After 15 years, Viktor Orbán could lose power. But the opposition’s path is fraught with obstacles, from a lopsided electoral system to the extraordinary difficulty of restoring democracy even if they win.
Hungary is scheduled to hold parliamentary elections on April 12. After more than 15 years, this will be the first time that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán faces a strong opponent and could lose power. The stakes of the election could not be higher: if Orbán wins, Hungary will continue its slide into autocracy domestically and will keep blocking joint action at the EU level. But if he loses, a unique opportunity opens up: at home, the opposition will have a chance at re-establishing democracy, and within the EU, it could change Hungary’s position as the perennial obstructionist.
While Brussels has developed creative ways to handle a difficult Budapest, excluding it from decisions wherever possible, it has yet to find a permanent solution to Hungary’s vetoes. This means that the elections matter for the EU as a whole. Because of the global context, these elections are even more important: the challenges the EU faces, from a sputtering economic engine to a warmongering Russia and a hostile United States, are more significant than before.
The opposition Tisza party is currently leading in the polls, but things can still shift in the next few weeks, and a victory is far from certain in Hungary’s lopsided electoral system. This insight looks at the plausibility of an opposition victory and the chances of restoring democracy in Hungary afterwards.
Can the opposition win in Hungary?
An opposition victory will depend on at least three factors: the popularity of the opposition party or parties; the peculiarities of the Hungarian electoral system; and the events leading up to the election.
Domestic politics in Hungary has undergone a significant change in the past two years. The traditional left-right divide that defined Hungary’s politics since the early 1990s has collapsed. It has been replaced by a transformed arena where a political newcomer, Péter Magyar and his Tisza party, has gone from obscurity to challenging the governing far-right Fidesz party as the most popular political force. Even though Magyar, the ex-husband of Fidesz’s former justice minister, is a conservative politician, Tisza’s voter base is united by its opposition to Fidesz and incorporates much of the left-leaning vote. Left-liberal parties such as the Demokratikus Koalició, DK (Democratic Coalition) and Momentum have been decimated, and current polls show a three-party parliament as the most likely outcome, with only the extreme-right Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland) making it past the 5 per cent electoral threshold in addition to Fidesz and Tisza.
Tisza is currently in the lead, polling at around 44 per cent, while Fidesz is just behind at 41 per cent, and Our Homeland is at 6 per cent. (This is based on polling averages collected by political analyst Gábor Tóka and takes into account both independent pollsters, among which Tisza is leading by as much as 10 percentage points, and pro-government polling, where Fidesz is ahead by 6-7 percentage points.) The gap between Tisza and Fidesz has been narrowing since summer 2025, with the latter making some gains thanks to pre-election campaign spending, such as a subsidised mortgage scheme for first-time buyers, tax cuts for families and a pension top-up for the elderly.
However, popularity alone will not determine the outcome – the electoral system adds another layer of complexity. Hungary’s electoral system is a mixed system but has features that favour the largest party. The so-called winner compensation bolsters the winner’s position by adding ‘wasted’ votes for the winning party (the votes that went beyond the necessary margin for victory) to count towards its total number of seats. This runs counter to the logic of proportional electoral systems, where it is the losers that receive compensatory seats to ensure that their representation corresponds to their vote share, even if they fail to win districts. Winner compensation, however, significantly boosted Fidesz’s seats in previous elections. For example, in 2022 Fidesz received 53 per cent of the popular vote but 68 per cent of the seats, gaining a supermajority for the fourth time in a row.
According to polling experts, the system also disproportionately favours Fidesz, so much so that Tisza would need to win the popular vote by more than 3 percentage points to secure an election victory. This is partly due to gerrymandering – several Fidesz strongholds are smaller than the average voting district, for example, meaning that fewer Fidesz votes are required to elect a representative (though this assessment is based on previous elections and voter preferences could still shift). And partly because of other structural features of the system, such as the fact that the ethnic Hungarian vote beyond Hungary’s borders strongly favours Fidesz and that the elected minority representative has traditionally also aligned themselves with Fidesz.
Cheating at the ballot box is unlikely in Hungary, but there are several other elements that made recent elections “free but unfair” in the assessment of election observers. These include Fidesz’s abuse of state resources – such as organising ‘national consultations’ that spread misleading claimsunder the guise of public surveys or exploiting official government channels to send political ads to people who had only registered for the Covid vaccine. Additionally, the information environment is highly distorted: Fidesz-friendly businessmen have acquired hundreds of media outlets over the past 15 years, and journalists and the government’s critics are regularly targeted with smear campaigns. Disinformation has long come from the top in Hungary, and it has received a boost with AI-generated videos recently. On social media, Fidesz massively outspends other parties in the region. In the month before the Czech elections, for example, all Czech political parties combined spent a total of €500k on Facebook, while Fidesz and its proxies spent almost €2.5 million in the same period – despite the fact that the Hungarian elections were almost a year away at that point. In addition, civil society has long had to contend with politically motivated harassment and threats. The recently established Sovereignty Protection Office (SPO), an official government body, has regularly labelled NGOs, as well as opposition politicians, as threats to national sovereignty.
About the Author:
Zselyke Csaky is a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform.