The year that has just begun, 2026, promises to be full of major changes. Whether the new perspective favoring populist right-wing parties, sponsored by the American side of the Atlantic, will consolidate, or whether we will instead see a decline in these positions, will become clear very soon. Important elections are scheduled for this year. Alternative für Deutschland will be called upon to prove itself in the heart of former West Germany, with important elections in the Länder of Baden-Württemberg (March 8) and Rhineland-Palatinate (March 23), but the real test for the European right will be on April 12, once again in Hungary. The stakes are high, not only for Viktor Orbán, who is seeking his fifth consecutive term (his sixth overall), but for the whole of Central Europe, which, after Andrej Babiš’s victory in the Czech Republic and the crippling of the Tusk government in Poland, may once again see the Visegrád Group playing a leading role both in the EU and in the now long-running Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
The political context
During this term, Orbán, who has been Hungary’s prime minister without interruption since 2010, has surpassed Angela Merkel as the third longest-serving European prime minister ever: ahead of him are only Jean-Claude Juncker, Christian Democrat prime minister of Luxembourg for eighteen years (1995-2013), and Tage Fritjof Erlander, Swedish Social Democratic prime minister from 1946 to 1969. Over the last fifteen years, Hungary and the entire Visegrád Group have seen Budapest and its head of government as absolute protagonists. Orbán’s charismatic figure, the economic successes of his governments, and his ability to maintain a very high specific weight in foreign policy have greatly complicated the lives of Hungarian opposition parties, which to date have always failed in every attempt to even remotely undermine the dominance of the Fidesz-KDNP tandem and its leader. On the contrary, over the years, Orbán’s position has become increasingly consolidated, maintaining a gap of around 20 percentage points between the government and the opposition. Beyond Orbán’s indisputable merits, the diverse composition of the opposition forces, which have always been divided between the MSZP (socialists, heirs of the old communist regime of János Kádár), the far right (first Jobbik and then Mi Hazánk Mozgalom) and smaller liberal and environmentalist parties, has certainly played a major role in keeping the prime minister firmly in power in a parliamentary republic such as Hungary. Hungary, a unicameral country, elects the 199 members of its National Assembly (Országgyűlés) through a mixed proportional and majority system: 106 are allocated through a majority system in single-member constituencies, while the remaining 93 are allocated through a proportional system, with a threshold of 5% for individual parties and 10% for coalitions.
Orbán versus Magyar, a two-horse race
A party or coalition must therefore win exactly 100 seats in order to govern in Budapest. As already mentioned, the prime minister’s coalition will once again be called upon to prove itself. This coalition consists of Orbán’s Fidesz party and the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP), a partnership between two historic parties on the Hungarian political scene that has been in place since 2006. Contending for victory against Orbán in next April’s elections will no longer be a coalition, as was the case in 2022, when the United for Hungary (Egységben Magyarországért) alliance failed spectacularly, to the consternation of many pollsters who had predicted the opposite, but a single party: the Respect and Freedom Party (Tisztelet és Szabadság Párt, abbreviated to TISZA), affiliated with the European People’s Party and led by Péter Magyar, who, despite being its leading exponent and prime ministerial candidate, is not its founder. Created in 2020 by Attila Szabó and Boldizsár Deák with the specific intention of competing in the upcoming elections, the party gained notoriety with the accession of its current leader, Magyar.
