The end of the road for Viktor Orbán?
Péter Magyar's wacky crusade against Fidesz — and his 'bitch ex-wife'
Viktor Orbán has governed Hungary as prime minister for sixteen consecutive years — a record unequalled by any of his predecessors. Before Orbán, this distinction belonged to Kálmán Tisza (1875-1890), whose puckishly named Liberal Party — in truth perhaps the most conservative government west of the Vistula — presided over the merry age of stability, magnatial despotism, and preposterous clientelism whose colour provided a rich seam for the nation’s literary talent to mine. Of the era’s chroniclers, the most memorable is the portly Liberal MP Kálmán Mikszáth, whose acerbic satires on the burlesque of rural electioneering and the persistence of ‘feudal’ structures have given his oeuvre an enduring relevance in a country where the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Even the names repeat themselves, although in this case tragedy follows on the heels of farce. Tisza’s son István also twice served as prime minister (1903-05, 1913-17), and Orbán’s supporters today are quick to draw parallels between his doomed opposition to Austria’s war in 1914 and the current officeholder’s critique of Western involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.
Whatever other reasons may exist for his pacifism, Hungary’s experience of great power conflict weighs heavy on Orbán’s conscience, for had the younger Tisza’s warnings been heeded, the country would not have been partitioned in the postwar Treaty of Trianon. The Tisza river, from which this illustrious family took its name, was also dismembered by the treaty: though its main body winnows through Hungary’s sleepy, post-industrial east on its way to meet up with the Danube near Belgrade, its source is in Ukraine, as well as a small Hungarian minority, although the influx of wartime refugees has noticeably altered the region’s ethnic makeup. The word Tisza is a hair’s breadth away from tiszta, which means ‘pure’ or ‘clean’, although the two are not etymologically related. In short, this is a word with powerful associations, whose rich evocations of timeless landscape, Belle Epoque splendour, and ancient Magyar soil beyond the borders made it a natural choice when Péter Magyar, a picaresque former government hanger-on plucked from the pages of a Mikszáth novella, found himself needing a name for his hastily convened political party in 2025.
So transformative, so long Orbán’s reign, that it has cleanly split Hungarian society into two camps: those who want it to continue, and those who do not. For the first time in a decade and a half, including four years ago when an unholy alliance of everyone from the post-fascist Jobbik to the Greens to the followers of disgraced former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány banded together in a failed attempt to dispel the prime minister’s spectre, Orbán’s majority is finally under serious threat. This can be seen in the polls published by both the pro-government and independent pollsters, although the former show a close election and the latter a landslide Tisza victory, in the comparative size of their rallies in Budapest on the March 15 national holiday (those who put this down to the ‘home advantage’ of liberals in the capital should be reminded that a Fidesz mayor governed the city from 2010 until 2019), and in the desperate measures that the government has taken to stem the bleeding, whether it be fiscally irresponsible giveaways like a fourteenth monthly pension payment, the dismissal of the party’s experienced campaign manager András Gyürk for Orbán’s spad Balázs Orbán (no relation) last August, or the aggressive surveillance campaign that the security services — or at least those branches housed in the Prime Minister’s Office — have conducted against the Tisza Party. This is not the behaviour of a government confident in its prospects of reelection.
In certain regards, Magyar is the ideal challenger to Orbán’s seemingly endless rule. His youth and energy present a favourable contrast to the flabby, zebra-munching incumbent, and the girls seem to like him. His lack of political experience — or any experience at all, having spent almost his entire career banqueting from the governing party’s teat — spares him the unsavoury associations with the cabinet of old socialist skeletons that spooked wavering centre-right voters from voting for the united opposition last time around. As a former Fidesz apparatchik, Magyar’s appeal is to the party’s conscience; the essence of his pitch is to finally give the people the good king without the wicked advisors.
Yet caution is advised. There were very good reasons why Fidesz kept Magyar far from any real power: his indiscretions and frankly bizarre conduct of his personal affairs — again, we are on Mikszáth’s turf — are the talk of the town in Budapest. What is publicly known is that Magyar was previously married to Judit Varga, who served as Fidesz’s Minister of Justice from 2019 to 2023. In April 2023, Varga, along with the President of Hungary, Katalin Novák, had signed off on a pardon for a man who had been convicted of helping cover up sexual abuse in a Calvinist-run children’s home. Novák, like Orbán, is a Calvinist, and was close to the synodal president of the Hungarian Reformed Church. Unsurprisingly, there was a scandal when this was revealed in February 2024, and both Varga and Novák resigned. Into this whirlwind, Magyar, previously an obscure pro-Fidesz apparatchik, released secret voice recordings of his ex-wife (the relationship broke down at some point in early 2023) calmly and matter-of-factly discussing the corrupt dealings of the Orbán government. Magyar began organising anti-government protests, and in July 2024, he took over the (mostly inactive) Tisza Party in order to contest elections. Soon after the release of the voice recordings, Varga alleged both verbal and physical abuse from Magyar, as well as generally unstable behaviour, backed up by a police report from 2020 (which Magyar disputes the accuracy of). Magyar has, in turn, alleged that state personnel attached to Varga had been improperly used for personal purposes in order to coerce and intimidate him.
