It appears that Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party he leads will continue to shape Hungarian public life for some time to come. Yet the country’s current prime minister is making remarkably modest claims in this regard, while his intended involvement in public affairs appears strikingly limited. Viktor Orbán has always planned for the long term; Péter Magyar’s ambitions extend much less far into the future.
Orbán and the longue durée
As prime minister, Viktor Orbán invariably set out lengthy time horizons for his tenure in office. Although, during the past four years, he regularly spoke of eventually having to hand over the baton to the next generation, the last person to seriously question his position as leader was perhaps János Lázár, before the 2018 election. That challenge ended with Lázár being sidelined. This April, Lázár suffered a major defeat alongside his former boss, having served as one of the faces of the campaign.
Orbán always planned at least as far ahead as 2030. In his telling, that was how long it would take to put the country right after the “social-liberal” rampage. Those deadlines, however, were repeatedly pushed back. During the latest campaign, for example, Lázár regularly described Hungary as a half-finished country, implying that much remained to be done before their work – whatever it might have been – could be completed.
Péter Magyar has adopted a far more modest outlook as prime minister, although he threw himself into even the first few months of his first term with extraordinary energy and a punishing workload. He says he sleeps little and values the time he spends with his family and children, but that there is no time for rest at present. “Perhaps there will be time for a little rest in seven years and eight months,” he wrote in a Facebook post yesterday. In the accompanying photograph, he can be seen leaping up two steps at a time while holding a national flag – suggesting, among other things, that slowing down is not currently an option.
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Among the Tisza government’s first measures was a constitutional limit stipulating that a prime minister may serve no more than two terms – eight years in total – at the head of the Hungarian Government. The calculation above is therefore easy to understand. Although many questioned whether Péter Magyar genuinely intended to honour the restriction, he appears to be standing by his promise.
That said, the new constitution that Tisza intends to draft by next autumn could establish a semi-presidential republic, with a directly elected president enjoying a strong mandate and correspondingly broader and more powerful powers. Nothing currently prevents someone from moving directly from the office of prime minister to that of president, although there has been no such example – in either direction – since the collapse of communism.
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For now, at least, Tisza has the power to reshape Hungary’s constitutional order as it sees fit. It holds 141 seats in Parliament – comfortably more than the two-thirds majority required. More importantly, if an election were held today, it would receive an even stronger mandate, with roughly two-thirds of the vote.
Meanwhile, Fidesz, the party led by Viktor Orbán and Hungary’s strongest opposition force, is showing signs of disintegration. Tibor Navracsics, a former European commissioner and minister, and Orsolya Ferencz have established an independent platform called the Civic Democrats. János Bóka, Fidesz’s parliamentary group leader, welcomed the move. Yet in Hungarian political history, the emergence of platforms within a party has invariably been the prelude to its collapse – as happened with the Hungarian Socialist Party and, more recently, Jobbik.
Andrea Virág, strategic director of the Republikon Institute, also told Népszava that Viktor Orbán – despite enjoying the support of almost 100 per cent of his party – had remained virtually silent as party leader in recent months, while Hungary was facing an energy crisis, a water crisis and, in her view, a constitutional crisis.
According to Andrea Virág, this suggests that Viktor Orbán has voluntarily withdrawn from the political stage and is looking for someone to whom he can hand over the baton. She argues that he has abandoned his party, has no strategy for a return and that everything around him is now showing signs of collapse.
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