Could Viktor Orbán be back in 2030? Why Péter Magyar has a fight on his hands after landslide win

The mood was jubilant among liberals and pro-Europeans in Hungary and beyond on April 13 as Péter Magyar led the Tisza party to a landslide election victory. His win ended the 16-year administration of Viktor Orbán’s pro-Russian Fidesz party. Given the high turnout and margin of victory, giving Tisza a two-thirds constitutional majority in parliament, the jubilant mood seems justified.

However, defeating Orbán will be a long-term project. While several centrist politicians around the world have successfully unseated governing far-right populists in recent years, fewer have been successful in keeping them at bay long term. Poland’s Donald Tusk and Joe Biden in the US are probably the most obvious examples of this struggle.

A major challenge for Magyar will be to undo the system Orbán has put in place over the past 16 years to exercise control over the country. A key component of that system is Fidesz’s extensive control over the media.

Research I have carried out alongside colleagues shows that, despite a semblance of pluralism, most Hungarian media outlets are now controlled by people close to Fidesz. The pro-Fidesz Central European Press and Media Foundation (Kesma) plays a particularly central role, controlling more than 500 national and local media outlets.

Here, the experience of Poland is informative. When Tusk’s centre-right Civic Coalition replaced the populist, right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party as Poland’s governing coalition in December 2023, one of the first actions of the new government was to try and depoliticise public media.

In eight years of PiS government, Polish state media was accused of promoting the party’s policies and launched personal attacks on opposition figures, including Tusk. During a campaign rally months ahead of the election, Tusk said: “We will need exactly 24 hours to turn the PiS TV back into public TV. Take my word for it.”

And when in power, his government acted swiftly. It fired the supervisory boards of all three of Poland’s public media institutions – Polish Television, Polish Radio and the Polish Press Agency.

The PiS and its supporters quickly pushed back. PiS organised street protests and a sit-in at the public broadcaster, prompting the government to send in the police. This created an opportunity for PiS to denounce the new government’s action as an anti-democratic attack on the free press.

Mishandling the depoliticisation of the media was part of the Tusk government’s bad start to the post-populist era. At least partly as a result of this, PiS was able to regroup. In June 2025 it secured a big electoral win when PiS-backed Karol Nawrocki beat the governing party’s candidate, Rafał Trzaskowski, to the presidency.

Post-Orbánomics

Beyond the depoliticisation of captured public institutions – which include not only the media but also courts and parliament – the economic performance of Hungary’s post-populist government will be important. It is one thing to promise a brighter future; it is another to deliver it.

Here, the Biden administration provides a cautionary tale. According to American political scientist Paul Pierson, Biden’s economic programme was arguably the most ambitious democratic economic programme of investment and stimulus since the 1960s.

As a result, unemployment fell more quickly in the US than elsewhere after the COVID pandemic and, for the first time since the 1970s, wage inequality in the US decreased. Yet, during the 2024 presidential election campaign, the democrats were not able to take advantage of this success.

Instead, inflation largely caused by external factors such as post-pandemic supply chain disruptions and increasing energy prices became the key economic talking point. The usual authoritarian populist “culture wars” campaign did the rest to see US voters elect Donald Trump for a second term.

Magyar will face an equally daunting task when it comes to reforming the Hungarian economy. Since the end of socialism in the late 1980s, Hungary’s economic model has been strongly dependent on foreign direct investment (FDI).

It initially depended on inward investment from western Europe, in particular from Germany. Now it depends increasingly on investment from east Asia. The strong reliance on FDI has created what researchers have called a dependent market economy model of capitalism.

Orbán has sought to attract investment from China and South Korea into EV battery manufacturing. Due to, among other things, the massive water usage of EV battery plants, this part of “Orbánomics” is ecologically disastrous and highly unpopular among the Hungarian population. This led some observers to consider foreign EV battery investments as an electoral liability for Orbán.

In this context, Hungary’s post-socialist strategy of relying on FDI may have run its course. But developing an alternative economic strategy will be no easy task. Over the past decade or so, the EU has relaxed its traditionally hostile approach to industrial policy, giving member states more leeway to pursue industrial change.

So far, governments in eastern and central Europe have used this leeway to try and take back control over their domestic economies by reducing FDI dependence and driving out foreign companies from some industries. But this strategy has not helped to provide the economic growth and uplift in living standards that these countries need.

Magyar will need to surround himself with the right economic advisers to figure out what an alternative model that delivers on the promise of a more prosperous future for Hungarians could look like. If that fails, Orbán – with the help of his backers in Russia and the US – will try and regroup in opposition and possibly return in 2030 portraying Fidesz as the saviour of the Hungarian people.

Gerhard Schnyder receives funding from NORFACE under the "Democratic Governance in a Turbulent Age" programme for the project "Populist Backlash, Democratic Backsliding, and the Crisis of the Rule of Law in the European Union" (POPBACK project - popback.org)