A crowd of several hundred people gathered on Wednesday evening in the square of a small Hungarian town on the banks of the Tisza River.
Expressions sombre, they held aloft flaming torches as the voice of their hero, Peter Magyar, cut through the chilly night air with a defiant rallying cry: “We are not afraid.”
But many of his supporters believe Magyar himself should be.
Until a year ago, Magyar, 43, was a trusted figure within the government. Now he is the biggest threat Viktor Orban has faced in 15 years of uninterrupted rule. Has the proudly illiberal 61-year-old prime minister finally met his match?
With a year to go before the country’s general election, Magyar, a former lawyer whose name, felicitously, is Hungarian for Hungary, appears to have caught the government off-guard, already overtaking Orban’s juggernaut ruling right-wing party, Fidesz, in the polls.
With a relentless, almost prosecutorial fervour, he blasts deteriorating living standards and healthcare and the “industrial-scale” corruption of the ruling clan. Orban is a “gangster”, he told the crowd in Szentes last week. He promised to put an end to the ruling party’s “vile, lying propaganda machine”.
He returned to the theme the next day sitting at a conference table at his party headquarters, located in a modest block of flats in Budapest.
“They say we are the strongest and best country in the EU, but this is propaganda reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels in Nazi Germany,” he said in his first British interview. “In reality we are Europe’s poorest and most corrupt.”
With a boyish smirk playing about his face, Magyar, dressed in blue suede shoes, jeans and a light-green gilet — a “success vest”, as Hungarians jokingly call what has become a sort of uniform for the wealthy elite who have gravitated around Orban — tore once more into his enemy.
“We don’t have a government, we have a power machine, including the secret services, the propaganda department and this gang of Orban family members. And people are quite fed up with it,” he said.
Magyar was elected as an MEP last year after joining the small centre-right Tisza party, which he has now made his own. Tisza is one of the country’s greatest rivers but also a hybrid word signifying freedom and respect. “Tisza is in full flood,” Magyar likes to proclaim of his growing army.
If elected Hungary’s prime minister, he would normalise relations with the EU and keep the country anchored in Nato. Orban, by contrast, has befriended Russia’s President Putin and alienated Brussels by trampling over EU laws. As a consequence, €19 billion in EU post-pandemic recovery funds and other resources for Hungary have been blocked.
“We’ll get that money back, it will restore our crumbling health system,” said Magyar.
But will he make it to the finishing line? This is a significant moment for Hungary, the first time a Fidesz party insider — Magyar worked variously in the foreign ministry and prime minister’s office — has challenged Orban since 2010.
Orban casts a long shadow over modern Hungarian politics: he was also prime minister from 1998 to 2002 and, back in 1989, was a figurehead of the pro-democracy movement, making a famous speech calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops.
He is also someone who has proved particularly adept at clearing the field of rivals, and Magyar says it is clear the government will leave no weapon unused in its effort to stop him too. “We’ll see if I’m still a candidate next year,” he said at one point, with a nervous chuckle. “Of course, they will try everything, they are using the propaganda machine to attack me and my family.”
The dirty tricks have already begun, he added.
His ex-wife, Judit Varga, a former justice minister under Orban and the mother of his three sons, has claimed that Magyar locked her at various times in a room without her consent, pushed her against a door while she was pregnant and walked around their shared residence brandishing a knife. Magyar said she was blackmailed into making what he insists are false claims of abuse.
He also said that a police report about his alleged aggressive threatening behaviour when Varga tried with the help of bodyguards to take away their children had been falsified. Then an ex-girlfriend popped up with recordings of Magyar supposedly belittling his followers. He believes his voice has been parroted in social media clips by an artificial intelligence programme.
Now he has received a tip-off about another more run-of-the-mill effort to undermine him: his offices and the flats of his colleagues will be raided by police. “Their aim is to stop us and make it impossible to run our campaign,” he said.
What prompted him to enter such a murky — and potentially dangerous — political arena? “I’m doing it partly for my sons,” he said. “It’s not easy for them, but … I hope that they will forgive me later because one day, maybe, they will be able to live in a normal, democratic European country.”
A turning point for him came last year when a scandal erupted over a secret pardon that covered up sexual abuse at an orphanage close to Orban’s home village.
• Outrage over Orban’s ‘Pleasure Palace’ gives opposition party a foothold in elections
Varga, whom Magyar had divorced in 2023, resigned, along with the president, Katalin Novak, as they had both signed the pardon. That was when Magyar decided to defect. “I thought to myself, ‘This cover-up at the children’s home, it’s too much, the level of corruption is so high’,” he recalled.
He decided to vent his concerns in public. “I just wanted to give people some insider information about how the party’s inner circle works, how the decisions are made, I didn’t want to become a politician at all at that stage.”
Videos of him on social media talking about the country’s woes — “a few families own half the country,” he said in one — clocked up millions of views. “People started urging me to enter politics and do something meaningful,” he said.
So he did. On March 15 last year, a national holiday commemorating the 1848 revolution against the Habsburgs, he held a rally in Budapest attended by tens of thousands at which he announced the formation of a new party to fight and dismantle what he called the “feudalistic system”. He hopes another rally on the same date this year will attract a crowd of 300,000.
Like Orban, he is passionate about football and he turned to a sporting metaphor when asked if he could keep up the momentum until the election in April next year. “By then it will be like the 85th minute in a football match, we want to be leading 3-0 or 4-1. In that case, [the government] can do what they want, but it won’t be enough,” he said.
Problems would arise, though, if “we are one-all in the 85th minute. That’s when they will use the referee, they will try to modify the rules, they will do everything they can to try to win.”
Orban, regarded as an inspirational figure by those on the American right — including President Trump, who once described the Hungarian leader as his “twin” — is renowned for having weaponised the state apparatus and a largely friendly media against his foes.
“He can change the rules of the game,” said Zsuzsanna Szelenyi, a former Fidesz activist who broke with Orban in the 1990s over his growing authoritarianism.
She noted that electoral laws have been changed countless times, with voting districts suddenly reshaped to allow wins for the government when its candidates were under threat. Such tinkering with the electoral map was certain in the run-up to next year’s election, she predicted.
“Peter Magyar will have to go through hell, though, and to stay calm,” she added. “So far the attacks don’t seem to have hurt him.”
For the last election, in 2022, the government redistributed the equivalent of about 6 per cent of GDP to various societal groups in a bid to buy favour. Those under 25 were exempted from income tax. So were women with three children. The economic difficulties Hungary faces today make a repeat of that approach less likely.
They have also fuelled resentment over the glamorous lifestyle of the elite. Jozsef Martin, Transparency International’s director for Hungary, said: “The economic situation has deteriorated very significantly. When people felt better off it helped to hide all the corruption.”
Standing in the crowd waiting for Magyar in Szentes, 80 miles southeast of Budapest, was a woman in a red coat: Zsuzsanna, an English teacher. “We’ve got to do something to get rid of Orban, he’s betraying the country, why not try Peter Magyar who speaks out loud my secret thoughts?” she said.
“We live in fear here,” she added, declining to give her full name, saying she risked being fired from her job. “It’s an atmosphere that reminds me of my childhood under communism in the 1970s, when we were afraid all the time. I thought we were free of that in the 1990s, after the end of communism, but now we’ve gone back.”
She paused, before adding: “If we don’t get a new leader soon, Hungary as we know it will be over, a dictatorship like Venezuela or Belarus.”
