After an extended summer break, Viktor Orbán plunged back into the political deep end. But can he still swim?

There was a bit of everything at Kötcse: a great comeback, tough messages, “national resistance”, a fight against the Tisza government and, of course, the unavoidable question: what happens to Fidesz with Viktor Orbán at the helm now that it is in opposition?

The 12 September Kötcse picnic was therefore not simply the traditional opening of the political season. For the first time after sixteen consecutive years in government, the Hungarian right had to gather knowing that it was no longer the one holding the steering wheel.

Viktor Orbán, however, certainly did not arrive looking like a politician preparing to say goodbye.

“I’m back,” he announced before the event, in a video that left little doubt about his intentions. Then, upon arriving in Kötcse, he admitted that sixteen years of continuous government had left him tired and that he had needed a rest. Whether he had actually managed to recharge his batteries, he suggested, would become clear only now.

But perhaps that is not the most important question. The question is not whether Viktor Orbán has recovered. It is whether Fidesz can renew itself with him.

Without Orbán, there is no Fidesz — or is Orbán the reason there is no way back?

There are currently two diametrically opposed arguments on the Hungarian right. According to one, Fidesz would begin to fall apart without Viktor Orbán.

The party has been organised around a single political centre for decades. Orbán is the brand, the strategist, the campaign machine and the politician who led Fidesz to four consecutive general election victories. Even after the defeat of April 2026, he remains the figure most capable of keeping the camp together, identifying the enemy and convincing supporters that the war is not over merely because one battle has been lost.

And there is a powerful argument behind that view. Fidesz–KDNP still received 2,458,337 list votes in the April election. That was enough for 38.61 per cent of the list vote, even though the coalition won only 52 of the 199 parliamentary seats.

To put that figure into perspective, Fidesz–KDNP received fewer list votes in 2014 — 2,264,780 — and nevertheless secured 133 seats, giving it a two-thirds parliamentary majority.

So it would be premature to write off Orbán or the political community he built. But there is another camp on the right that sees precisely the opposite problem. In their view, Viktor Orbán himself has become Fidesz’s greatest obstacle.

How can a party genuinely renew itself if every new face is still associated with the old system? How can it offer a new political direction when the person most closely identified with sixteen years of government remains its central figure?

If the 2026 election was, at least partly, a referendum on sixteen years of Fidesz rule, how can the same man credibly present himself as the face of a new beginning?

This is no longer simply a question of personnel. It is Fidesz’s strategic trap.

Has Orbán become Gyurcsány?

Another comparison is increasingly tempting: Viktor Orbán today could become for Fidesz what Ferenc Gyurcsány became for the Hungarian left after 2006.

The logic is simple. A politician can remain enormously important to his own camp while becoming so strongly rejected outside it that winning a national election with him at the front becomes extremely difficult.

Gyurcsány’s political career after 2006 offers an obvious example. His continued leadership helped keep parts of the left together, but his personal political baggage also became one of the most persistent obstacles facing the opposition.

Could the same thing happen to Orbán? The analogy, however, is far from perfect.

Orbán’s situation is fundamentally different because Fidesz has not collapsed electorally. Quite the opposite. Despite losing government, the party retained a remarkably large electoral base in April. More than 2.4 million voters still backed the Fidesz–KDNP list.

That gives Orbán something Gyurcsány could not rely on indefinitely: a huge, disciplined and still politically relevant organisation behind him. So perhaps the better question is not whether Orbán is becoming Hungary’s next Gyurcsány. Maybe it is whether he can prevent Fidesz from becoming a party permanently trapped in its own past.

Kötcse: a fresh start or the same old record?

The message coming out of Kötcse does not yet suggest a radical reinvention of Fidesz. Instead, Orbán appears to have chosen confrontation.

According to reports from the closed-door meeting, the former prime minister argued that the right’s political mission remained unchanged: defending a sovereign Hungary. He portrayed the Tisza government as a threat to that sovereignty and said the opposition needed to rebuild itself and eventually return to government.