Some sort of kompromat drop has been hinted at by the pro-government media and is expected before the election, although nothing damning has appeared as of this article’s editorial deadline. In early 2026, Magyar even stated, pre-emptively, that a secretly recorded video of him having sex from 2024 existed and was being used as blackmail. Magyar’s combustive personality, his inexperience, the slapdash organisation of his young party, and his decision to fill his shadow cabinet with ‘big beasts’ with established careers in politics and industry (such as former Shell executive István Kapitány or old Fidesz foreign policy hand Anita Orbán, of no relation to the prime minister or to Balázs Orbán), and who no doubt bring ideas of their own about the future direction of the country, understandably raise questions around his ability to impose his authority over a future Tisza government.
What explains Magyar’s rise? A commonly proffered explanation is corruption; this is plausible only to those whose knowledge of the region extends no further than the inner rings of Vienna or Budapest and who, when they go to the Kaffeehaus, order Wiener melange, when in fact they should try the black Central European brew of hypocrisy and ennui in which everything in this part of the world is drenched. East of Munich, a blasé ‘they’re all doing it!’ attitude towards corruption is the norm, and Péter Magyar’s success in boosting his profile through an anti-corruption message is less due to moral outrage than pleasure taken in salacious gossip (and as the events detailed above demonstrate, the gossip is indeed highly salacious). Corruption cannot explain any variation in Fidesz’s fortunes — Lőrinc Mészáros (a childhood friend of Orbán who is now the richest man in Hungary) and all the rest were already rich men ten years ago, yet this never lost Fidesz an election. None of this was ever a secret; the internet exists in Hungary too, and critical journalism is easily accessible. It is simply of no concern to the coalition of pensioners, gypsies, and wage labourers who vote for Fidesz that public tenders are rigged, private enterprise squashed, and EU development funds put towards questionable ends.
No: the Hungarian voter will forgive Orbán his zebras, and they will allow him much more. What the man on the Csepel omnibus truly cannot forgive is the decline of his own living standards. Real GDP has stagnated, the figure for 2025 being only 98.7% of where it was three years ago. Orbán frequently boasts that Hungary’s continued energy trade with Russia has allowed it to weather the supply shock that has bedevilled heavy industry elsewhere on the continent, yet Hungarian inflation has consistently been the highest among the Visegrád countries (consisting of itself, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia), accelerating in 2023 even as it mellowed elsewhere. The bill for Orbán’s Faustian bargain with German auto manufacturers, placed at the commanding heights of Hungarian industry in exchange for a decade of modest growth, has finally come due, with the country’s industrial output shrinking to 93.6% of its 2021 value. Since Orbán took office, the labour share of GDP has, against the tendency to stagnation both in the region and the EU as a whole, undergone a steady decline. All this has only been exacerbated by Hungary’s constrained access to EU budgetary funds, which over the period of the bloc’s 2014-2020 budget (or ‘multiyear financial framework’ in eurocrat jargon) averaged 3.2% of the country’s GDP per year.
Remember that it was not always such. It is easy to criticise Orbán’s economic policies from the vantage point of 2026, but his government, though it crushed the ambitions of the entrepreneurial middle classes, brought real, tangible benefits to the ordinary citizen. Critics of Orbán’s economic policy often cite Hungary’s middling GDP growth measured against the regional average, but this neglects the picture in the latter half of the 2000s under the socialist government, when the country had fallen behind its neighbours. Hungary was also disproportionately affected by the global financial crisis, which forced the communist successor party to turn to the IMF to avoid default.
Orbán, by raiding Hungary’s private pension funds to the tune of €14 billion, managed to stabilise the deficit while also reducing the corporate and income tax burden, paying off the government’s outstanding obligations to the IMF by 2013 and closing its Budapest office. In 2011, he bailed out homebuyers by allowing them to pay off foreign currency-denominated mortgages at submarket fixed exchange rates, an episode largely unknown in Britain, but an abiding source of trauma in relations with Austria, whose banks suffered the brunt of the adjustment. Unemployment has been consistently low. The government’s signature policy of subsidising household energy bills is wildly popular for reasons that need no explanation. The tightening of these subsidies almost certainly played its part in Tisza’s poll surge, although the government has once more dipped into its pockets in advance of the election.
It will not come as news to Pimlico Journal’s readers that in the age of mass immigration, figures like GDP paint a much less reliable picture of a country’s quality of life than they once did. British visitors to Budapest are often favourably struck by its safe streets and its largely autochthonous population, while Orbán has pitched Hungary as an island of demographic calm amidst the maelstrom gripping Western Europe at the centre of his pitch to supporters at home and abroad — ‘no migration, more babies’ as one government minister recently proclaimed to GB News. But Hungary, too, is wrestling with its own Orbánwave in the rapidly multiplying numbers of (mostly) South Asians to whom the government has issued work and study permits since the lockdowns, and who have been deployed as the avant-garde of wage discipline everywhere that labour markets are tight.
