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I guess all those people handwringing about democratic backsliding were full of shit. Orban used to be popular, and now he's not. Simple as.
The real question is, what changed since 2022? The main things are the prolonged invasion of Ukraine and the return of Trump. Was this a foreign policy election?
You can check my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3671/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/430673?context=8#context
In 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war was very fresh, the invasion was barely more than a month old at the time of the election. The opposition candidate said a few stupid things in interviews about sending weapons and possibly Hungarian soldiers to Ukraine if NATO would decide so. Or that Ukraine is fighting our war too, and "blood is more important than oil" etc, which were blasted all around the pro-Fidesz media, there were huge billboards etc. saying that Fidesz will keep Hungary out of the war and will keep a strategic calm while the opposition would let Hungary slip into the war. It scared many people.
But even the baseline was different. In 2022, the opposition was a multi-party patchwork which included the despised previous Socialist PM who was in power before Orbán, and there were constant internal squabbles between the opposition parties, leading to an ineffective campaign.
I don't think this is so black-and-white. Of course some ignorant people claimed that Orbán is like Erdogan or Lukashenka or Putin. He never was that sort of dictator with blood on his hands, people never fell out of windows of tall buildings, journalists were not imprisoned, there was no novichok, etc. The democratic backsliding is about making a joke out of institutions, placing puppets everywhere from his small inner circle including the constitutional court, the public prosecutor's office, the president of the republic, the national bank, etc, funneling about a quarter of all public contract money to his frontmen, making a joke out of the public state media (you cannot imagine it, it is parody-level extreme bias, something you couldn't imagine if your standard is the left-bias of western media), taking over a lot of private media, threatening to pass a law that would crush them under claims of being foreign agents, constantly keeping some state of emergency to make passing laws even easier, and ruling by decree, on a whim. First with the justification of the dangers of migration, then covid, then the Ukraine war, there was always some special emergency state for the legal system. They often passed totally unrelated laws and bypassed the need for public tenders and gave government contracts to their friends and themselves with the justification of the state of emergency. They constantly gerrymandered and originally tailored the electoral law to benefit them. They won a 2/3 constitutional parliamentary supermajority in 2014 with less than 45% of the votes because the voting system they designed benefited them. The system forced parties to join up, since one large party and many small ones simply results in this distorted outcome. But they made sure to give enough media space to small parties to avoid having any one of them grow too big. So in many of the elections a lot of energy was spent on the squabbles of the opposition parties and in what form they should run together, what to do with the party of former PM Gyurcsány who still had significant support, but not enough to win alone, but many voters outright rejected Gyurcsány, so it was a neither with, neither without situation.
Being a former Fidesz insider, Magyar could draw a line and he held to it throughout it all, that he will not collaborate with anyone from the former opposition parties. Every single person of their candidates is someone new, who was never an MP, and never held high political positions. Gyurcsány even resigned from chairing his party and it was taken over by his wife (whom he also divorced). The small parties also just withdrew from the election. But by then they were already led by unknown people and had very low support, each below the 5% threshold, because the 2022 parliamentary and 2024 European elections led to resignations of known figures in those opposition parties.
It's certainly a combination of incompetence (or deals with Fidesz) of the opposition parties, combined with good machinations by Orbán, tending to his little garden of opposition parties well. But he also centralized power in a way that can be labeled authoritarian and made a puppet show out of the institutional checks and balances. The country was basically ruled by Orbán's college dorm friends and his childhood friends.
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