Orban’s Mafia State Could Fall—or Cement Itself

Four years ago, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s authority was at its peak. After 12 years in which he systematically dismantled Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with an autocratic system concentrating political power and illicit wealth in the hands of family members and loyalists, Orban’s party, Fidesz, secured a fourth consecutive supermajority in the 2022 elections. Shortly after, he institutionalized rule by decree because of the war in neighboring Ukraine—the third such declaration issued by Orban under the cover of a state of emergency. The opposition, meanwhile, was fragmented. Without credible leaders, unhappy voters drifted into apathy as Orban built what we have described in our research as a “mafia state”—a characterization now adopted by the opposition and even referenced by Orban himself in a campaign ad depicting him as the crime boss in The Godfather.

Today, the picture has changed considerably. Despite retaining overwhelming control over the state, the media, and vast sectors of the economy, the regime has been unable to stop the rise of a new political force. The Tisza Party, led by the former regime insider Peter Magyar, has run ahead of Fidesz in independent polls since late 2024, with recent surveys showing a 23-point advantage among likely voters. As the April 12 elections approach, Magyar has rekindled the hope that after 16 years, a system long seen as unassailable may finally meet its end.

Magyar’s campaign—the most serious challenge to Orban since his return to power in 2010—did not come out of nowhere. It was made possible by the gradual erosion of the regime’s pillars of support and the complacency of a leader increasingly insulated from meaningful political competition. Years of centralized power, sustained financial inflows from the EU, and a weak, corrupted opposition created a false sense of stability within the regime. Yet beneath the surface, dissatisfaction had been building, waiting to be activated by a charismatic leader. By speaking to both disillusioned opposition voters and segments of Fidesz’s own base, Magyar has emerged as precisely that figure.

Hungary’s future will turn on the outcome of Sunday’s elections. If Magyar wins and Orban allows the results to stand, the new government can set Hungary on a path back toward democracy. But the regime might be prepared to go to great lengths to secure victory, unwilling to relinquish a system that has enabled its mafia-like functioning and its members’ impunity. And if Orban remains in power, he will do what it takes to deny his opponents another chance like this one—and that will mean pushing Hungary further toward the consolidation of autocracy.

HUNGARIAN GODFATHER

After Fidesz won a supermajority in 2010, Orban painstakingly created a mafia state, combining absolute power and systemic corruption organized from the top. The following year, he rewrote the constitution and filled key institutions such as the Constitutional Court and the Prosecution Service with loyalists, establishing unchecked control over the state. He also built a vast network of dependence, rewarding compliant officials with plum positions, enriching loyal oligarchs through state contracts, and, at the lowest level, granting local leaders and public workers livelihoods tied to the regime. He denied these opportunities to Fidesz’s opponents and threatened to punish disloyalty from insiders by stripping them of their favored status. Like a mafia boss who decides the fate of the members of his immediate and adopted family, Orban stands at the top of his own adopted political family to which nearly every sector of Hungarian society must pay tribute.

Orban’s mafia state managed to gather considerable but not overwhelming popular support, engineering electoral victories by extending its patron-client network, constructing a state-funded propaganda machine, and reshaping electoral laws in Fidesz’s favor. The stability of this regime has depended on three pillars: economic growth from external financial support, suppression and co-optation of the opposition, and an increasingly widespread belief that Orban could not be defeated.

Unlike authoritarian systems in the Middle East or post-Soviet Europe and Central Asia that sustain themselves by tapping natural resource wealth, the Orban regime was largely financed by the EU. Annual EU transfers constituted around three percent of Hungary’s GDP, exceeding the level of aid the United States provided to European countries through the Marshall Plan after World War II. The regime funneled aid through public procurements from Brussels to Orban’s political network, with connected companies winning over $30 billion in contracts between 2010 and 2025, according to the Financial Times. It was through procurements that Orban’s childhood friend, Lorinc Meszaros, went from modest entrepreneur to Hungary’s richest man, widely believed to be acting as Orban’s frontman, holding assets on the prime minister’s behalf. EU funds, combined with a global economic upswing lasting from 2013 until the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, enabled the regime to construct and sustain its network of dependencies.