A rising star in Hungarian politics, 45-year-old Magyar is difficult to classify according to the political science standards of Western European observers: the ex-husband of Judit Varga (Orbán’s Minister of Justice from 2019 to 2023), Magyar left Fidesz, proclaiming his disappointment, in the spring of 2024, and was elected MEP for TISZA in June 2024, becoming its secretary the following month. To challenge Orbán for the position of prime minister, the TISZA leader immediately decided to play a different card from his unfortunate predecessors: presenting himself as a repentant Orbán supporter, he preferred to accuse the government of betraying Hungary rather than being an enemy of Brussels. Despite his affiliation with the EPP and the blessing of its powerful secretary Manfred Weber (a CSU representative close to Angela Merkel), Magyar was careful not to present himself as “the man of Europe,” a role that had led to the downfall of all Orbán’s old opponents, instead betting everything on an image of a patriot with a human face. Sensing the ideological fragmentation of the Hungarian opposition, whose votes he would need to govern, Magyar chose to focus entirely on delegitimizing the prime minister, presenting him as a corrupt, anti-democratic, and politically unreliable administrator, championing an “anti-corruption” policy that an Italian observer might recall as similar to that of the Five Star Movement a few years ago. Perceiving the sensitivity, in a conservative country like Hungary, of many ethical issues (for example, those concerning homosexual rights but also the relocation of refugees), Magyar has repeatedly avoided taking a clear stance, for example by deliberately deciding not to participate in the large illegal gay pride parade in Budapest last June, which was attended by a large number of foreign politicians, including Italians Elly Schlein and Carlo Calenda and the Green mayor of the capital, Gergely Karácsony. Magyar’s position, although ideologically lacking a well-defined identity and therefore politically precarious, could prove electorally insidious, bringing together a vast audience of diverse subjects and individuals united only by their hostility towards Orbán. In this perspective, it is not surprising that all the other opposition parties have remained on the sidelines, from the nationalist far right of Mi Hazánk Mozgalom led by László Toroczkai, the popular former mayor of Ásotthalom, to the Democratic Coalition (Demokratikus Koalíció, DK) of former prime minister and former communist Ferenc Gyurcsány.
Election campaign or referendum campaign?
While Magyar’s strategy of turning the election campaign and the spring elections into a referendum for or against Orbán is clear, the incumbent prime minister’s tactics are different. Although the charismatic face of Fidesz suffers from a natural lack of “novelty effect,” Orbán still has many arrows at his disposal, starting with the economy and foreign policy. As for the economy, whose ministry is headed by the independent Márton Nagy, former deputy governor of the Hungarian Central Bank (MNB) and former president of the Budapest Stock Exchange, the data are encouraging: inflation, considered out of control by many foreign media outlets, has fallen from 5.5% in January 2025 to 3.8% last November, while Hungary’s GDP has grown by 1.2 percentage points.
The news is even better when it comes to real wages, with Hungary outperforming all other European Union countries: after 2.9% growth in the year just ended, ECA International estimates 3.5% growth for 2026. Hungary and its economy continue to remain highly competitive despite the geo-economic situation not exactly favoring European Union countries: proof of this can be seen in the opening of large factories in Hungary during the last four years of the current government, including the new large BMW factory inaugurated at the end of September in Debrecen (2,749 jobs) and the expansion of the Mercedes-Benz plant in Kecskemét. In addition, Szeged will be home to the first European plant of BYD, the Chinese electric car giant headquartered in Shenzhen. Closely related to the economy is the geopolitical stance of the current Hungarian government: Budapest is in fact the last European chancellery, together with Bratislava, to buy Russian gas, thus helping to keep energy prices under control and maintaining the competitiveness of Hungarian industries compared to those of other European Union countries. Hungary, together with Slovakia, also resells its electricity (produced in part by the Paks nuclear power plant, which is scheduled for expansion) to Ukraine, for which it is now an irreplaceable supplier.
With regard to the bloody conflict on its borders (Budapest shares 103 kilometers of border with Kiev), Orbán’s position has remained anchored to very strict criteria of realpolitik from the outset, which, on the one hand, penalized the executive during the end of Biden’s presidency, but on the other hand strengthened it during Donald Trump’s second presidency, who twice floated the idea of a major peace conference in Budapest, precisely because of the realistic attitude maintained by the Hungarian government towards the conflict, for which the White House holds the previous Democratic administration responsible. Perceiving the great popularity of Orbán’s position on the war, Péter Magyar, while describing Fidesz as a party strongly influenced by Russia, is trying to keep a low profile on the issue, supporting positions very similar to those of Orbán, declaring that he has no intention of sending weapons, let alone troops, in support of the Ukrainian government, and also stating that he wants to make Ukraine’s accession to the EU subject to a referendum. Magyar argues, however, that relations between Budapest and Moscow should be reset, or at least subjected to a robust review, just like those with China and Turkey, other chancelleries, those of Beijing and Ankara, with which Orbán has established solid relations during his terms in office, with Hungary representing the destination of a quarter of all Chinese investments in the EU.
