New opposition party takes a page out of Orbán’s playbook to build rural network

In the past few elections, Hungarian opposition parties had a hard time building support outside of Budapest and other large cities, letting Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP sweep much of the Hungarian heartland. The newly formed opposition force, Péter Magyar’s TISZA Party is trying to build a network of activists in Fidesz-dominated rural regions. They were able to form pockets of supporters in small communities that haven’t even been on the radar of opposition parties before. The country’s most impoverished North-Eastern region however seems to remain firmly in Fidesz’s grasp.

The urban-rural divide has long been a mainstay of Hungarian politics, and only grew stronger under the governance of Viktor Orbán. Along with age, education level, and economic status, community size became the best predictor for voting behavior: parties challenging the Orbán-government have won the majority of votes in the capital city Budapest, and doing reasonably well in some large cities like Pécs and Miskolc. However, almost a third of Hungary’s population lives in rural villages, where the ruling Fidesz-KDNP faces almost no contest.

An extreme but illustrative example of this trend is the small village of Csenyéte, a community in North-Eastern Hungary of 550 people, most of whom live under the poverty line, and where over 99 percent voted for Fidesz in 2022.

Let’s go “down” to the countryside

„Going down to the countryside” and challenging Fidesz’s control has been a central but largely failed goal of the Hungarian opposition. After the 2024 European Parliamentary elections, the former opposition parties (a coalition of liberal, social-democratic, and right-wing parties) has been overshadowed by the newly formed TISZA Party, led by Péter Magyar. A former official of the Orbán-government, Magyar seems to have taken a page out of Fidesz’s playbook when building his party’s countrywide network.

While in opposition, Fidesz has launched so-called “citizens’ circles”, a loose network of Fidesz sympathisers and activists opposed to the Socialist Party government at the time.

Although the movement was not officially a part of any political party, Viktor Orbán was personally involved in its organisation. The network formed the bases of the party’s current national organization – the current party director of Fidesz, Gábor Kubatov, who is widely seen as the architect of Fidesz’s dominance over rural Hungary, also started his carreer as an organiser of citizens’ circles.

Fast forward to 2024, Péter Magyar announced the formation of the so-called TISZA-islands, a loose network of TISZA supporters and activists willing to work against the government parties. Like the former citizens’ circles (that by today were largely absorbed by the formal Fidesz organization or disbanded), thes „islands” are not officially parts of the party structure. However, Magyar stated that they are instrumental for its campaign. TISZA island membership is even a prerequisite for someone willing to become a member of an official TISZA Party chapter (and thus being able to participate in the upcoming 2026 primary election).

Islands in Fidesz’s seas

We found that many TISZA-islands have public social media presence. Putting these public profiles on a map suggest that TISZA has been more successful at „going to the countryside” than the older opposition parties, establishing islands in some of Fidesz’s strongest constituencies. According to TISZA Party’s headquarters, they do not publish statistical data on the number of islands as their number and membership is changing rapidly. In a January interview, Péter Magyar said that there were already 1200 TISZA islands with tens of thousands of members in total.

In our survey, we found 208 islands with public social media profiles, which have a total of almost 20,000 members, meaning that the total network could realistically consist of tens of thousands of people.

The majority of these islands are located in constituencies that were won by Fidesz-KDNP by a large margin (more than 10 percent) in the 2022 elections.

There are also TISZA islands in constituencies where the governing parties received more than 60 percent of the vote in 2022, such as OEVK 04 (Szigetvár) in Baranya County or OEVK 03 (Szentgotthárd) in Vas County, although these are not TISZA’s strongest regions based on publicly available data.

We found the highest concentration of TISZA islands in Central Hungary, in smaller communities outside Budapest – this is in line with the voting patterns observed at the 2024 EP elections. In Budapest, the traditional base of opposition to Orbán’s regime, there are slightly fewer islands, althogh they have more members overall than the smaller islands around the capital.

However, the geographic distribution of TISZA islands deviate from the familiar electoral map: no strong TISZA network can be seen in the two opposition strongholds outisde Budapest, Pécs and Szeged.

In contrast, the strongest cities in the TISZA network include Debrecen, a staunchly Fidesz-voting city.

Large TISZA groups have also been formed in Szekszárd, Veszprém and Zalaegerszeg, which are bastions of Fidesz.

In addition to the larger cities, TISZA islands have also been established in communities of less than 5,000 inhabitants, such as Nyírlugos, Gönyű, Tiszaigar, Verseg and Tét. In these settlements Fidesz won with a majority of more than 60% in 2022. Tellingly, these villages were not on the radar of the parliamentary opposition in the 2024 local elections: only Fidesz-KDNP and independent candidates ran for mayor and municipal council seats.

North-East Hungary: from Socialist central to Fidesz base

In one region however, TISZA seems to have a harder time building a network of support: in the counties of Heves and Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg, in North-East-Hungary. In the former, Heves there are only five TISZA islands, while in the latter, there are seven, three of which in Nyíregyháza, which is considered oppositional in the region. The TISZA network is somewhat stronger in the neighboring Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county, where there are 9 TISZA islands. Among them is the organisation in Szerencs, which is surprisingly the largest TISZA group with more than 1000 members.

On average, The Northern and Noth-Eastern region has long been the poorest part of Hungary, still suffering from the deindustrialization and disbanding of agricultural collectives that happened after the fall of Communism, and heavly depending on government programs. It seems that this dependence can be leveraged by the whoever controls the government into electoral success: before 2010, the region regularly voted for fot the Socialist party, which dominated Hungarian politics at the time. After the Socialist’s collapse, voters of the region shifted to Fidesz, and the North-East became the strongest base for the party.