Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, is set to lose the parliamentary elections on 12 April 2026. This would be a major victory for liberal democrats in Hungary and the European Union, as well as for anyone opposed to authoritarian populist rule worldwide. According to recent opinion polls, Fidesz’ main rival, the centre-right Tisza, seems to be within reach of attaining a two-thirds constitutional majority. While this may provide ideal conditions for re-establishing democratic institutions, it also implies that Tisza would not be effectively constrained by any meaningful democratic controls, much like its current predecessor, leaving Tisza’s leader, Péter Magyar, with similarly unrestrained and centralised power all over again. Avoiding the double trap of meeting populist expectations and stabilizing institutionally unconstrained powers are two major tasks the new government needs to perform.

István Bibó, Fidesz, and democratic regime change

Fidesz – the party originally called Alliance of Young Democrats – has always been led by Viktor Orbán. When he and his friends founded Fidesz in 1988, it was the first independent political party in Communist Hungary. Orbán was a student of law and a member of the ELTE Law Faculty Advanced College named after István Bibó, the most important Hungarian political scientist of the 20^th century, and a hero of the 1956 revolution. In 1956, Bibó was the only member of Imre Nagy’s revolutionary government who did not flee the Parliament building in Budapest when the Russians invaded. Instead, he famously typed a proclamation by the revolutionary government while Red Army officers were already in the building. He was jailed in 1957-63 and afterwards spent the rest of his life as a librarian in the Central Statistical Office.

Bibó believed in compromises among actors in democratic politics. He claimed that mutual trust can be generated among ideologically opposed political rivals, potentially leading to democratic consolidation even in hard times. As a participant-observer in the brief post-WWII democratic period of 1945-48, he wrote important essays, among which “The Crisis of Hungarian Democracy” is the best known. Using today’s parlance, he could be called an early anti-populist if populism is defined as an anti-pluralist political orientation undermining the equal moral standing of one’s political rivals and, consequently, making consensus-seeking politics impossible. Yet, Bibó also knew that seeking compromises with autocrats for political gains could lead to eliminating meaningful democratic choice. Pursuing the national interest at the cost of democratic self-determination, he argued, had brought about the misery of small East European states.

In 1988-89, founders of Fidesz were good students of Bibó. As part of the opposition Roundtable Talks, they negotiated the conditions of democratic regime change and along the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats made it sure that the process of democratization itself was as transparent and democratic as possible. Within Fidesz, Orbán was the face of anti-communism. In a party self-identified as “radical, liberal and alternative”, he represented radicalism. On 16 June 1989, at the reburial of Prime Minister Imre Nagy and his fellow martyrs of the 1956 revolutionary government, which was arguably the single most important public event of the Hungarian democratic regime change, Orbán delivered the most radical and most often remembered speech. On Heroes Square in Budapest, he demanded freedom, democracy, and the withdrawal of the Red Army from Hungarian soil.

37 years later

37 years later, Hungary – led by Prime Minister Orbán – finds itself to be the closest Russian ally in the EU. Orbán’s political ideas have also shifted in other ways in past decades. In 1998, ten years after Fidesz was founded, he started his first term as prime minister as a moderate right-wing liberal. In 2002, when his coalition was defeated by the Socialists and the Free Democrats, he was an increasingly right-wing conservative nationalist and the unquestioned leader of the Hungarian Right. And in that capacity, he was about to start his long march towards popularly legitimized autocracy.

After defeating Fidesz in 2002, the Socialist-Liberal coalition was re-elected in 2006. However, their expansionist, Latin American-type populist economic policies – buying votes for fiscal transfers at elections and stabilizing the budget afterwards – got them into trouble. In 2008, the global financial crisis kicked in, and the centre-left government was forced to continue austerity policies instead of budgetary easing. That gave Orbán an easy victory in 2010, when the Socialist-Liberal electorate collapsed and Fidesz received 53 percent of the popular vote. In the dominantly majoritarian Hungarian electoral system, in which proportional election on party lists was always dominated by majoritarian election in single mandate constituencies (SMCs), that was translated into two-thirds constitutional majority in parliament. Accordingly, Fidesz introduced a new constitution, made the electoral system even more majoritarian, and established the European Union’s first – and so far only – electoral autocracy. In the next 12 years, Fidesz won three additional two-thirds constitutional majorities in 2014, 2018 and 2022.

