On the international stage, Viktor Orbán appears a ferocious beast. The envy of populists worldwide, Mr Orbán’s “illiberal” system has stood unshakeable for the past sixteen years. Having won a sweeping mandate in 2010, his Fidesz party have engineered virtually all aspects of the Hungarian social, political and economic realms in their own favour.
Employing the imagery of a well-oiled propaganda machine with its megaphone pointed at Europe after consolidating the narrative in the domestic sphere, The Economist’s recent Charlemagne column claims “it would be unwise to bet against Mr Orbán’s lot” in the upcoming parliamentary elections. “Reshaping the ideological order in a country of 10m people”, the article continues, “ is small fry for someone of Mr Orbán’s self-appointed global stature”.
There was a time when this analysis was gospel. But with an ease not dissimilar in appearance to that with which Orbán cemented power, he may now be on the verge of losing it.
Polling and internal panic
Tell any former apparatchik that “the numbers don’t lie”, and you may be laughed out of the room quicker than you can say “two-thirds majority”. But the data is becoming impossible to ignore. It is not just independent pollsters that place the insurgent Tisza between 5 and 15 percentage points ahead — there have been suggestions that internal Fidesz consensus is just as “brutal”.
Sources close to the inner circle have revealed an internal party mood laying somewhere on the spectrum between mild unease and code-red pandemonium. The primary catalyst? The sheer size of the crowds Péter Magyar continues to draw. In some cases, they have reached over 100,000 — certainly no “small fry” for a country of ten million.
Dumpster diving
Perhaps the most tell-tale sign that Fidesz have lost control of the narrative domestically has been the recent kompromat scandal. With less than a month until election day, a potential Sword of Damocles still hangs over Péter Magyar’s head.
In mid-February, a grainy image of a bedroom appeared on radnaimark.hu, a website ominously named after Tisza’s vice president. Shortly after, Magyar put out a statement claiming that Fidesz had lured him into a “honey-trap” kompromat operation, and recorded — and may have doctored — compromising material on him.
With the tape having been recorded in August of 2024, and still not having been released, it shows not just the extent to which Fidesz fear Magyar’s momentum, but for the length of time they have done so. Although sex “scandals” are not a foreign concept to any country’s politics, the context surrounding this one does not indicate a government with a solid control of the domestic narrative.
The Ukraine escalation
My previous analysis discussed the importance of Ukraine to this election. The past few weeks have seen an acute escalation of tensions between Kyiv and an already-confrontational Orbán. After a Russian strike damaged the Druzhba pipeline in late January, Westbound oil stopped arriving in Hungary. Orbán has since accused Zelenskyy of “blackmail”, while simultaneously claiming the pipeline damage is a fiction designed to sabotage Hungarian energy security.
The theatrics are ramping up. Earlier this week, a heated exchange of words — with what amounted to a veiled threat on the Hungarian Prime Minister’s life by the Ukrainian president — culminated in a social media post of a visibly emotional Orbán calling his family, warning of “Ukrainian danger”. Between the deployment of troops to energy infrastructure in anticipation of Ukrainian sabotage, the seizure of an armed Ukrainian convoy carrying millions in cash and gold, and the government’s upping of the national terror alert level have led some to speculate Orbán may be seeking a possible military escalation.
We are a far cry from George W. Bush’s Iraq days, and there was certainly a time when Mr Orbán would have seemed far too politically astute to believe this could create a “rally around the flag” effect. However, between Fidesz’s muffled cries of desperation and projections of power, the possibility of an ace up Orbán’s sleeve before election day is not to be discounted.
It is certainly a futile task to make definitive predictions about the outcome of the upcoming Hungarian parliamentary elections. But it is equally unreasonable to equate the control over the narrative held by the king of illiberalism just three years ago, to that held by its contemporary cadaverous counterpart.