Opposition Without Substance: The Failures of Hungary’s Antipolitical Left

In April, Hungary’s center-right Tisza party accomplished what the leftist opposition had been unable to do in 16 years: unseat Fidesz through the ballot box. In just one year, they rose up from nothing to become far and away the most popular party in the country. Today, not a single representative of the leftist opposition sits in the National Assembly. What explains their failure? This essay points to antipolitics, the left’s decisive shift from mass party politics to symbolic protests and intellectual criticism. Instead of building a social base and party structure that could compete with Fidesz, especially in the countryside, leftists have poured their energies into critical media outlets and quasi-political parties which largely appeal to civil society in Budapest.

During Fidesz’s 16-year reign in Hungary, left-leaning politicians and journalists fought tirelessly to hold their government accountable for its authoritarianism, corruption, and xenophobia. At the parliamentary level, the Democratic Coalition (Demokratikus Koalíció, DK), Politics Can Be Different (Lehet Más a Politika, LMP), and Momentum (Momentum Mozgalom) used their mandates to criticize Fidesz’s centralization of power and keep social and environmental concerns alive in the public arena. At the same time, critical media like 444 and Partizán shed light on Fidesz’s systemic corruption in an informational environment largely under the control of the state.

Their struggle was not an easy one. Fidesz severely constricted the space available for opposition politics. On the one hand, it reinforced the majoritarian aspects of Hungary’s electoral system. Fidesz redrew the country’s electoral map to multiply allied districts and reduce opposition-friendly ones (gerrymandering), and it channeled the excess votes of single-member district candidates to party lists. Fidesz’s corporate network gobbled up the country’s mass media and transformed them into mouthpieces for their conservative worldview. By means of their media empire, Fidesz painted socialist and liberal politicians, activists, and journalists as traitorous servants of Western interests.

To resist Fidesz’s authoritarianism, the left focused on extra-political activism—protests in the streets of Budapest, theatrical demonstrations in the National Assembly, and critical commentary online. Parties like DK, LMP, and Momentum, as well as news platforms like 444 and Partizán, portrayed Hungary’s political elites as incompetent and corrupt fools. They positioned themselves in contrast to those elites as high-minded social activists and critical commentators. By undermining the legitimacy of their political establishment, they sought to usher in an age of unfettered civil society.

To resist Fidesz’s authoritarianism, the left focused on extra-political activism—protests in the streets of Budapest, theatrical demonstrations in the National Assembly, and critical commentary online. […] By undermining the legitimacy of their political establishment, they sought to usher in an age of unfettered civil society.

The anti-Fidesz left of the 2010s drew inspiration from the democratic opposition of the 1980s. In that era, a range of socialist and liberal thinkers banded together to resist Hungary’s state-socialist regime. Their main strategy (and philosophy) was antipolitics, the stubborn rejection of the culture and practice of state power. Instead of abiding by the daily rituals and propaganda of the political establishment, they fostered an underground culture of dissent. Spearheaded by humanistic intellectuals, the movement circulated critical publications and organized demonstrations of opposition to the state.

The democratic movements of the 1980s and 2010s succeeded in fostering a culture of opposition to their authoritarian states. The dissidents of the 1980s reached and mobilized tens of thousands of Hungarians through their underground publications, environmental protests, and national celebrations-turned-rallies. Similarly, the dissidents of the 2010s cradled a culture of opposition to Fidesz, especially in Budapest and among the youth. They successfully organized a range of mass protests, and they kept Hungary’s democratic decline under the scrutiny of civil society and EU leaders.

However, both movements failed to capture state power. The democratic opposition of the 1980s was defeated in Hungary’s first post-communist elections by the center-right Hungarian Democratic Forum (Magyar Demokrata Fórum, MDF). Over the course of the 1990s, their leading figures fled the political scene to return to their principled lives of social criticism. Their party, the Alliance of Free Democrats (Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége, SZDSZ), was subsequently taken over by neoliberal experts who advocated for a free market over a free society. The democratic opposition of the 2010s was recently trampled over by the center-right Tisza party in the 2026 elections. This essay unpacks the antipolitics of the leftist opposition, both in the 1980s and post-2010.

The Roots of Antipolitics: The Democratic Opposition of the 1980s

In the 1980s, a variety of democracy-minded socialists and liberals came together to criticize Hungary’s state-socialist regime. That alliance, known as the democratic opposition, was mostly composed of humanistic intellectuals in Budapest. By means of their social status and cultural power, they attacked the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party for presiding over an authoritarian and bureaucratic regime in the name of the working class. The democratic opposition advocated for a strategy of antipolitics. Hungarians, they declared, should reject the symbols and practices of the socialist state in their everyday lives. Through that banal form of resistance, the regime’s legitimacy would slowly erode. The democratic opposition’s defiance took the form of underground lectures, publications and, when possible, petitions and public demonstrations.

Antipolitics was not merely a strategy for opposing an authoritarian regime. It was a shift in ideology. The democratic opposition believed that the state itself was an unnatural construct, which was founded on oppressive social hierarchies. Political life, in their romantic imagination, was meant to revolve around civil society, organic associations of artists and intellectuals. Such spiritual leaders, including themselves, were more open-minded than state politicians and their base supporters could ever be. The democratic opposition anointed critical intellectuals, not working people, as the primary agents of democratic revolution. Their utopia was a quasi-libertarian one—a society freed from traditional politics and reveling in spontaneous artistic exchange.

The early 1990s were characterized by painstaking economic liberalization and political infighting. By 1994, the country’s GDP had shrunk by 20% and the number of people living in poverty had ballooned from 1.5 to 3.5 million. Some industries that had been propped up by the socialist state collapsed, while others were rapidly taken over by multinational corporations. SZDSZ’s elitist vision of spontaneous civic activism did not have much to say about the country’s deteriorating social and economic conditions. In 1994, the Hungarian Socialist Party (Magyar Szocialista Párt, MSZP) took back state power. It had transformed itself into a well-oiled party capable of analyzing public opinion and delivering clear political messages. MSZP promised to bring order to the country’s social and economic chaos and govern on the basis of professional expertise.

SZDSZ, on the other hand, failed to professionalize. Over the years, its leading figures like János Kis and Gáspár Miklós Tamás left the political scene. They never intended to build careers as politicians because of their philosophical commitment to antipolitics. SZDSZ ultimately attached itself to MSZP, its archenemy of the 1980s, as a minor coalition partner. Instead of championing a society of free-spirited democrats, it became a conduit for neoliberal experts who promoted Hungary’s integration into the global marketplace above all else. Antipolitics helped build a culture of dissidence. But it could not envision a mass social base (i.e. the working class), nor a mandate for state power.

Antipolitics Post-2010

After Fidesz took power in 2010, various left-leaning political parties, social movements, and mass media revived the project of antipolitics. Ferenc Gyurcsány, the disgraced socialist prime minister of the 2000s, launched a new political party in 2011, DK. Shedding itself of any rigid social democratic label, the party aimed to become a broad democratic coalition on a mission to unseat Orbán and Fidesz. In name and strategy, DK harkened back to the democratic opposition of the 1980s. Illustrating their penchant for symbolic politics, in 2012, they organized a hunger strike in front of the National Assembly to protest Fidesz’s hardening of voter registration requirements.

In 2009, a group of environmental and civic activists founded LMP, a green party built on the foundations of climate-related performances and other social demonstrations in Budapest. LMP attacked Hungary’s political elites for their corruption and incompetence. Much like the democratic opposition of the 1980s, they called for the creation of a sustainable society made up of spontaneous civic associations and freed from the self-interested bickering of traditional political parties. Tamás Gáspár Miklós, a leading light of the 1980s democratic opposition, favored LMP’s antipolitical ideology and backed a number of their anti-Fidesz and climate-friendly demonstrations.

A third example of antipolitics is Momentum. The group first broke into the political spotlight in 2017 when it organized NOlimpia, a campaign against the Hungarian government’s bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. As an association, Momentum managed to collect nearly 300,000 signatures for a national referendum on the matter. As a result, Fidesz was forced to scrap its Olympic ambitions. Momentum then became a political party, and it quickly gained steam across Budapest for its anti-establishment demonstrations and social media savviness. The party’s founders were inspired by the dissidents of the 1980s, including early Fidesz, and they sought to reawaken the revolutionary fervor encapsulated in that era of Hungarian politics.

The various parties of the left reluctantly agreed to run together in the parliamentary elections of 2022 under the slogan, “United for Hungary.” It was a perfect illustration of the dysfunctional nature of antipolitical politics. For one, their identity was utterly incoherent. They allowed the radical right-wing party Jobbik to join their alliance, forming an odd bond between the radical right (Jobbik), social democrats (DK), greens (LMP), progressives (Momentum), and a few other smaller parties. The only thing holding the coalition together was their dogged opposition to Fidesz’s rule.

