As Hungary approaches its April 12 election, longtime Prime Minister Viktor Orbán faces an unprecedented challenge from former ally Péter Magyar and his Tisza party, marking a potential turning point for the country and for Europe.
Arriving at the airport in Budapest, Hungary’s capital, I received a text from a Hungarian friend. “Make sure you check out the posters on the way into the city,” he said.
He didn’t need to warn me. Mile after mile, along the highway to the city center, my taxi drove through a forest of political posters. Some urged voters to cast their ballots for the ruling Fidesz party: “Fidesz is the sure choice,” one version proclaimed in large red letters splayed over the Hungarian national flag.
Far more numerous were the posters depicting the opposition party, Tisza, and its leader, Péter Magyar. One looked like a Marvel comic book drawing of Magyar, half his face painted in dark blue, his eye circled with yellow stars, a cartoon depiction of the European Union flag, his mouth sewn closed with crude stitches. It turned out to be a reference to an actual comic book concocted by government-linked influencers titled “The Two-Faced,” unmasking Magyar as an “agent of Brussels,” in other words, the European Union. Odd, yes, since Hungary is a member of both the EU and NATO.
Pulling up in front of my hotel, it seemed every light pole had a poster attached. The first one I noticed was a dark, unflattering photo of Péter Magyar,flanked by equally menacing pictures of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Another was a poster of Zelensky by himself, his harshly lit black-and-white face creased with a huge smile, but with the warning: “Let’s not let Zelensky have the last laugh.”
Zelensky’s picture was everywhere. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought the Ukrainian president was running for prime minister of Hungary.
But where were the billboards for the current prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the man who has held that office for the past 16 years? I saw none during my week-long visit, but a Hungarian friend forwarded one to me: the prime minister in a heroic profile, the national flag unfurled behind him, along with the message: “Let us join against war.”
The posters are part of a massive Fidesz campaign blitz leading up to the April 12 election for the Hungarian National Parliament. The outcome will lead to the formation of a new National Assembly. The country’s notoriously complicated electoral system will translate votes into mandates, and the Parliament will select the Prime Minister. The latest polls show Magyar’s opposition party, Tisza, leading Orbán’s Fidesz party by about 10 percent.
If Viktor Orbán and his party are defeated, it would be an earth-shattering political event, not only in Hungary, but also in Europe. In 16 years, he has established overwhelming control of Hungary, its economy, its media, its internal political structure, and its foreign policy.
Orbán, 62, won his first term as Prime Minister in 1998, but lost the next election in 2002. The socialist government that followed drove the economy into the ground; then came the 2008 financial crisis. Orbán didn’t have to make much of a case to voters. He won by a landslide. He was back – with a supermajority – that allowed him not only to adopt a new constitution, but to amend it at least 16 times. (In his first term, he amended it 12 times.) The Fidesz-controlled legislature passed gerrymandering laws and legalized techniques like “voter tourism,” which permits voters to register to vote anywhere they want in Hungary, even if they do not live there.
Orban writes the rules of the game. But his increasingly authoritarian policies, along with what the opposition charges is massive corruption, have led to persistent structural problems for Hungary, including high inflation, a weak currency, deteriorating public services, and over-dependence on foreign investment and imported energy, especially from Russia.
However, you won’t hear any of that from Viktor Orbán. Ignoring the deteriorating economy, he is running almost exclusively on two issues: “traditional values,” such as anti-LGBTQ policies, and the fear of war, specifically, the war in Ukraine. Orbán depicts his country as squeezed from the west by “progressive forces” and from the east by Ukraine. He has weaponized the fear of war, claiming he is the only one who can prevent Hungarians from being dragged by conniving EU forces into the Ukraine war. He even claims, without evidence, that Ukraine is planning to attack Hungary. Precisely why a country trying to fend off a war waged against it by Russia would attack Hungary is not clear.
Orbán’s critics label him a “tool” of Vladimir Putin, who often uses his veto to stymie actions for which the EU requires consensus, such as sanctions on Russia or aid to Ukraine. That’s helpful to Putin’s efforts to undermine and divide the EU. But playing the spoiler role can be politically effective for someone like Orbán, according to András Rácz, a senior fellow and Russia expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
“It’s a way of exercising influence,” he told me during an interview in Budapest. “To basically extort money or favors by promising not to cause any further problems. This is a small-power strategy: If you don’t have your own resources, if you’re small, your population is small, your economy is smaller, the only way you can exert influence is actually to misuse the veto you have by spoiling things. It took a long time for the EU to learn this strategy.”
