It's difficult to say where things will be going from here. Assuming the opposition parties really do form an alliance for the 2022 election, they will almost certainly deprive Fidesz of its two-thirds majority and perhaps break the sense of inevitability about Fidesz staying in power indefinitely. The problem is that Fidesz and Fidesz-adjacent people control all the media, either directly (public TV and radio) or indirectly (hostile takeovers of private media) and don't shy away from using it to their benefit. For years, the M1 evening newscast has been a stream of propaganda about the good work the government does, the perfidies of oposition, the evils of migration, Soros and EU etc etc. Granted, Hungary is not alone in this, TVP is basically the same these days.
Lengyel, Magyar, két jó barát, in all the wrong ways. Hungary, however,
is unique in that there are almost no neutral or opposition media left.
Some people - not just Orbán apologists - like to talk about he's popular not because of his stranglehold over the media and scaremongering, but because his government is actually good. Bullshxt. I could go over a litany of what Fidesz is doing wrong, but here are just two examples:
- the aptly named "slave law", a 2019 labour law reform that, among other significant changes, increased maximum yearly hours of overtime from 250 to 400 ("hurr durr economically leftist far right!")
-
Pancho Aréna, a €10 million stadium built in Felcsút, a small village... that also happens to be the place where Orbán lived as a kid. It's something unbelievable; a stadium for thousands of people and the only access road is literally a village residential street, there are no facilities anywhere and the most interesting attraction in the surroundings is a
railway to nowhere. Fortunately, the structure is built of wood - if there is a God, that
thing will burn down to cinders at some point.
Any change will have to come from within, though. Even if EU had the balls to discipline Hungary (assuming that it wouldn't just backfire and make Orbán more popular), they'd be stopped by the V4. If Orbán tried to do the things he is doing now during his first term in the late 90s, Hungary wouldn't come anywhere close near EU and all surrounding countries would condemn him - but that's not happening now. Orbánism used to be based on Hungarian irredentism towards neighbouring countries, but today it uses modern far-right tropes about transnational elites. 2021 Orbán doesn't hate nationalists from the rest of V4 and they don't hate him. They might not be as shamelessly anti-democratic, but fundamentally they see him as "one of us". They would never allow EU to actually punish him.
As I once put it in a rant on AAD,
He doesn't care that much about
Trianon either. Even the farthest far-right doesn't, beyond occasional grumbling - just like far-right in neighbouring countries.
It's all about Brussels, Muslims and (((Soros))) now. Which is certainly worse* - you used to have Hungarian idiot nationalists yelling about retaking Felvidék and Erdély and Slovak/Romanian/whatever idiot nationalists yelling about fifth columnists. Annoying, but because this isn't Yugoslavia, turning those ideologies into reality was beyong the pale. Now they are all on the same side, fighting together against the same enemies and what's worse, they have allies in mainstream politics and in government. Man, V4 sucks.
* and I'm saying this despite being glad that I'm too young to remember most of
Slota's alcoholic rants about getting into tanks and razing Budapest. It's much better for me not to have to listen to the leader of a governing part talk about how I'm half-"ugly mongoloid type with crooked legs that arrived on a hairy, even uglier pony".
