Orbán remains FIDESZ chairman and rejects course change

The election at the end of April had been won by a clear margin by the opposition movement Tisza under Péter Magyar. Tisza – the abbreviation stands for "Respekt und Freiheit" and also refers to the river Tisza – holds a two-thirds majority in the new Hungarian parliament, which enables constitutional amendments. The FIDESZ faction shrank to just 52 members of parliament.

Criticism of own election campaign

At the party congress, MP Balázs Hidvéghi criticised his own campaign team. Their "sense of reality has worn thin; both in style and content we fell well below our level and distanced ourselves from the mood of the citizenry." According to the report, Orbán had appointed the political scientist Balázs Orbán – not a relative – as campaign manager, but ultimately retained operational control over content and messages himself.

FIDESZ stands for "Bund Junger Demokraten" (Federation of Young Democrats) and was, at its founding, a liberal youth party of which Orbán is a co-founder. With a tactical exception between 2000 and 2003, Orbán has led the party for 33 years. FIDESZ-led coalitions governed Hungary from 1998 to 2002, and pure FIDESZ governments from 2010 to 2026. During this time, Orbán served a total of 20 years as prime minister.

Opposition with two-thirds majority

Political scientist Eszter Galgóczi of the Forrás Institute told the news portal 24.hu that the question of Orbán's leadership role would arise "früher oder später." She told the portal: "Der gegenwärtige Kurs des FIDESZ ist ein Lehrbuchbeispiel fürs Scheitern." Péter Magyar, a former FIDESZ functionary, broke with Orbán in February 2024 and founded the Tisza movement, which the report describes as "bürgerlich-pragmatisch und kosmopolitisch."

According to the report, during the election campaign FIDESZ had whipped up sentiment against Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky, among other things, and stoked war hysteria with the claim that Magyar would send Hungarian men and sons into the Ukraine war. Magyar rejected this portrayal; the report provides no further details.

Outlook: Search for successors

Against this backdrop, Orbán's re-election as party chairman is seen as an attempt to unite the party behind its new role in opposition. According to Galgóczi, however, the leadership question remains unresolved. The report was filed on 14 June 2026 by Gregor Mayer from Budapest.

It remains to be seen how Orbán intends to approach the personnel and programmatic renewal that he himself described in his speech as a task for the "jüngere Generation." The FIDESZ executive board would need to position itself early on whether the party will move toward the Tisza movement in terms of content or continue its previous course – the latter being what Orbán had expressly announced in his speech.