The candidates’ positions on the relationship between Hungary and the European Union are more distant: never idyllic, relations between Budapest and Brussels have reached their lowest point this year, with the Hungarian capital aligning itself with Washington in its role as a wrecker of a Union increasingly seen as a cage for peoples and a threat to the sovereignty of its members. Magyar, the enfant prodige of the European People’s Party, promises to normalize relations with Brussels, thus unblocking billions of euros in EU funds (currently frozen due to sanctions against Hungary) which, according to the leader of Tisza, should revive the Hungarian economy and limit once and for all the influence of the current prime minister and his party, whom he considers, as already mentioned, a corrupt caste dedicated to mere private interests. Tisza’s enthusiastic endorsements by European leaders have caused embarrassment to the Magyar leader, who is actually trying in every way to prove his independence, even though he cannot do without their support.
Determined to build a platform dedicated to a single purpose: to dethrone Orbán, Magyar therefore maintains an ambiguous and unclear position on all issues other than the mere figure of his rival: from immigration to LGBT rights, from the rights of Magyar minorities in Slovakia and Transylvania to possible accession to the euro, Tisza’s line seems to boil down to “let’s get rid of Orbán, then we’ll see.”
Who will win?
It is difficult to make predictions about the upcoming Hungarian elections: both because the strong single-member component of the constituencies up for grabs makes individual local candidates very influential, and because, traditionally, polls commissioned by opposition supporters tend to greatly overestimate the latter’s performance. An example of this is the 2022 election campaign, when most of the pro-European and pro-Democratic press considered Orbán and his challenger Péter Márki-Zay to be “neck and neck,” only to see the latter trailing by twenty percentage points the day after the vote. However, everyone seems to agree on one thing: the 2026 challenge will be the most difficult one yet for Orbán. The opposition’s choice of a candidate who is not openly disruptive has proved to be insidious, and the polls, net of those purely propaganda-driven ones commissioned by Tisza and the media sympathetic to him, bear witness to this. probably closest to reality is the poll conducted last October by the XXI Század Intézet foundation, which sees Fidesz in the lead with 44%, followed by Tisza with 41%, with Mi Hazánk at 7% and DK at 3% trailing far behind. If the elections were to end with a similar result, the 2026 election would be the most closely fought Hungarian political election since 2006, when Orbán was defeated by the socialist Gyurcsány by just 1.2%, bearing in mind that, historically, Fidesz tends to perform best in the final months of the election campaign, gaining percentage points in the last few months before the polls. According to the Nézőpont Institute, it is also the incumbent prime minister who is considered most suitable for the role of head of government: he is preferred by 45% of Hungarians, compared to 34% who would instead trust Magyar, a sign that it is more the idiosyncrasy for Orbán than the esteem for their own party’s candidate (who, among other things, is currently on trial for theft) that is pushing them to vote for Tisza.
A vote with continental significance
As already mentioned in the case of the Czech Republic, every election in the Visegrád countries takes on significant weight in the current geopolitical situation. In the case of Hungary, the significance of the vote goes beyond the current security crisis in Eastern Europe and takes on crucial importance, even in a purely ideological-political sense, for the internal structure of the European Union. For sixteen years, Orbán has increasingly represented the point of reference for defenders of the prerogatives of nation states within the European Union and, not insignificantly, the only true right-wing identity-based executive, even when this camp still represented a marginal share of public opinion on the Old Continent.
photo: Random photos 1989 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0