The rise and decline of Orbánomics

In most of the past 16 years, Orbán’s opposition has been ideologically divided, organizationally fragmented, and electorally weak. Elections were unfair but mostly free. The regime effectively eliminated the system of checks and balances but relied on genuine popular support. In the 2022 elections, the opposition fielded united SMC candidates and a united party list. It was a highly ambitious institutional innovation, based on pre-election primaries and resulting in a much more competitive opposition alternative than ever before since 2010. However, using pre-election fiscal expansion and a barrage of government propaganda, Orbán kept the upper hand. Informational autocracy proved robust and agile, agitating against any form of social dissent, politically operationalized as a virulent anti-LGBTQ campaign, and stirring anxiety around the full-scale Russian assault on Ukraine, with the claim that only Orbán could keep Hungary out of the war. The result was yet another Fidesz two-thirds majority and the complete disintegration of the opposition. However, Orbán’s post-election government performance was no longer the same as before.

The electoral majority that firmly stayed behind Fidesz until about 2024 was based on a mix of political exclusion and social inclusion, a strategy often pursued by politically successful autocracies. One important example in the Hungarian context was János Kádár’s “Gulash Communism” in the 1970s and ‘80s, which turned out to be highly costly in terms of stabilization needs after the democratic regime change. Successive Orbán governments in the 2010s provided social transfers, tax benefits, and symbolic reputational advances for villages, churches, middle-class families, and rural elites; controlled utility prices for households; provided public employment for the long-term unemployed, including many in the Roma minority; and implemented institutionally differentiated policies to promote domestic and foreign businesses in line with the regime’s economic goals. All this was enabled by exceptionally benevolent economic circumstances. Throughout most of the 2010s, economic growth was robust, employment and real wages grew, and huge amounts of EU funds were flowing into Hungary. As a consequence, a broad range of activist government policies could be pursued alongside conservative fiscal policies while keeping external economic vulnerability low.

This changed in the 2020s, when Covid, alienation from the EU mainstream, a fundamental deterioration in the global business environment, and a loosening fiscal stance before the 2022 elections altered the situation dramatically. Just like in 2006-10, pre-election fiscal expansion was followed by post-election stabilization needs, occurring amidst decreasing EU financing as the EU Commission suspended most Hungarian development funding as part of its renewed rule of law procedure. The economy fell into recession, inflation accelerated, and real wages dropped in 2023. This was followed by two more years of near economic stagnation, during which financing extensive government clienteles without EU money – its primary source in the previous decade – became increasingly difficult for the regime. As the resulting political vacuum could not be filled by the discredited “old opposition”, a new political alternative was needed.

The redistribution of populist attitudes

Hungarian politics fundamentally changed in early 2024 amidst a major political scandal resulting from a presidential pardon given to an associate of a convicted child abuser. Strangely enough, the political actor who completely altered the set of existing roles and rules in Hungarian politics was the ex-husband of former Justice Minister Judit Varga; one of the two Fidesz politicians who resigned in the “clemency gate”. Her ex-husband, Péter Magyar, launched a new political movement in early 2024, and Tisza party – as the movement was called from April – became the dominant opposition force at the June 2024 European Parliamentary elections.

Magyar and his party have not only been successful politically, but also highly interesting from an analytical standpoint. Authors have examined the collective psychological needs Magyar responded to and analysed him as a charismatic actor equipped with sophisticated social media skills. Qualitative research claimed that Tisza engaged in “transformative repolarization” of the political space instead of “reciprocal polarization” and “disruptive escalation” that the “old opposition” had pursued since the early 2010s.

Most recently, Andrea Szabó and her co-authors showed how Tisza has reconfigured the distribution of populist attitudes across government and opposition electorates. They reported the proliferation of “leader-centred representation,” implying that “[b]y 2025, preferences for strong, personalised leadership are broadly shared across partisan publics, including among voters who disagree fundamentally over which leader should govern.” Today’s Hungary, they claim, is characterized by a “hybrid populist electorate” in which “populist demand is not confined to regime supporters but extends across partisan blocs once opposition realignment creates a credible anti-incumbent pole.” In other words – I add – the rise of Tisza mobilizes populist attitudes on the opposition side, no longer leaving them the prerogative of those in power for 16 years. On the one hand, this is very good news as it makes the opposition electorally more competitive than it has ever been since 2010. On the other hand, Szabó and her co-authors explain, this constitutes a “populist voter trap” that prevents the prospected regime change from ending the period of populism-driven politics.

