“This is a special opportunity to get rid of Orbán"

It’s T-minus 14 days until an election that will decide whether Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister since 2010 and icon for global nativism, gets another four-year term for Fidesz or is ousted by Péter Magyar’s Tisza movement.

In the final days of the campaign, Fidesz is throwing everything - allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use, claims of interference by the Ukrainian “terrorist state”, intelligence-service surveillance, and a visit by US vice-president J.D. Vance - at Magyar. Yet the latest Median poll shows a growing lead for Tisza - a centre-right party founded only six years ago and repurposed in 2024 as a Magyar vehicle.

As an electoral coalition, Tisza - binding together urban liberals and disgruntled non-metropolitan conservatives - is proving uniquely difficult for Fidesz to kill. “This is a special opportunity to get rid of Orbán,” says László Andor, the secretary-general of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) - a Brussels-based think tank affiliated to the Party of European Socialists (PES).

“There are many people who now say they will vote for Tisza on April 12 but not because they’re enthusiastic, not because they would want to stay with them for a long time but in order to benefit from this joy: the person of the prime minister would change in Hungary after 16 years and this Fidesz gang could be sent into retirement or maybe worse. This is about one opportunity”.

This joy is tempered for Andor, an economist who advised Hungarian centre-left prime minister Péter Medgyessy (2002-24) and served as European commissioner for employment and social affairs (2010-2014) under president José Durão Barroso. It is “not good if Hungary, with all this jubilation, delivers a parliament without a centre-left or without a left at all,” he tells the Twenty-Four Two Podcast. “In all likelihood, Hungary ends up now with a parliament with the centre-right, the far-right and the extreme-right or maybe just the centre-right and the far-right. That’s not something people normally celebrate in the European Union. I would certainly not celebrate this”.

If Tisza wins the election, Andor hopes the left will quickly start preparing for municipal and European Parliament elections in 2029. “That’s a lot of time to prepare, to come forward with new initiatives … Normally, in order to have progressive parties, you need progressive movements. You need a trade union movement with more energy. You need environmentalist movements. You need a student movement. You need a feminist movement. You need a peace movement. You need all different type of movements … to uphold politically the progressive alternative in a country”.

Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.