Hungary is preparing to oust the European Union’s longest-serving head of government, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has been in power for sixteen years. During this time, Orbán’s Fidesz party has secured a two-thirds constitutional majority in parliament four times in a row, and Orbán himself has become a leader of the European—and even the global—far right. Yet his chances of securing another two-thirds victory on April 12 look dim. After months of an almost comically volatile campaign marked by defections, leaks, and allegations of foreign interference, polls suggest that he is in fact locked in a race to prevent that same two-thirds majority from falling to his most important challenger, Péter Magyar, and his Tisza party. How did this happen, and what would follow if Orbán were actually defeated?

The Hungarian Majoritarian Machine

Hungary was once considered the paradigmatic success story of post-communist transition in Central and Eastern Europe. Economic reforms had already begun in the early 1980s during János Kádár’s Communist regime. After the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the collapse of Communism, Hungary privatized fast, attracted foreign direct investment and built the formal institutions of capitalism, including competitive markets and market regulation. Thus, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Hungary was one of the most politically stable countries in the region, with a well-functioning party system, secure governing majorities and not a single early election.

This stability rested on an unusually centralized, exclusionary political system that set high barriers to entry to the political market. This limited the number of new political parties and produced hyper-stable governing majorities. The central institution of this political system was the unicameral parliament whose two-thirds majority could enact virtually any political or institutional change overnight, up to and including rewriting the constitution. The electoral system reinforced this concentration. By combining proportional party lists with single-member constituencies in a majoritarian framework, it steadily pushed voters toward larger parties. By the early 2000s, the competition had narrowed to two dominant blocs: Fidesz on the Right and the Socialists on the Left, with the liberal Free Democrats playing an auxiliary role alongside the Socialists. In contrast to the rise and decline of new parties in proportional electoral systems elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, the Hungarian party system had consolidated around a narrowing set of parties, with effectively no new entrants in the first two decades after 1990.

The result was a political order that insulated governing majorities from the influence of social and economic actors. Neither trade unions nor business associations nor local and regional governments wielded considerable political power. The President of the Republic was elected by parliament and played an almost entirely ceremonial role. Electoral competition encouraged short-term economic promises, unfettered by the kinds of constraints pressure groups with longer-term horizons might impose. Fiscal policy followed a marked political cycle with recurring post-election consolidations.