The battles ahead for Hungary's new prime minister

Welcome back. There was jubilation on the streets of Budapest last Sunday after the opposition Tisza party won a landslide election victory, sweeping nationalist populist Viktor Orbán out of office. Tisza leader Péter Magyar (read our profile here) pulled off a historic feat, evicting a premier who had used his 16 years in power to systematically tilt elections in favour of his Fidesz party. For young Hungarians, though, the hero of election night was probably Zsolt Hegedus, an orthopedic surgeon who is expected to become minister for health. Hegedus's celebratory dance backdrop became a viral sensation. You can reach me at [email protected] Youth of today Young voters played a big part in Tisza's success. A poll by Median, conducted between April 7-11 and which accurately predicted an opposition supermajority, found that 73 per cent of 18-29 year olds supported Tisza. There were no published exit polls. Timothy Garton Ash observed the same youthful "energy for change" at an opposition campaign event in Budapest as he did on a visit to the capital in 1989. He writes: In the very square where, back in 1989, I watched a fiery young student leader named Viktor Orbán call for the end of the weary old communist regime and for the Russians to go home, I now saw a new generation of Hungarians calling for the end of a weary old regime led by this same Orbán and his Fidesz party It is a contrast to western Europe where young people are increasingly turning to the far-right to express their opposition to the political establishment. Information tool Median was vilified by Fidesz supporters for forecasting an opposition win. It is one of seven independent pollsters whose surveys in the final few weeks of the campaign on average showed 52 per cent for Tisza and 38 for Fidesz, close to the final result (54 to 38). Government aligned institutes, either through incompetence or lies, all predicted a Fidesz victory, a reminder of how opinion polling was turned into another political tool by Orbán and his allies. As Political Capital, a Budapest-based research outfit, noted, so-called competitive authoritarian regimes like Orbán's maintain power through information tools -- propaganda and censorship -- rather than repression or violence. Fidesz turned public media into government mouthpieces while stifling independent journalism and exerting ideological control over cultural and educational establishments. But this information bubble could not withstand the weight of public dissatisfaction over a flatlining economy, falling living standards and threadbare public services. Factory of lies As if to illustrate the collapse of the Orbán information bubble, Magyar made combative post-election appearances on state television and radio outlets that had in effect shut him out and denigrated him for 18 months. He seemed to relish the moment, tearing into his hosts for having spouted government propaganda and lies. "What was going on here would have made Goebbels and the North Korean dictator lick their fingers," he told M1 TV. He reiterated his intention to suspend the news services on public broadcasters until new regulation guaranteeing media impartiality was in place. "This factory of lies will end after the Tisza government is formed," he said. Crumbling regime It wasn't just Orbán's propaganda machine that failed but the ideological underpinnings of Fidesz, Political Capital concluded. An attempted government cover-up of a child abuse scandal and revelations about the government's servile stance towards Moscow undermined the "regime's credibility and the very foundations of its ideological self-definition", namely the protection of family values and national sovereignty. Magyar has vowed to bar Orbán from returning to office and to clear out Fidesz appointees who occupy the presidency, constitutional and supreme courts and other state bodies. He has promised to prosecute allegations of corruption and to recover assets appropriated through abuses of power. An ability to change the constitution gives an incoming Tisza government powerful tools to reverse the Fidesz party takeover of the state. Out of power, Fidesz's clientelistic networks in the public sector and in business are likely to collapse with, as Political Capital put it, "many people discovering their inner dissident retroactively, as happened when the communist Kádár regime collapsed in 1989." So the future looks bleak for Orbán. Perhaps his best hope is that regime change takes a lot longer than Magyar would like, tying the government up in interminable legal and constitutional wrangles while Hungarians see no improvements in their ordinary lives. That's why it is so important for Magyar to secure the release of nearly €18bn of suspended EU development aid to kick start the economy once he has implemented the rule of law safeguards Brussels is demanding. It will be a race against the clock says Zselyke Csaky, since billions of euros in aid will otherwise lapse in August. But to avoid repeating the mistake of the hurried release of funds to Poland after Donald Tusk's return to power, the EU will need to "combine a warm embrace of the Magyar government with a steely sense of the EU's leverage", writes Jeremy Cliffe of the European Council on Foreign Relations. All change Hard to imagine that a week ago, Hungary was on the cusp of a sweeping system change akin to 1989. That period is instructive. The transition from democracy was incomplete. There was no full accountability for communist-era crimes or a wholesale clearout of elites. Hungary did not even acquire a wholly new constitution for the liberal democratic era. The shortcomings of the transition provided a justification for Orbán's remodelling of the constitutional order, which became de facto one-party control of the state. To be genuine, Magyar's regime change will require full accountability from Orbán and his allies. If there is to be a constitutional overhaul, the public will need to give its consent in a referendum. Checks and balances must be restored and independent institutions will have to prove a track record of constraining executive power. All of this will take time. More on this topic Marton Dunai on why Hungary will find it hard to dismantle the Orbán system. 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