While Orbán has previously voted to approve – after getting what he wanted from the EU – sanctions on Russia as well as Finland and Sweden's accession to NATO, today Hungary is blocking the EU’s decision to provide 90 billion Euros (US$104 billion) to Ukraine. Europe is losing patience. The European Parliament, in a November 2025 report, described Hungary’s “deteriorating situation” and called the Orbán system a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.” The report cited what it called “threats to judicial independence…the link between corruption and electoral integrity…its failure to uphold the rights of its citizens, its threats to academic freedom, its politically motivated business practices, its allocation of state advertising to government-friendly outlets, and its de facto constitutional ban on Pride marches.”
The EU has demanded that Hungary institute rule-of-law and anti-corruption reforms, but Orbán’s government has refused. Orbán has instead defended his system as a legitimate alternative model for EU members—a necessary “illiberal state” born from the perceived failure of liberal democracy.
In response, the EU has frozen nearly 22.5 billion Euros (almost $26 billion) in EU funds for Hungary, much of which could be spent on roads and railways, education and schools, regional development, broadband Internet access, energy, and other projects that could improve the lives of Hungarians.
Orbán’s sinking poll numbers in this election have so alarmed Moscow that it reportedly launched a Soviet-style “active measures” campaign to help him, according to the Washington Post. In late March, it reported that officers from the SVR, Russia’s external intelligence service, had developed a strategy they called the “Gamechanger” to “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign” by the “staging of an assassination attempt on Viktor Orbán.”
In a fascinating bit of political analysis, the SVR conceded that, for Hungarian voters, the current election campaign is about bread-and-butter issues, and that dynamic could imperil Orbán’s re-election. “The majority (52.3%) are dissatisfied with the state of affairs in the country,” the Russian officers wrote, according to the Washington Post. “The dissatisfaction prevails not only in cities but also in the rural areas (50.8%) where traditionally the ruling Fidesz party’s position is strong.”
An assassination attempt, they concluded would “shift the perception of the campaign out of the rational realm of socioeconomic questions into an emotional one, where the key themes will become state security and the stability and defense of the political system.” So far, no attempt on Orbán’s life has materialized. The Hungarian government called the Washington Post report "completely false," even labeling it "pro-Ukrainian propaganda."
Orbán has other international supporters, including Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, and even President Donald Trump. In a video address, the President called Orbán a “fantastic guy” who had “shown the entire world what’s possible when you defend your borders, your culture, your heritage, your sovereignty and your values.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Budapest in February, and Vice President JD Vance is expected to visit Hungary closer to the April 12 vote.
Several Hungarian political experts with whom I spoke, however, doubted the assistance from the US would be effective. “Honestly, I believe the Fidesz campaign is overestimating the use of American figures,” Botond Feledy said. In the Hungarian countryside, he explained, people are preoccupied with other issues.
In mid-March, one month before the election, both Fidesz and Tisza held large rallies in the center of Budapest. Orbán’s Fidesz rally, dubbed the “Peace March,” attracted his core supporters: overwhelmingly older, many of them from rural areas, bused into the capital by their local mayors or pro-government organizations. Orbán stuck to his anti-war, anti-migration message, telling his followers Hungary will not follow a “path of war.” He railed against the EU, claiming Europe’s aim is to “redraw the religious and cultural map of Europe and to reconfigure its ethnic foundations.”
“We are here, and we will remain here,” he said, “even if Brussels parachutists rain down from the sky by the hundreds. We will pick them up, dust off their trousers, and send them back — some to Brussels, others to Kyiv.”
On the other hand, the opposition Tisza march drew large crowds of decidedly younger, urban Hungarians. Political views among them vary, but all are united in their intent to put an end to Orbán’s rule. Péter Magyar, who led the march down one of Budapest’s main avenues, did not tie himself to specific policies or proposals, taking what Americans would call a “big tent” approach, zeroing in on the core issues of corruption and rule of law. Magyar, 45, is an effective “retail politics” campaigner, traveling to villages, shaking hands, talking directly with people, holding town hall-style events, in contrast to Viktor Orban’s traditional, highly staged public appearances.
The march concluded at Heroes’ Square, Magyar taking the microphone to tell his supporters: “Viktor Orbán is a traitor who betrayed our common future…He did not build a country, but his own dominion. He did not elevate the homeland but made it the poorest and most corrupt country in the EU.” The crowd interrupted his speech several times with cries of “Ruszkik Haza!” In Hungarian, “Russians go home!”
Magyar was a member of Orbán’s Fidesz party and was once married to Orbán’s former justice minister. They are now divorced. He left Fidesz two years ago, accusing the party of corruption, after his wife resigned in the wake of a political scandal over a presidential pardon for an accomplice in a child sex abuse scandal.
