Fear and Rush in the Carmelite Monastery: Orbán Weakens Where He Once Secured a Two-thirds Majority
Recent weeks and even months have indicated that Viktor Orbán's system is far from being intact, starting from the pardon scandal to the emergence of Péter Magyar.
Moreover, there are signs of a political community swelling against Viktor Orbán, one that targets the very heart of the area that granted Fidesz a two-thirds majority.
Orbán is currently facing challenges that he may have thought were long behind him. It seems that the path is clearing for a moderate right-center stance, or in other words, offers are appearing that cater to conservative-liberal voter demands. This effectively invalidates Orbán's claim of Fidesz ruling the terrain between "extreme right" and "extreme left" in Hungarian politics.
Undoubtedly, the loudest phenomenon emerging from the NER is Péter Magyar, who on March 15 announced to his hundreds of thousands of supporters and followers that he welcomes everyone under his banner: conservatives, bourgeois democrats, social democrats, and liberals alike. Thus, he targets both the right and left center, segments of the political spectrum that Viktor Orbán has been dominant in. The only exclusion for Péter Magyar, aside from Viktor Orbán himself, is not Fidesz, and not even explicitly the far right, but the entity he considers far left, the Democratic Coalition (DK), along with Ferenc Gyurcsány.
In recent months, others have also set their sights on moderate conservative and liberal voters. Despite participating in the opposition coalition in the 2022 elections, both Momentum and LMP have recently made verbal (and in the case of LMP, also practical) moves to distance themselves from DK. Momentum is challenging Gyurcsány's left-wing neoliberalism with a liberal program (though sharing municipal candidates), whereas LMP's self-definition spans from left-wing through liberal to conservative ideas, now pivoting more towards the right in their candidate nominations.