Policy-wise, Tisza has pledged to maintain all fiscal transfers and tax benefits Fidesz has introduced in the past 16 years. In some areas, including pensions, healthcare, and taxation of the self-employed, it has committed to pursue even more expansionary fiscal policies than Fidesz did. The only ones who are set to be worse-off by a Tisza majority are government-friendly oligarchs, who should expect a stoppage in politically administered procurements and administratively provided market shares. In addition, owners of wealth of one billion forint (~ 2.6 million euros) and more will be exposed to a 1 percent wealth tax.

In line with the median voter theorem, Tisza has adopted ideologically centrally located positions across a range of sensitive policy issues. These included a neutral stance on last year’s banned Budapest Pride march, in which Tisza did not participate; its rejection of the EU-financed 90 billion-euro loan to Ukraine that they opposed in the European Parliament; as well as its pledge not to adopt the European pact on migration and asylum if a Tisza government were formed, on a sovereigntist anti-migration basis.

Tisza did not only adopt the political central ground ideologically, distancing itself from parties of the “old opposition”, but it also refused to cooperate with any of them or, in fact, with any personality with an independent political standing. Neither parties of the old opposition, nor independent members of parliament and leaders of municipalities have been considered as potential allies by Tisza. This is a politically rational strategy by Tisza due to the logic of the majoritarian electoral system, which can transform relative majorities into absolute ones, small absolute majorities into large ones, whereas at the margin it can generate two-thirds (in parliament: constitutional, in municipalities: qualified) majorities. Moreover, Tisza has also justified this position morally, claiming that the “old opposition” had all the way collaborated with the regime, and whoever does not vote for Tisza ultimately supports the maintenance of Orbán’s rule. Through this, Tisza has been urging a complete dismissal of incumbent political elites regardless of the actual political role one has played so far, in a truly populist fashion.

Tisza’s organizational model fits well with this exclusionary approach to power. Tisza as a political party lacks internal structures of coexisting authorities and altogether consists of about 30 people. In contrast, Tisza as a political phenomenon is much more of a hierarchically organized movement with centralized leadership. Its thousands of activists, who mainly engage in highly respectable charitable activities, are technically not members in the party and hence cannot hold party leaders accountable for their actions. Decision-making and political communication are highly centralized and controlled by a few party officials at the top. Magyar is the unquestioned number one among them, and Tisza does not have a political stance independent of him and his institutionally unconstrained leadership.

A populist institutional trap?

István Bibó, if he had been alive, would have condemned Fidesz a long time ago for undermining consensus-based democratic politics. Operating a vast media machine in a politically controlled public sphere, Fidesz used polarization as a strategic tool, consciously and systematically weakening the mental foundations of liberal democracy. In the current situation, Bibó would probably support Tisza, but he would also note that the system of checks and balances and the principle of limited government, upon which the idea of liberal democracy rests, are incompatible with a single political party exercising unlimited power.

By the virtue of its political success – attained through hard work amidst increasingly beneficial political conditions – Tisza is getting close to a decisive electoral victory, and even a two-thirds constitutional majority in parliament might not be out of its reach. On the one hand, this may provide ideal conditions for re-establishing democratic institutions. On the other hand, being equipped with a two-thirds majority would imply that Tisza is effectively not constrained by any democratic controls. Next to the proliferation of populist attitudes, generating a “populist voter trap” described in the previous section, this is the other trap Hungary may fall into. The trap of autocratic institutions that can only be altered by a large enough mandate that, if exists, can make its possessors exempt from obeying the rules they wanted to introduce in the first place.

16 years ago, upon taking over government with his first two-thirds constitutional majority, Viktor Orbán consolidated his power through autocratization, effectively eliminating the set of depoliticized institutional constraints on which Hungarian liberal democracy in 1990-2010 rested. We do not know how Péter Magyar will approach the same task if he is given a similar chance on 12 April 2026. Independently of the size of his governing majority, though, he cannot adopt the same autocratic practices Fidesz chose to follow in the past 16 years if he is to keep his most important electoral promise: the re-democratization of Hungary.