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Hungary goes to the polls on 12 April. For the first time since 2010, the opposition has a real chance of winning. But the deeper shift is not about polling numbers—it is about the emotions that have structured Hungarian politics for fifteen years.

Fear, resentment, and exclusion do not simply accompany the Orbán regime. They are its architecture. Opponents are cast as traitors, dangers, or enemies of the nation. Grievance is organised into durable loyalty. Accountability is made to feel like betrayal. For a long time, no opposition force found a way past that emotional infrastructure. Péter Magyar’s TISZA party did. Not by cooling the temperature, but by rewriting what the conflict is about. That is why the regime’s response has been so ferocious.

That infrastructure has a name: affective polarisation. It works not by making voters disagree, but by making them feel that the other camp is not merely wrong but threatening. The consequences for democratic accountability are direct. When political identity becomes tribal, voters grow less willing to punish failure, corruption, or abuse, because doing so would mean helping the enemy. TISZA’s opening was to offer a different emotional logic: not the absence of conflict, but a different axis for it.

In my latest study (available for download below), I argue that TISZA’s significance lies less in its novelty as a party than in the political logic it introduced. Earlier opposition actors fought largely on terrain shaped by Fidesz, reacting to Orbán’s agenda and divisions rather than setting their own. TISZA shifted the core conflict away from the stale left-right divide, replacing it with a different moral contrast: corrupt power versus civic renewal, exhaustion versus agency, fear versus hope.

To understand why that shift was so difficult to achieve, it helps to know what system it is up against. Hungary under Orbán is what I call a populist electoral autocracy (PEA): a system that preserves the formal machinery of elections while distorting competition through media asymmetry, institutional control, and permanent division. Opposition actors in such a system face a dilemma: treat it as a flawed democracy, amenable to better coordination and messaging, or as an entrenched autocracy requiring a fundamentally different strategy. Between 2010 and 2024, the Hungarian opposition never fully resolved that choice. They coordinated late, without a unifying vision. The 2022 joint campaign, the latest, was the clearest example: technically organised, but politically thin—cooperation without imagination.

TISZA broke that pattern in two ways. Organisationally, it built a different kind of presence: TISZA Islands at the local level, participatory digital outreach, a style that gave supporters ways to get involved rather than just watch. Strategically, it reframed the conflict itself. Rather than mirroring the government’s enemy-making logic, it narrowed its critique to the ruling elite and paired it with a message of national and civic renewal: “No left, no right, only Hungarians.”

As such, the divide was no longer patriots versus traitors. It became a corrupt and closed system against a moral, civic, and functioning Hungary. Political scientists call this transformative repolarisation. The point is not to escape polarisation altogether, which is rarely realistic in a regime built on enemy construction, but to break the ruling bloc’s monopoly over what the conflict means. The risk is that even this strategy can slide into emotional simplification, leaving the opposition trapped in a new logic of mutual demonisation.

The results are consequential. After a strong showing in the 2024 European Parliament election, TISZA moved ahead of Fidesz in independent polling by the end of 2024 and, by March 2026, is widely treated as the frontrunner in the coming parliamentary election. Emotions, as it turns out, can disrupt entrenched equilibria. TISZA mobilised not only anger, but also relief, dignity, and the sense that political action might matter again. That hope is drawing in voters well beyond the established opposition electorate.

But this is not simply a story of smooth democratic renewal. It is a story of polarising transition.

Once TISZA began to look less like a protest vehicle and more like a governing alternative, the regime’s response hardened. The party and Magyar were cast as unstable, deceptive, foreign-linked, and dangerous. Fidesz moved simultaneously to restore familiar culture-war terrain—including banning the Budapest Pride 2025 march—seeking to reactivate the divisions on which it has long thrived. Hybrid regimes adapt: when a challenger changes the structure of competition, the regime works to re-establish the symbolic battlefield on which it is strongest. The backlash created real uncertainty about how far the regime might go to narrow the field of competition, including the possibility of legally excluding the main challenger from the electoral race.

So what should we watch as 12 April approaches? Not only the polls. The deeper question is whether TISZA and Péter Magyar can hold a politics of hope, competence, and renewal without being drawn into the regime’s preferred language of suspicion, panic, and existential danger as the temperature goes up. The test is not whether polarisation disappears. It is whether its emotional logic can be rewritten.

Meet the Author

István Benedek is a Research Fellow at the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Political Science, and an Assistant Professor at the Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Law, Institute of Political Science, Hungary. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Eötvös Loránd University in 2023. His main research fields include democratic theory, democratization, autocratisation, populism, political polarisation, Euroscepticism, and comparative politics. Member of the Hungarian Political Science Association since 2018 and a Board Member since 2025.

Download Information

Benedek, I. Polarizing transition? Opposition strategies and the rise of Péter Magyar and the respect and freedom party (TISZA) in Hungary. Comp Eur Polit 24, 24 (2026). Download this open-access MORES publication here.

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