Magyar promises to bring Hungary back in line with the EU, but he also supports what he calls “pragmatic relations” with Russia. His Tisza party does not agree with the EU’s quota rules on migration. The party platform supports preserving a border fence that Orbán erected in 2015 to keep out Syrian and other refugees.
“They are taught that Tisza is a liberal, lefty party,” Botond Feledy told me, referring to impressions of Tisza in the United States. “It definitely is absolutely not. Its leader is definitely not. He’s not even coming from that background. He’s coming from Fidesz background, more right-leaning, going toward the center. But not up to the center. No one is left on the Left.”
Budapest is a stunningly beautiful city, and Hungary is a relatively rich country. Its GDP grew rapidly from 2013 until the Covid crisis hit in 2020. Wages and the living standard have increased during the time Orbán has been in office. That’s the good news. The bad news is, it is now one of the poorest countries in Europe.
“Almost every other country in the European Union in this region of the EU has been performing much better than Hungary, especially in the last ten years,” Tamás Boros, Executive Director of the independent Hungarian think tank, the Equilibrium Institute, explained. One reason is the government’s policy of spending state money on selected companies, and on attracting foreign companies to build factories in Hungary. Hungary spends almost three percent of its GDP on individual companies. “So, it’s like state aid,” Boros said. “In other EU countries, it is usually one percent or one-and-a-half percent.”
“They want economic results very quickly, to make their governance more legitimate and more popular,” he said, “and for that you don’t need a long-term strategy. If you can show in the news that you opened a new factory and created a thousand new jobs, this works better politically than investing in education, for example.”
Surprisingly, Hungary has the largest foreign direct investment (FDI) coming from China in the whole of Europe.
“Orban uses this idea that we are in the EU, but we don’t play by the rules, so we can invite Chinese companies to Hungary,” Tamás Boros said. “It is beneficial for Chinese companies because they have access to the EU, but they bring their own labor, so it doesn’t help the country.”
Hungary has other challenges, too. The government’s pro-natalist policies urge women to have more babies. In the previous decade, Hungary succeeded in increasing its fertility rate. Now, however, Hungary’s population is dwindling, falling from 10.7 million in 1980 to 9.9 million in 2025.
A 2025 report by Poland’s Centre for Eastern Studies noted that “Hungary experienced a record population decline of 334,000 individuals between 2011 and 2022. Since 2022, Hungarian birth rates have once again been falling, with the fertility rate dropping to 1.38 by 2024. Depopulation is now progressing at its fastest rate to date.”
“We have one of the lowest birth rates right now in the history of Hungary,” Boros told me. “There was never ever such a low birthrate in the history of Hungary. It is partially economic and partially because most of the people see their future as unpredictable.”
Hungary also spends less than almost any other country in Europe on healthcare: five percent of GDP versus seven to eight percent in most other countries.
The biggest mistake the Fidesz government made, Boros told me, is in education. “The first thing they did was to lower the compulsory school age from 18 years to 16. They believed that if they wanted to have very quick GDP growth after winning the elections back in 2010, they wanted a lot of people working and not going to school.”
Péter Márki-Zay is the mayor of Hódmezővásárhely, a city of 42,000, a two-hour drive south from Budapest. About a half hour shy of the town, I drove past a massive factory under construction in the nearby city of Szeged. It turned out to be a new, 740-acre electric vehicle factory, aimed at the European market, being built by the Chinese car manufacturer BYD.
When I arrived at Mayor Márki-Zay’s office, he smilingly introduced himself as “The former next Prime Minister of Hungary.”
An economist and engineer, Márki-Zay, 54, worked for several years in Canada, and then in Indiana as a product manager in an automotive company. Back from abroad, he decided to run for mayor in his hometown, which had always been a Fidesz-controlled city. He defeated Fidesz in its former stronghold and, he said, Orbán’s government decided to punish him.
“Before I was elected, every city received about $6 million or $7 million for development expenses,” he told me, “and since I became mayor, we haven’t received anything, even our fair share.”
In 2022, Péter Márki-Zay tried to defeat Viktor Orbán for the post of prime minister, running as the standard-bearer for a coalition of opposition parties. But getting his message out was almost impossible. Fidesz controlled almost all the media, and he was given only five minutes on public television.
And yet, he told me: “I was a big fan of Mr. Orbán.”
“Why?” I asked him.
“I supported him,” he went on. “The best government we’d had in the last 35 years was the first Orbán government. Honestly. By all objective measures…After 2002 he lost the election and socialists had the majority control of the media. And he learned from this defeat…He said that we need media, we need money, and then you have power. He successfully turned Hungary into a very autocratic system, big corruption, and he became extremely rich. These riches now are used to enrich himself even more, to exercise more power, to keep him in power forever.”