The blatant corruption and breakdown of public services that followed gave critics ample evidence to make their case against Fidesz. But the regime employed a wide variety of tools to silence or co-opt dissent, absorbing the opposition into the autocratic system by infiltrating and domesticating parties, placing fines on others in an attempt to liquidate them, and creating fake parties to divide opposition votes in elections. Protests took place, but most died out as quickly as they broke out. With no channels for public dissatisfaction to be converted into a political force, the system effectively insulated itself from any political costs of its own scandals and failures.

This suppression produced the system’s psychological pillar: the myth of inevitability. Every opposition defeat reinforced the sense among a growing number of Hungarians that resistance had become futile. Hungarians increasingly made their peace with the regime, seeking not to challenge but rather to adapt to it. Orban presented himself as the guarantor of peace against a warmongering opposition ahead of elections in 2022, but the effectiveness of his messaging also depended on the perception of his permanence. As long as the system seemed unassailable, many sought to rationalize Fidesz’s politics or accept its propagandistic claims. In 2022, polls showed that nearly a third of opposition voters believed the government’s unfounded claim that the opposition would lead Hungary into war; in an anti-LGBT referendum held concurrently with that year’s parliamentary elections, 300,000 more voters supported the government’s position than voted for Fidesz.

THE CHALLENGER

The system’s apparent stability seems to have misled Orban. After the 2022 elections, his attention increasingly shifted to global politics. Orban helped establish the right-wing Patriots for Europe faction within the EU and sought to soften Western sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. This international turn, however, came at a cost. Orban was slow to recognize that his regime’s domestic support was beginning to crumble.

The economic foundation began to shake in December 2022, when the EU froze more than half of Hungary’s allocated funds over alleged violations of the rule of law. At the same time, the slow global recovery from the pandemic and the government’s anticompetitive policies pushed the economy into stagnation, and inflation surged into double digits. This strained the regime’s network of dependencies: as the budget tightened, low-level members lost access to resources as Orban channeled funds upward. In 2025, Meszaros’s fortune grew by approximately $1.5 billion; Hungary’s GDP increased by less than half that amount.

Economic hardship fueled widespread social discontent. The revelation in early 2024 that an individual with ties to the government had received a presidential pardon in a high-profile child abuse case led to mass protests. The demonstrations, however, were not led by the opposition. A demonstration in Budapest organized by social media influencers, for example, drew around 150,000 people, whereas the opposition’s own rally mobilized only about 1,500. Opposition to the regime mounted, but a gap remained between popular demand for change and the political means to supply it.

Into this gap stepped Peter Magyar. A former head of Hungary’s state-owned Student Loan Center and a visible presence at Orban’s events, Magyar broke with the regime after the pardoning scandal, accusing Orban of unjustly shifting the blame for the pardon onto President Katalin Novak and Justice Minister Judit Varga, Magyar’s ex-wife. Magyar’s prior affiliation with Orban enhanced his credibility. In the eyes of many Hungarians, his break with Fidesz appeared as both a symptom and a catalyst of the regime’s unraveling.

The system’s apparent stability seems to have misled Orban.

Magyar further enhanced his credibility by refusing to strike deals with the neutralized and discredited opposition. By rejecting cooperation with old, corrupt parties, he succeeded in uniting anti-Orban voters behind a project of regime change. Magyar created a movement that turned the previously inactive Tisza into the strongest opposition party in the June 2024 European Parliament elections. By October 2024, it had overtaken Fidesz in the polls.

Magyar has powered Tisza’s rise in part by crafting a new political language. His campaign has recast Hungarian nationalism, long monopolized by Fidesz, on more inclusive terms. Whereas Orban equates his supporters with the country and excludes his critics from it, Magyar recognizes Fidesz voters as part of a shared political community. Tisza’s program, which speaks pragmatically about a “functioning Hungary,” avoids divisive ideological rhetoric. Magyar’s criticism of the regime is targeted narrowly at its main beneficiaries, to whom Magyar promises a “road to prison.” He has described the political system as a mafia state led by the “Orban clan” and has presented the challenge of rebuilding Hungary as regime change. Unlike the state-sanctioned opposition, which downplayed corruption because it ranked relatively low among voters’ stated concerns, Magyar has connected Hungarians’ everyday grievances—underfunded health care, failing public services, deteriorating infrastructure—directly to systemic corruption. The critique has cut across ideological and partisan divides, resonating with voters across the political spectrum.