To decide their candidate for prime minister, the coalition held a primary. Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony, one of the left’s most popular figures, vowed to take up the leadership role. A few months later, he abruptly stepped down in favor of Péter Márki-Zay, an independent center-right politician, admitting that he was never really interested in political power in the first place. The coalition did manage to collectively garner about 35% of the vote, following years of popular dissatisfaction with Fidesz’s kleptocratic rule, but they still fell over a million votes shy of the ruling party.

Antipolitics is also embodied by the various media outlets which emerged in Hungary after 2010. Once Fidesz took power in 2010, its corporate network quickly began to conquer the country’s mass media landscape. Popular news sites like Origo and Index were pressured to tone down their criticism of the government and eventually bought up by companies affiliated with the ruling party. Editor-in-chief of Index Péter Uj left the portal in 2011 and, in 2013, he launched 444 with some ex-colleagues. In many ways, 444 is also an inheritor of the antipolitical identity of the democratic opposition. For one, it is characterized by its satirical criticism of state power. Its segments on Hungarian politics often poke fun at leading government figures by compiling their most incendiary and comical statements. 444 also lionizes the work of civil society. It hosts blogs for organizations like the Hungarian Helsinki Commission, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, and Amnesty International Hungary, among others.

The YouTube channel Partizán is another leading example of how the left’s energy has been channeled into critical commentary instead of traditional politics. Márton Gulyás, its central figure, started out as a leftist activist with Humán Platform, an association dedicated to social solidarity, and Krétakör, an anti-establishment cultural center. He organized various demonstrations against Fidesz—its border fence, xenophobic rhetoric, and legislative crackdown on Hungarian civil society. In 2016, he launched a YouTube series called Slejm (Phlegm)—“a politics stuck in the throat.” Throughout the series, he castigated the country’s political elites as intolerable, spineless fools. Since then, Partizán has ballooned in popularity. It gradually shed its original leftist trappings to become the go-to channel for political commentary and interviews in Hungary.

Concluding Thoughts

Today, we are witnessing both the effectiveness and limitations of the left’s antipolitical outlook. One the one hand, it is indisputable that the anti-government criticism of parties like DK, LMP, and Momentum and media like 444 and Partizán contributed to the fall of Fidesz. Drawing on the years-long work of those groups, Tisza attacked Fidesz for its corruption and propaganda. Tisza won over most voters below the age of 50, channeling the revolutionary fervor of many disillusioned young people who have only known life under Fidesz’s rule. Nonetheless, Tisza is a conservative party that seeks to uphold Fidesz’s hardline opposition to immigration, obsession with traditional families, attachment to Christian nationalism, and belief in foreign investment-driven growth. It is a rightist party, which has harnessed the anti-establishment fervor spurred by the left.

Critical commentary and street protests are important elements of liberal democracy. They are embodiments of the freedoms of speech and assembly, and they cast attention on abuses of state power. But they are not a substitute for the arduous labor of building grassroots parties which can mobilize people across the country and social spectrum. In the spirit of antipolitics, movements like DK, LMP, and Momentum and media like 444 and Partizán have guided the energies of leftist civil society towards fleeting expressions of anti-government criticism. Instead of building nationwide parties that could compete with the right, many talented organizers, speakers, and intellectuals have found a home in the ever-growing array of officially independent but spiritually leftist media outlets and quasi-political parties which prefer to label themselves social movements.

Instead of building nationwide parties that could compete with the right, many talented organizers, speakers, and intellectuals have found a home in the ever-growing array of officially independent but spiritually leftist media outlets and quasi-political parties which prefer to label themselves social movements.

Faced with Fidesz’s heavy-handed politics, it is understandable why leftists looked toward antipolitics. But Fidesz’s government was not a dictatorship. Opportunities for party-building did exist. Tisza’s success is a stark illustration of that fact. The party was able to rise from nothing to the very seat of state power by engaging local activists across the country and by channeling their energies into a national political structure. The left failed in its post-2010 efforts because antipolitics is not just a strategy of resisting an authoritarian state. It is an ideology which delegitimizes the pursuit of state power and lionizes the authority of intellectual elites, largely in Budapest. Among other factors, that philosophy has helped deprive Hungary of a youthful and competitive left. Socialists and liberals around the world would do well to learn from that failure.

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Beni Kovacs is a Teaching Associate at Boston University with a PhD in Political Science from Queen Mary University of London. His research explores the radical right in the United States and Hungary – where they come from intellectually and how they envision domestic and international politics.

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