There is a theory in team sports that, with a few notable exceptions, coaches have a relatively short shelf-life. After a while, players get tired of hearing the same messages from the same person, and those messages lose their effect. Fidesz has always been an inward-looking party, a tendency that seems to have grown. Along the way, it has lost the ability to communicate outward with the voters. Despite being in power for 16 years, nothing was ever its fault. It was Russia’s war in Ukraine, or bureaucrats in Brussels, or multinationals sending profits back home.

Now the voters have sent them home, and so the baton of power passes from Fidesz to a new political force in Tisza. Its history as an effective electoral force dates back to the European Parliament elections just two years ago. Its freshmen MPs will be the first ever from its ranks to sit in the Hungarian parliament. Péter Magyar’s top team has been together for at most a couple of years, some members for far less than that. The Tisza MPs have never worked with one another. In a memorable phrase in the election roundup inside this issue, one political analyst described Fidesz as the glue that held the Tisza coalition together. The party existed to replace the longtime government, and has achieved that goal to an almost unbelievable extent. Once it takes power, that insistent drive to get the job done will no longer be there. Quite another pressure will, instead, bear down.

Every politician who has experience of it will tell you that having to make choices, rather than criticize them, represents a different order of magnitude. Tony Blair, who won three consecutive elections for the Labor Party in the United Kingdom (one less than Orbán’s remarkable four on the bounce), often said in interviews, “Opposition is easy; government is hard.” Two years ago, Tisza had a mountain to climb to unseat a Fidesz party that controlled public media and had used successive supermajorities to build a majoritarian electoral system that favored the party in power. The really hard work for Tisza starts once Magyar moves from prime minister elect to the holder of that great office.

One final thought, and perhaps this is the most important of all. With Magyar having emerged from within Fidesz, the election took on something of an air of civil war, and like most such conflicts, became all the more personal. There were dark predictions ahead of the vote that lengthy legal challenges, perhaps even violence, would follow once the results were known. Thankfully, none of that came to pass. Only Fidesz insiders will know whether they saw this coming, whether their internal polling told them a different story from the message consistently put out by the pro-Fidesz pollsters. Still, Orbán saw the tsunami coming his way quickly enough on April 12. By 9:20 p.m., when only roughly 30% of the votes had been counted, he had phoned Magyar to congratulate him, and then gave a relatively conciliatory concession speech to the cameras, promising Fidesz would fight from opposition, though notably not mentioning his own future. Yet again in Hungary’s post-communist democracy, and despite all the bitter political campaign rhetoric, power had symbolically transferred peacefully.

Whatever your political motivations, everyone should wish Tisza well in creating a legislative and tax environment that gives all businesses, whether local or international, a level playing field on which to operate, with a transparent and consistent approach to let the economy flourish as it should, and to the benefit of everyone, not the select few.

Robin Marshall

Editor-in-chief

This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of April 24, 2026.