Even though Márki-Zay has his own political party, he supports Péter Magyar’s campaign against Viktor Orbán. “He is the only one who can defeat Orbán,” he told me. “No question about it. If you split the opposition votes, then Orbán still can win. Thirty percent of the votes are enough to get a two-thirds majority in his system. But if there’s only one challenger, one candidate stronger than Fidesz, then Fidesz loses.”
Over his 16 years in power, Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party secured complete control of media platforms like TV, radio, and newspapers. But most Hungarians now follow political events on social media, as opposed to traditional media. Fidesz is much less effective than Tisza in spreading its message on social media, although, for years, they poured the equivalent of millions of dollars into online advertising.
That all changed last October when the European Union restricted online political advertising, seriously damaging Orbán’s media strategy. The new transparency law required companies like Meta and Google to label political advertising on their sites, revealing who paid for it, and the amount paid.
Orbán’s message to voters, however, has been effective. Stirring fear of war worked for him in 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and even if his new version of that message, accusing Ukraine of planning to invade Hungary, can seem far-fetched, Orbán speaks to some Hungarians on a more visceral plane.
“Orbán is a master of identity politics,” Péter Krekó, a social psychologist and political scientist who is director of the Political Capital Institute, told me. “In that sense, he just practically sits on the zeitgeist. He doesn’t talk about policies, he doesn’t talk about his plans to improve the economy, healthcare, education, and these are concerns at the top for voters. He always wants to talk about these gigantic civilizational clashes between liberals and conservatives. Between globalists and sovereigntists.”
Orbán is promising Hungarians recognition and pride, Krekó explained. “He positions himself as this fighter for Hungarian sovereignty, and it has a strong resonance in Hungarian identity because Hungarians are proud of being freedom fighters.”
Péter Krekó called it an “identity revolution.” Fighting for Hungarian sovereignty means rejecting Europe’s dictates. The “arrogant West is on the decline,” Orbán tells his countrymen. “We’re not going to imitate you anymore; you have to imitate us.”
Viktor Orbán’s winning streak has lasted for 16 years. This time, however, he is facing a new kind of challenger, a young politician who comes from his own party and shares some of the same political views.
“Orbán never ever thought he would have to fight with someone with a similar mentality, who can use similar nasty tactics in politics,” Péter Krekó told me. “The good guys, the good pro-Western guys, the liberals that previously have been challenging him, he could eat them for breakfast. But it’s not that way this time.”
Orbán still controls the election system, however, especially its built-in advantage of turning a plurality party into a supermajority winner. A detailed analysis of that system in the Journal of Democracy notes: “While the Hungarian case has distinctive features, it demonstrates more generally how autocrats can rig elections legally, using their parliamentary majorities to change the law to neutralize whatever strategy the opposition adopts.”
Géza Jeszenszky is Hungary’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs and former ambassador to the United States, Norway, and Iceland. During our meeting in Budapest, he focused not on Orbán’s Fidesz voters, or on Magyar’s Tisza voters, but on the undecided. “They will decide the fate of Hungary,” he believes. At this point, the outcome is unpredictable. If Orbán loses, he said, “the information monopoly would be broken, and that would open eyes. His spell would be broken.”
Just before leaving Budapest, I met a young Hungarian who has faced the dilemma that many of his generation face: whether to stay in Hungary or to leave. “Young people leave by the hundreds of thousands,” Mate Kollar told me. “One tenth of the population is abroad. Ninety percent of young people declared they want to leave the country. It’s very bad.”
Mate was accepted at several top-notch US universities and was hoping to get a Hungarian government scholarship to pursue a master’s degree. “I had this interview with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, at one point, they asked me: ‘Which journals do you read? Which dailies do you read?’ And everybody in this region of the world knows this does not mean ‘Do you read Politico or the Wall Street Journal?’ This means: ‘Who do you affiliate with politically?’ The question was, in fact, ‘Who do you vote for?’ And they didn’t like the answer.” He didn’t get a scholarship but was able to pursue his studies at a German university operating in Hungary.
Despite that, Mate Kollar thinks the people of Hungary are going in the right direction. “It doesn’t matter what the result of the election will be,” he said, “because the country’s political landscape, and the mentality, has changed in the past two years.” Previously, he said, people were reluctant to share publicly who they were going to vote for. “But now, people are actually putting up Tisza party stickers on their cars, on their homes. Even on themselves. And this is an extremely new concept in this country.”
During communist times, especially after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which was crushed by Soviet troops, people were hanged for their political beliefs. “The thinking was, everything has to come from above, that there is a king above us, a leader who knows better than us. And people have realized in the past 15 years that’s not how it’s going to happen.”
“We are going in a new direction,” Mate said. “Whatever the result of the election may be, what’s coming is going to be very new. If the system doesn’t change, then we have to.”
