisza” could be well on the way to becoming a nationwide slogan of political resistance.
Magyar also resembles Orbán in his bravado. But unlike Orbán, who’s always boasting about how he’s vanquished Brussels—he has not—Magyar has so far delivered on his boasts. Shortly after entering politics, Magyar announced he was organizing a demonstration in front of the Hungarian Parliament Building that would be attended by hundreds of thousands of people, a demonstration so large it would be “seen from the moon.” Commentators said he was overpromising and called the strategy risky. But on April 6, he held the largest demonstration in Hungary since at least 2006. The square in front of the parliament was so densely packed one couldn’t pass through it. The crowd flowed over into the side streets. A few commentators said they were reminded of 1989.
Magyar’s success must also be attributed to his superhuman level of energy. In the two months leading up to the election, he barnstormed the country, visiting every county in Hungary and hundreds of towns and cities. He’d even show up in little villages, milling with local townsfolk who may never have seen a national politician in person, before climbing into the back of a pickup truck to address the crowd. Nothing like this very American style of campaigning has ever been seen in Hungary. Magyar’s rally in the city of Debrecen, a Fidesz stronghold, was attended by tens of thousands of people. Never in the Orbán era had such a large demonstration been held outside of Budapest. And that wasn’t the only large demonstration outside Budapest. Magyar held rallies in Eger, Szeged, Pécs, Győr, Székesfehérvár, Veszprém, and on and on. The stamina needed to maintain grassroots campaigning like this over a two-month period is truly astounding.
Moreover, by taking his message directly to people across the entire country, Magyar managed to counter Orbán’s propaganda machinery in a way no other opposition figure has been able to do. Magyar turned himself into a national phenomenon and a celebrity. People in parts of the country used to getting their news exclusively through government media learned who Magyar was by word of mouth. Then, because they were interested in the celebrity, they followed him on Facebook, where he posted videos of his rallies. People could watch his interviews on the internet and follow announcements from his party on YouTube. Magyar built up a social media presence in a way no other opposition figure has done, and this countered the reach of state media. For the first time since coming to power, Orbán was responding to the emerging political narrative rather than shaping it.
EARLY POLLS SUGGESTED the inconceivable; support for Fidesz was hemorrhaging. Clearly Orbán needed to engage the campaign more vigorously. His people decided to organize a so-called “peace march.” These are well-established—and impressive—mobilization operations that the Orbán government has variously employed over the years in response to political challenges. They involve bringing people into Budapest from across the country on charter buses and then directing a march of hundreds of thousands through the capital. Often the route ends in front of the Hungarian Parliament Building, but the chances this year’s peace march would assemble there were precisely zero. To do so would have invited comparisons with Magyar’s demonstration, the size of which Fidesz couldn’t match even with the help of charter buses. The peace march instead concluded in a large city park, where Orbán gave an address. It was a large event, to be sure, but not as big as Magyar’s demonstration in April.
Over the last weeks of the campaign, Orbán also attempted to repeat a tactic he used to wallop the opposition in 2022: stirring up fears about the war in Ukraine. According to government media, Magyar was supported by the “globalist war party” and “U.S.-dollar-backed left”; Europe was on the brink of nuclear war; the stakes were nothing less than war or peace. To vote for the opposition was to vote for war, Orbán claimed.
A final set of polls suggested the strategy was working. Undecided voters looked to be breaking for Fidesz, which was projected to pull in 50 percent of the vote. Election night was, therefore, a surprise. The propaganda campaign had failed to bring waffling Fidesz voters back home. Orbán’s base had eroded, and the Tisza party outperformed even its high expectations.
THE UTTERLY IMPROBABLE RISE of the Tisza party has fundamentally reshaped Hungary’s political landscape. The significance of Magyar’s achievement should not be downplayed; even if Orbán’s regime isn’t yet tottering, it’s definitely under stress. Things are moving in Hungary in a way they haven’t for a very long time. What happens next depends on many unpredictable variables, not the least of which is Péter Magyar himself.
Having created a major political party ex nihilo in two months, Magyar will have to anchor that success with organization and infrastructure. National elections are only two years away. The Tisza party will need to field candidates, open local offices, articulate policies, and build up a ground game. And it must do all these things in a legal, political, and media environment controlled by Fidesz.
In building up infrastructure, Magyar must decide whether to bring in members of the old opposition. Although Tisza cleaned up in the European elections which took place at the national level, old opposition politicians hold power in many municipalities. If Magyar joins forces with them, he’s likely to undermine his brand, which is about giving birth to a new era in Hungarian politics. But if Magyar excludes the existing opposition, his task of building infrastructure will be that much harder.
The shape of the future also depends, of course, on Viktor Orbán and how he responds to his first serious political challenge in fourteen years. Tackling Magyar head on seems unlikely, because, to put it frankly, Orbán lacks the mojo. For years, his messaging has focused on Hungary’s “external enemies”: George Soros, the European Union, migration, the global left, the war-mongering West. The absence of a domestic political challenger has protected him from having to discuss domestic issues. There are many to go around: His government currently faces a budget shortfall and will probably need to impose austerity measures it failed to disclose before the elections. Inflation persists at around 4 percent. The healthcare system suffers from decades of neglect; the education system suffers from a lack of teachers. Everyone knows his government is extravagantly corrupt.
Unless Orbán finds a way to change the subject, the Tisza party is going to drive these issues home. If Orbán cannot disarm Tisza politically, he will likely modify the constitution or change the electoral laws to become inhospitable to them, a tactic he has employed in the past without penalty. Without a collapse of his base and open dissension in his party, however, it is hard to imagine that he will relinquish power voluntarily. Then again, history tends to deliver its greatest surprises when one least expects them. Virtually everyone in Hungary who has witnessed Péter Magyar’s incredible, improbable rise—including people in Fidesz—cannot help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, the young man has managed to catch the thin coattails of history.
Bálint Magyar and Péter Magyar are not related. Magyar is a common Hungarian surname—and because it is also the word for the people and the language of Hungary, it would be comparable to a surname like “American” in the United States. In this case, it almost makes Péter Magyar’s name sound like “Captain America.”
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