Later that evening, Orbán made the new tone even clearer. The period of patience with what he called the “new communists” was over, he said. Fidesz would “take up the gauntlet” and fight. He also announced the beginning of what he described as a period of “national resistance”.

Politically, this is hardly surprising. Fidesz knows how to fight.

It has spent sixteen years building an exceptionally powerful political organisation, a vast communications network and a loyal electoral base. Opposition politics may therefore be uncomfortable for the party, but it is not unfamiliar territory.

The more interesting question is whether confrontation alone is enough.

Can Fidesz renew itself with Viktor Orbán?

This is where the Kötcse meeting becomes more significant than the speeches themselves. If the same leader, using largely the same political language, focusing on many of the same enemies and defending much of the same legacy, is now expected to rebuild the same party, where exactly is the renewal?

There is certainly room for tactical change. Fidesz can become more active in Parliament. It can mobilise its local organisations. It can attack government decisions. It can build alliances with civil organisations, media outlets and influencers.

But organisational renewal is not necessarily political renewal. A party can change its campaign strategy without changing its political identity. And that may be the real dilemma facing Fidesz.

The April defeat was not simply a bad campaign result. It ended sixteen years of uninterrupted government and created a political landscape in which Tisza controls the government, while Fidesz must work out what kind of opposition it wants to be. That is a very different task from governing.

The real problem may come later

For the moment, Viktor Orbán remains the obvious centre of gravity of the Hungarian right. That may be precisely why replacing him is so difficult.

Who could actually take over? János Lázár? Péter Szijjártó? Gergely Gulyás? Someone else entirely? Or could a new generation of politicians emerge who have never been responsible for the entire sixteen-year Orbán era?

There is no obvious answer. And that is precisely the problem.

A strong leader can hold a political camp together after defeat. But the longer a party depends on one person, the harder it becomes to imagine what comes after that person. Perhaps Fidesz needs Orbán precisely because it has not yet found anyone who could replace him. But perhaps it also needs to find such a person precisely because Orbán remains so dominant.

That contradiction could define the future of the Hungarian right.

And what about Mi Hazánk?

There is another possibility that makes the situation even more complicated. If Fidesz moves further towards “resistance politics” and a harder nationalist message, what happens to Mi Hazánk?

The two parties remain separate political forces, but their political interests increasingly overlap on a number of issues. Mi Hazánk survived the April election and entered Parliament with six seats, while Fidesz is now facing the very different challenge of rebuilding itself from opposition.

Could this eventually lead to closer cooperation? Or even to a broader realignment of the Hungarian right?

A formal Fidesz–Mi Hazánk merger is far from inevitable. A looser alliance would arguably be much more plausible. Yet the more Fidesz struggles to decide what kind of conservative party it wants to become, the more interesting the possibility becomes.

And there is an even more intriguing question. What if the future conflict is not between Fidesz and Mi Hazánk at all? What if it is inside Fidesz itself?

Everything is still possible

Kötcse was therefore neither a simple comeback nor necessarily the beginning of the end. It was something more uncomfortable.

It showed that Viktor Orbán has no intention of disappearing from Hungarian politics. He has returned from his long summer break, reclaimed the political stage and clearly chosen confrontation with the Tisza government.

But it also showed how difficult the next chapter will be. Fidesz has to prove that it can do something it has rarely had to do before: reinvent itself without abandoning the political community that Viktor Orbán built around himself.

That is not an easy task. Orbán may still be the only politician capable of keeping Fidesz together. But if he is also the only politician the party can imagine at its centre, then the problem is much bigger than one election defeat.

Perhaps Kötcse was the great comeback, perhaps it was the beginning of the endgame. Or perhaps, as Hungarian politics has demonstrated so many times before, it was simply the opening move of another political battle whose outcome nobody can yet predict.

One thing, however, is already clear. Viktor Orbán has jumped back into the deep end. Now we will see whether Fidesz can swim with him — or whether, for the first time, it will have to learn how to swim without him.