After years of failure by the opposition to overcome the regime’s divide-and-conquer strategy, Magyar’s reframing of Hungarian politics not as a contest between left and right but as one between the nation and the criminal system that exploits it has finally produced a coalition broad enough to challenge Orban. In a recent poll, 43 percent of Tisza voters identified as liberal, 22 percent as left-wing, and 11 percent as right-wing.

Magyar’s rise shattered the myth of Orban’s inevitability. By June 2025, for the first time in two decades, polls showed that a majority of Hungarian voters no longer expected a Fidesz victory in the next election. By March 2026, 47 percent of the population anticipated a Tisza win, compared with 35 percent who expected Fidesz to retain power. Hungarians who had resigned themselves to the current system have begun to embrace the prospect of change.

THE NATION OR THE CLAN?

Magyar’s unprecedented challenge to Orban’s regime has yielded a campaign of unprecedented intensity. In the span of a single week in March, The Washington Post reported that Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto had regularly briefed Russia on high-level EU negotiations and that the Russian secret services had floated the possibility of false-flag operations to instill fear ahead of the election, the opposition outlet 444.hu reported that members of Orban’s network began evacuating assets to Dubai, and the former police captain Bence Szabo went public with claims that the Hungarian secret service had attempted to infiltrate Tisza to undermine it from the inside. The revelations have further underscored that the regime places no moral limits on the means it is willing to deploy to protect itself—including by meddling with the election itself.

In theory, Orban could make use of the many legal mechanisms he has created to insulate the regime from democratic accountability. With election day just a few days out, he could yet postpone the vote. If the elections take place and Orban loses, he could annul the results by claiming foreign interference; his campaign is already laying the groundwork for such an argument. If Magyar appears set to take office, Orban could still rewrite constitutional rules to embed vetoes in executive and legislative decision-making channels to constrain his ability to act, while loyalists and oligarchs across the state and economy could obstruct the new government.

For the regime, the stakes are not merely losing power but potential prosecution. Leaders in similar systems—former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, the Moldovan power broker Vladimir Plahotniuc, former North Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski—ultimately fled their countries to avoid justice, Gruevski with assistance from the Hungarian secret services. The prospect of legal consequences could push Orban to consider any means necessary to win.

Yet the regime’s delayed response to Magyar’s ascendancy narrows Orban’s room to maneuver. With such a large and mobilized opposition, overtly autocratic steps can easily backfire. Despite receiving preelection payoffs from the government, the security forces would likely refuse to suppress large-scale protests should the vote be postponed or annulled. Lacking a credible option for deploying coercive force to suppress the vote, the regime is left to rely on fiscal handouts and fearmongering propaganda, but these appear to be yielding diminishing returns: whereas once a third of opposition voters believed the opposition would lead Hungary into war, now only about one percent of opposition voters do.

REGIME CHANGE, AT HOME AND ABROAD

The results of the elections will reverberate far beyond Hungary. Under Orban, the country has become Russia’s most valuable subversive asset within NATO and the EU, using its veto power to obstruct the organizations’ foreign policy and security decisions. If victorious, Orban could deepen Budapest’s links with Moscow, putting Hungary on the path toward “Belarusization”—turning it into a Russian client state with little realistic prospect of a pro-Western government—on the EU’s periphery or outside it altogether. Orban’s success could also galvanize other right-wing populists and aspiring criminal autocrats who have long looked to Orban as a model, from Georgia and Slovakia to the United States.

At home, a Magyar victory would open the possibility of dismantling the state-run criminal network and restoring the rule of law. But if Orban wins, he will want to prevent another close call. His criminal system will have no other choice but to entrench its power once and for all, securing impunity for the regime’s beneficiaries by further severing the country’s ties to the West and intensifying repression through a purge of those Orban deems “foreign agents”—including independent media, investigative journalists, and nongovernmental organizations. The vote on April 12 is Hungary’s best chance in 16 years to choose democracy over autocracy. It may not come again.

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