Their presence is laxly controlled and their true numbers are almost certainly not known — take it on the authority of my Indian roommate in the sleazy Ferencváros, who used to regale me with lurid tales of visa fraud among his Deliveroo milieu (they still wear their traditional light-blue dress in Hungary too). These migrants have palpably changed the civic landscape not only in Budapest, but in provincial backwaters like Hajdúszoboszló on the Great Plains, bringing with them the usual range of behaviours drearily familiar in the West. As in Poland, where Donald Tusk was successfully able to take the immigration issue out of the hands of PiS, this has provided easy fodder for the opposition, with Tisza promising to terminate the government’s guest worker program once elected.
What does Tisza want? No one in Hungary is quite sure. The Tisza manifesto is an awkward jigsaw of ideas that do not fit together, promising fiscal austerity while offering generous social promises. That this is a campaign brochure and not a program for government can be seen by the fact that it duplicates, and in some cases outbids, the government’s election giveaways like the fourteenth monthly pension payment and energy subsidies. This is to be paid for by a progressive shakeup of the tax system, although this has not been costed. There are fairly credible rumours dating back to November of a ‘secret’ government program in which the burdens of the tax reform and the austerity program are made more explicit, but the general thrust of this document is not that different from what Tisza is openly campaigning on. In Magyar’s party, all the classic elements of Eastern European anti-politics unite — a charismatic leader with a field of paper candidates and shady businessmen behind him, a vague ideology of professionalism, decency, and anti-corruption, and a set of centre-right policies tacked on as an apparent afterthought. In the event of a Magyar victory, Budapest’s charity shops will see an influx of tweed and Barbour jackets; its department stores a shortage of blue polyester suits.
It should be clear from the above that Magyar’s challenge is not an intellectual repudiation of Orbánism, but an immanent critique. Thus, with no ideological differences, ideas have played little role in the campaign, which Magyar has tried to centre around corruption and cost-of-living issues, and Orban around issues of sovereignty raised by the war in Ukraine. The whole awesome power of the government’s public relations apparatus has been levied for a campaign smearing Magyar as a puppet of Zelensky or the eurocrats (the anti-Tisza billboards that have covered the country for a year now often feature the EPP’s president and parliamentary group leader Manfred Weber, a man barely known even in his native Germany, as the personification of this sinister power). Magyar has been careful to dodge this obvious tripwire.
Fidesz and Tisza are not the only parties contesting the election. Current polling suggests a potential four-party parliament, with the centre-left Democratic Coalition and the radical-right Mi Hazánk (‘Our Homeland’, a splinter from Jobbik after it politically moderated) each forming small parliamentary groups. The Democratic Coalition was for many years the party of the aforementioned disgraced former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, whose loyal cohort of followers wandered the desert with him for two decades, living off the carcasses of whatever opposition campaign they attached themselves to before moving on again. He stepped down last year, and the party leadership fell into the hands of his former wife of thirty years, Klára Dobrev. Whether they enter parliament is questionable; their contribution will be to act as a spoiler for Tisza, although Magyar will certainly be happy to have the Gyurcsányites campaigning against him rather than beside him. Our Homeland is exactly what one might imagine a party of that name to be: a jolly coalition of coronaboomers, fascist bodybuilders, and grizzled Christian Democrat Carroll Quigley enthusiasts for whom Orbán is a traitor to the national cause and an agent of dark masonic forces. Although some pro-government polls suggest they might be the kingmaker, it is improbable in the extreme that they will lend their support to Fidesz, nor will they happily lend their votes to Péter Magyar’s program of fiscal consolidation.
The outcome of the election is anyone’s guess. As my own well-placed sources in the Hungarian version of the Red Lion inform me, the mood in the government camp is that while the headline numbers put out by the independent polling companies forecasting huge majorities for Tisza are misleading insofar as they do not take into account what they themselves show are the large numbers of undecided voters, it will be a close-run thing. Their recurrent contention that polls are not neutral reflections of a reality that they do not interact with, but themselves shape individual behaviour by influencing perceptions of the probability of certain events, applies no less to their own optimistic internals, the implicit message of which is ‘Orbán’s got this, don’t defect’.
Fidesz has so thoroughly ensconced itself at every level of public life that an oppositional parliamentary majority alone would not be enough to dismantle the regime, any more than the collapse of communism displaced the old socialist networks from the bureaucracy. Yet the mere fact of Magyar’s exit shows that the centrifugal forces within the government coalition are already strong and will only grow stronger, with secret service repression of the type that has already reared its ugly head during the campaign — and which will only intensify with the widely anticipated reorganisation of the Interior Ministry in the event of a Fidesz triumph — perhaps Orbán’s only card left to play, regardless of whether he wins or loses. When the Liberal patrimonialism of Mikszáth’s day finally imploded and the boozy squires were turfed out of parliament, dour security men stepped into their place to restore order. Perhaps the lesson of the Tisza experiment will be that you really can step in the same river twice.
This article was written by Franz Pokorny, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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