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Is This Viktor Orbán’s Last Stand?

After 16 years in power in Hungary, his Fidesz party is trailing in the polls by double digits behind a new opposition party.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s autocratic prime minster, shouldn’t have had anything to worry about in the run-up to the April 12 general election. In four previous votes, he and his Fidesz party—a far-right trailblazer in Europe—triumphed handily, securing two-thirds majorities in parliament in every election since 2010. Orbán’s governments overhauled the Hungarian state in Fidesz’s image and tried to craft a system that would perpetrate Fidesz rule indefinitely. Moreover, the muscle behind Orbán and his party could hardly be more formidable: Vladimir Putin’s Russia, President Donald Trump, and China, too, line up behind Orbán, their favorite European leader.

And, yet, Fidesz is trailing a new opposition party, Tisza, by double digits and the buttons that Orbán’s pushed so deftly for 16 years—immigration, Hungarian nativism, anti-LGBTQ, “peace”—aren’t triggering Hungarians as they had in the past. Magyars appear fed up with the economic backlash of lost EU funding, the high cost of living, ubiquitous corruption, and a long trail of unseemly scandals. In 2024, Hungarian President Katalin Novak resigned after it emerged that she had pardoned the accomplice of a convicted child abuser. A pedophilia affair last year involving videos that showed children suffering abuse in state-run juvenile facilities prompted tens of thousands to take to the streets.

The gale-force storm has observers cautiously convinced that Tisza (Respect and Freedom Party) could upend Orbán’s “embedded autocracy.” Two of Hungary’s most astute analysts, Andras Bozoki and Zoltan Fleck, describe Orbán’s government as a highly centralized regime that is so deeply entrenched in the composition of society and in control of pseudo-democratic structures that it locks in its own electoral continuation. The Fidesz state, they argue, has the trappings of a democracy—regular ballots, basic civil liberties, and multiple parties—but the system is fixed to yield the same result. Orbán rewrote the Constitution, packed the courts, promoted and paid off loyal allies, and redrew electoral districts to Fidesz’s advantage. Independent media was nationalized or bought up by Orbán supporters, while critical civil society is squeezed out of the public sphere.

“There’s a chance Fidesz will exit from power peacefully,” said Zoltan Fleck, legal scholar at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and co-author of Embedded Autocracy: Hungary in the European Union. “But authoritarian regimes don’t usually finish........

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