HÓDMEZŐVÁSÁRHELY, Hungary — When opposition leader Péter Márki-Zay failed to topple Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in the country’s 2022 election, many Hungarians said the result showed only an insider could win, using the hardball tactics of the ruling Fidesz party.
Péter Magyar, who leads the polls ahead of Sunday’s election, is exactly such a candidate — a Fidesz veteran who was married to Orbán’s former justice minister and understands how to play the prime minister at his own game.
Márki-Zay is not a fan of Magyar’s personality — viewing him as “arrogant” and “self-centered” — but praises his cold-blooded political acumen and his ability to draw critical lessons from the opposition’s failure in 2022.
Crucially, Magyar has avoided being drawn into the bitter debate over international support for Ukraine — which proved a fatal misstep for Márki-Zay.
Magyar’s sometimes ruthless tactics have their critics. He is accused of pushing to extinguish all opposition parties apart from his own, of pursuing a brutal media blackout within his own ranks, and of resorting to populist promises in his campaigning.
But Márki-Zay sees that as the “right” way to end Orbán’s 16-year rule.
“What [Magyar] does — it’s better, it’s exactly what he learned from our mistakes,” he said over a coffee in Hódmezővásárhely in southern Hungary, pop. 40,000, where he serves as mayor. The town’s name translates to “beaver-field-marketplace.”
“His strategy was built on the experiences of the entire opposition.”
Magyar also has the wind behind him heading into the election because of the country’s economic weakness, amplified by a strong public perception that corruption and cronyism pervade Orbán’s government.
“People see that it’s not a functioning government, that’s what changed … people are very angry, they hate Fidesz so much, this was not the case four years ago,” Márki-Zay said.
Strict communications control
One of the most important lessons Magyar learned has translated into his strategic positioning on Ukraine.
The lesson relates to a catastrophic gaffe by Márki-Zay that is widely blamed for his heavy loss in 2022. While early polls had suggested a tight race, Orbán ultimately won by a massive 49.3 percent versus 32.7 percent for his rival.
As tensions mounted between Russia and Ukraine in February that year, just before Moscow invaded its neighbor, Márki-Zay told independent outlet Partizán on Feb. 23 that Hungary could support its neighbor militarily alongside its allies.
When pressed on whether that meant boots on the ground, he said: “Well, if NATO decides so, then even soldiers,” before adding “but right now there’s no talk of that at all.”
Unluckily for him, Russian tanks poured into Ukraine the next day, and pro-government media twisted his words to accuse him of wanting to drag Hungary into the war and to send the country’s children to die in Ukraine.
This time the opposition has avoided such missteps, even though Orbán has repeatedly cast Magyar as a pro-Kyiv candidate bent on dragging Hungary into war. Indeed, Magyar has gone to some lengths to avoid being seen as pro-Ukrainian, opposing both Kyiv’s fast-track EU accession and the sending of weapons.
The 2026 frontrunner has also kept a tight grip on party communications and has centralized messaging around himself. He has issued a media ban on almost all party members, only allowing a select few to give brief public comments.
Magyar is “making the same speech” at all of his rallies and only talks to limited media outlets, Márki-Zay said, focusing his communications on posts he writes himself on Facebook. “He’s not afraid of being populist,” he added.
Restricting party comms channels is “very clever,” Márki-Zay said, because it means “there’s less basis for criticism, less basis for falsified and manipulated recordings.”
Neutralizing the opposition
In 2022 Márki-Zay led a broad umbrella coalition, but the strategy backfired badly as the coalition fell apart on election night amid accusations of betrayal.
That’s when Magyar learned his second key lesson: that in order to take on Orbán, he needed to bulldoze the entire opposition into a single movement.
“Half of them are stupid, the other half are traitors. So why deal with the old opposition?” Márki-Zay asked.
It’s “a good thing” Magyar bypassed the existing opposition parties because now “he doesn’t have the burden of the corruption and the bad [reputation]” of those parties, Márki-Zay said. “There is nothing else to do.”
The strategy was also clever because the electoral system compensates big parties rather than coalitions of smaller ones.
Facing a system that offers public-financing incentives for parties to run independently, Magyar pressured all other opposition parties to stand down, accusing them of helping Orbán keep power if they failed to withdraw.
Those who didn’t withdraw say they have faced online harassment from supporters of Magyar’s Tisza party, which has also challenged the registrations of some candidates in court.
But Magyar had another reason for refusing to work with the old opposition parties, and for preventing anyone with a political background from joining Tisza: He feared they could be saboteurs, and believed that much of the opposition was in cahoots with Orbán and was benefitting from the status quo.
“It was clear that there were key people trying to derail the campaign” Márki-Zay’s long-time campaign manager Gary Akos told POLITICO.
Márki-Zay added: “I even banned a guy from the campaign, but others brought him back, so that was a [source of] chaos in itself.”
Although the mayor still has reservations about Magyar, he says he hopes he wins.
“Right now, his job is to defeat Fidesz and put all these criminals behind bars,” Márki-Zay said. “If he does it, we will erect a statue here in Hódmezővásárhely, I promised him that.”
