The shock
On election night, April 12, a spontaneous street party erupted in Hungary’s cities, in images that were to circle the globe. Young people flooded the streets waving flags, dancing, crying, hugging and celebrating the major victory of Peter Magyar and the Tisza Party over Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party.¹ How did we get here, and more importantly, why did this victory feel so unbelievable for millions even on election night?
When the results came trickling in, the entire country was watching intently. As the night went on, commentators on the government-controlled public media became eerily confused and silent in the face of the biggest celebration in the democratic history of the country.
Tense election nights are normal. Candidates sometimes poll close to each other, and given the margin of error, there can be unexpected results. This time the polls, which predicted a major Tisza victory, didn’t lie. Yet as the election approached, Fidesz remained confident. Opposition voters wondered whether Fidesz had different information than the public, and whether it was preparing some sort of manipulation of the election results and would refuse to concede defeat. The landslide defeat made such worries unfounded.
Now that the election is well behind us, we can try to understand the changes in the political landscape that preceded the vote. Clearly, expectations had not kept up with those changes. The Tisza landslide can best be seen as the consequence of an interplay between institutional factors, changes in media consumption and the emergence of a credible challenger.
Why Fidesz looked unbeatable right to the end
The reason why everyone was shocked by the results on election night was that Fidesz used the same strategies that helped it to landslide victories in the three previous elections, and expected comparable results.
Orbán is said to have stated, “You only have to win once, but win big.” During its 16 years in power, Fidesz reshaped the electoral system to play to its strengths and gradually captured large parts of the state, including the public media. The party also placed loyalists in positions that were designed to serve as checks on the government, including the presidency, attorney general’s office, constitutional court, electoral commission and media council. In rural areas, the party’s patronage network remained highly effective.
After winning a supermajority in 2010, Fidesz redesigned the electoral system to maximize the advantages of the largest party. Hungary already had a mixed-member majoritarian system,² but Fidesz pushed the electoral system in a more majoritarian direction by changing the weights of the proportional and single-member votes, eliminating the second electoral round and redrawing district boundaries.
To further secure its position, Fidesz took over all public media and most of the independent print and broadcast media. In the countryside, Fidesz limited the range of information even more severely, as the party, with the help of “friendly oligarchs,” bought up all local newspapers that were once popular with the locals. As these small communities got cut off from independent news media, the opinions of local elites became ever more important. So Orbán came up with another “invention”: co-opting these elites.
One indicator of these changes was that Hungary had started to decline on the political freedom scale. Freedom House, which describes itself as “the oldest American organization devoted to the support and defense of democracy around the world,” classifies Hungary as a partly free country. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, which “publishes data and research on democracy and human rights,” gives the country 0.6 out of 1 on free and fair elections.³ People questioned whether an opposition victory under these circumstances was even possible.
Fidesz has often been classified as a populist party. The government indeed sought to fulfill the people’s immediate needs right before elections and by April 2026 it had spent 90 per cent of the estimated budget deficit on populist policies. However, in the countryside Orbán operated a more elaborate electoral machine to capture the votes of the most vulnerable. Fidesz’s “crony capitalism” gave public work contracts to friends and relatives. A new loyal oligarchy emerged that could provide public employment and distributed goods through local bosses and potentates. These actors were then tasked with delivering votes through reward and punishment.
So Fidesz was confident that it could mobilize more people than the polls expected. And some of the tactics were working. Fidesz won 2.5 million votes in 2026, in between its two million votes in the 2024 European Parliament elections and the three million it won in the last national election in 2022. The change in mobilization happened on the opposition side. And the institutional design that had protected Fidesz for over a decade increased the regime’s vulnerability once opposition coordination finally emerged.
The opposition coordination problem
On election night everyone was holding their breath as the results trickled in. Turnout, already high in 2022 at 70.2 per cent, rose in 2026 to close to 80 per cent. Did this mean that Orbán’s machine was working better or that the opposition successfully mobilized?
Opponents of the Orbán government were haunted by memories of the runup to the 2022 election, when they had had high hopes for a victory after the opposition decided to run in a coalition against Orbán. We know that even under free and fair elections, dominant-party regimes can emerge. Fidesz looked to the electoral system in Japan, where the Liberal Democratic Party was in power for 29 out of the 32 years after the 1994 electoral reform.
