Hungary's Tisza Party Wins Big — and the Real Work Starts Now

Péter Magyar's Tisza party has delivered what many observers are calling a political earthquake in Hungary, winning a mandate large enough to put genuine constitutional reform back on the table. After years in which Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party reshaped Hungary's legal architecture to entrench its own power, the prospect of a government with the numbers to undo that work is, for many Hungarians and European partners alike, both exhilarating and sobering.

The scale of the victory matters enormously here, because Hungary's political system is not a standard parliamentary setup where a simple majority lets you govern. Orbán's governments used their successive supermajorities to rewrite the constitution, pack the Constitutional Court, reshape the electoral map, and embed loyalists throughout the judiciary and public media. Reversing those changes requires the same tool that built them: a two-thirds supermajority. Magyar and Tisza appear to have secured, or come very close to, exactly that threshold. That is not a routine election result. It is a structural opening that has not existed in Hungary for well over a decade.

The significance of a two-thirds mandate in Hungary cannot be overstated. Under the Fundamental Law adopted in 2011, a vast range of policy areas — from the organization of courts to media regulation to electoral rules themselves — are governed by so-called cardinal laws that require supermajority support to amend. Fidesz used this mechanism to lock in its preferences even against future governments. A Tisza-led coalition with sufficient seats could, in theory, begin unwinding those locks: restoring judicial independence, revisiting the media landscape, and reopening the electoral system that critics say was deliberately gerrymandered to favor the incumbent.

But the systems-level challenge here is precisely that these institutions were not just changed — they were populated. Judges, prosecutors, media regulators, and public administrators appointed under Fidesz will remain in post long after any election. Changing the rules is one thing; changing the culture and personnel of institutions shaped over fifteen years is a generational project. Poland's experience after its 2023 election offers a cautionary parallel: Prime Minister Donald Tusk's coalition won power but has found the process of restoring judicial independence grinding and legally contested at every turn, with Fidesz-aligned figures in Warsaw watching closely and offering rhetorical solidarity to their counterparts in Budapest.

The European Union has a direct stake in what happens next. Hungary has been the subject of Article 7 proceedings — the EU's most serious rule-of-law mechanism — since 2018, and billions in cohesion funds have been frozen over concerns about democratic backsliding. A government genuinely committed to restoring judicial independence and press freedom would, if it follows through, unlock those funds and remove one of the EU's most persistent internal headaches. That financial dimension gives Tisza a powerful incentive to move quickly on rule-of-law reforms, and gives Brussels an incentive to be a cooperative partner rather than a skeptical auditor.

The second-order effect worth watching, though, is what a successful democratic restoration in Hungary does to the broader European far-right ecosystem. Orbán has functioned for years as a proof-of-concept: the argument that illiberal governance is not just ideologically coherent but electorally durable. Parties from France's Rassemblement National to Italy's Fratelli d'Italia have drawn on that example. If Hungary's voters decisively reject the model and a successor government manages a credible transition back toward liberal democratic norms, it punctures the narrative that democratic erosion is a one-way ratchet. That reverberation could matter well beyond Budapest.

Magyar himself is a relatively new figure in Hungarian politics, which is both his greatest asset and his most significant vulnerability. He carries none of the baggage of the pre-Orbán opposition, but he also leads a party without deep institutional roots or a tested governing apparatus. The mandate is historic. Whether the organization behind it is ready to govern a complex state while simultaneously reforming the legal framework that state runs on is the question that the next several months will begin to answer.

The hardest part of regime change, it turns out, is rarely the election.