With single-member districts, there is pressure for the opposition to unite, as noted by French political scientist Maurice Duverger.4 On the district level, two big rival parties emerge because people are less willing to vote for smaller parties, and hence small parties drop out. In a mixed system, however, the list tier makes electoral coordination difficult as it allows small parties to survive. Fidesz made it increasingly easy for small parties to run and increasingly difficult for opposition parties to coordinate formally.
At the same time, Fidesz unified the political parties on the right with the motto “One camp one flag.” And the electoral engineering worked well for 12 years. The opposition was divided, riddled with the heritage of old ideological divisions and political scandals and the shadow of the 2008 economic crisis. Hence it could not effectively compete in the single-member districts.
Clearly, by 2022 many opposition voters had effectively become electoral system experts. They knew very well that in electoral districts they would have to run one-on-one against Fidesz, and the major opposition parties managed to form an electoral coalition. But it was too late: a true focal point did not emerge because of ideological differences, lack of a common image and lack of leadership. Fidesz won another supermajority. The roughly two million voters that wanted the Orbán regime out were bitterly disappointed in the failure of the opposition party alliances.
Scandal and the emergence of a focal point
The tide did not turn in 2022. What changed by 2026? Often, major changes in politics start with unintended errors. In 2024, the Fidesz-appointed President of the Republic, Katalin Novák, pardoned a teacher who was an accomplice in a pedophilia case. Public protests erupted against the government. Demonstrations of this magnitude were not new to Fidesz, and it reacted swiftly by giving in to some of the demands. Novák and Justice Minister Judit Varga resigned the following week. Viktor Orbán stayed clear of the case.
As fate would have it, Varga’s ex-husband was Peter Magyar, a former member of the inner circle of Fidesz. After the resignation of his former wife, he spoke up against the party in an online talk show, which was picked up by the media, especially the online media which had become the primary source of news for young people. A possible focal point for the opposition had emerged.
And there were signs of growing dissatisfaction. The party won its supermajority after the 2008 economic crisis; now there was another economic crisis in Hungary. According to every measurable indicator, the country had slid to the back of the European Union, and the people were feeling it in their pocketbooks and in unemployment, inflation and a weakening currency. This happened partly because the EU closed off the funds for Hungary. Orbán was running out of money for the local bosses, who were becoming less effective. And finally, information was reaching the countryside as the internet and smartphones became widely available.
Peter Magyar visited all of Hungary’s electoral districts, even remote countryside locations. The week after his first online media appearance, Magyar organized a huge opposition rally in Budapest (directed and recorded professionally), and the demonstrations kept growing across the country. Local rallies and local Tisza organizations (islands) brought information to the countryside. When opposition voters finally found their focal point, support for other opposition parties collapsed. After four failed elections, opposition voters knew the Hungarian electoral system too well to risk splitting their vote.
Under these new conditions, the very electoral system that had protected Fidesz made the regime vulnerable to a sudden swing. The majoritarian system turned against it. The surging opposition found solutions to the other issues that had previously held it back. Tisza moved its communication online. Opposition activists developed digital tools to monitor and document electoral irregularities. The campaign itself turned into an information cascade that culminated in the landslide election victory.
Hybrid regimes: Resilient but fragile
For years Hungarian politics appeared frozen. Fidesz’s institutional dominance, media power and electoral engineering created a system in which peaceful alternation in government seemed nearly impossible. Yet once opposition coordination crystallized around a credible focal point, the very institutional structure designed to secure the regime’s durability fuelled its defeat. The Hungarian election demonstrates both the resilience and the fragility of hybrid regimes: they may appear immovable until expectations suddenly shift and political coordination cascades into a revolution by election.
Notes
¹ Tisza is short for Tisztelet es Szabadság Párt, or in English, Respect and Freedom Party. Tisza is also the name of the second longest river in Hungary. Fidesz was orig: inally an abbreviation of Alliance of Young Democrats. Now it is Fidesz – Magyar Polgári Szövetség, or in English, Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance.
² In a mixed-member electoral system, voters cast two ballots: one for a party list under proportional representation and one for a candidate in a single-member district. Different mixed-member systems assign different weights to the proportional and district tiers when converting votes into parliamentary seats. The parliament contains representatives elected both from party lists and from single-member districts, hence it is called a “mixed-member” electoral system.
³ Canada has a score of 0.94 on the V-Dem Free and Fair Elections Index, 2025.
⁴ Maurice Duverger, Les partis politiques, 10th ed. (Paris: FeniXX, 1981); 1st edition published 1951.
