Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party’s defeat in the recent Hungarian election has drawn attention to the winning strategy of his rival, Péter Magyar of the Tisza party. Over his 16 years in power, Orbán brought democratic institutions to heel and consolidated control over Hungarian media, cementing his status as the paradigmatic right-wing populist leader.
Many in Hungary see Orbán’s defeat as a victory for democracy and a defeat for Christian nationalism. In the United States and countries where Orbán’s “Hungarian model“ of conservative, illiberal government has found support, parties and candidates also paid close attention to this election, and Magyar’s winning strategy against populism.
Did the appeal to rural voters work?
One hallmark of Magyar’s successful campaign was his countryside tour. Over the past two years, Magyar visited towns and villages across Hungary to appeal to rural voters who had long been considered Orbán’s base. Coverage of the campaign, especially after Tisza’s victory, has highlighted how this strategy helped Magyar bypass Orbán’s media control – and project the image of a leader for all Hungarians, despite his roots in an intellectual Budapest family.
The fact that Magyar’s party won an overwhelming parliamentary majority suggests that this strategy worked. But did it? A closer look turns up little evidence that Magyar’s visits moved the needle.
Skipping Budapest – and courting the countryside
We collected data on Magyar’s campaign stops from the official Tisza party website, which tracked roughly 200 events between November 2025 and April 2026.
Figure 1 shows the weekly count of Magyar’s campaign stops. After a brief pilot phase in early November 2025, the tour paused over the winter holidays while Magyar focused on press engagements and building his team. Once the April 12 election date was announced, the tour resumed at a far higher tempo.
Hungary’s electoral districts did not receive equal attention, however. Figure 2 maps the number of events per constituency, with darker shades corresponding to more visits. While Magyar visited almost every district, the campaign tour bypassed Budapest, where Tisza was already strong. Instead he concentrated on the Fidesz strongholds in the countryside.
The strategy behind Magyar’s countryside tour
Where did Magyar campaign? To better understand his strategy, we compared his 2025 campaign stops to the results from Tisza’s breakout election, which occurred in the 2024 European Parliament election. Figure 3 shows the predicted number of visits as a function of the 2024 margin between Fidesz and Tisza, after accounting for other factors (such as regional differences).
The figure shows the Magyar campaign targeted competitive districts where the two parties were more evenly balanced, focusing less on Budapest and other areas where Tisza was almost sure to win, or places where Fidesz was dominant. This pattern suggests a data-driven approach to the visits, consistent with Tisza’s strategic social media use.
So did these visits make a difference?
A trickier question is whether the visits actually moved the needle for Tisza in the 2026 election. Figure 4 plots the 2024 to 2026 vote swing against the number of visits per constituency. If his visits helped, then you’d expect to see larger pro-Tisza swings in the places with more Magyar visits.
Surprisingly, the constituencies Magyar visited more frequently saw a slightly smaller swing toward Tisza. On average, places with zero visits swung about 35 percentage points, while those with 4 to 5 visits swung around 32 points.
A naive reading would suggest each additional visit actually hurt Tisza’s prospects. But as we showed, Magyar deliberately skipped places where Tisza was already very likely to win. Moreover, frequent visits may reflect Tisza’s efforts to address vulnerabilities not reflected in the 2024 vote patterns. The negative relationship between visits and vote swing could therefore reflect the campaign’s strategy, not its effectiveness.
In a more detailed analysis that’s available to review here, we adjust for the Magyar campaign’s strategic targeting. Although we cannot cleanly establish the causal effect of the visits, this analysis also shows that additional visits probably did not tip the election in Tisza’s favor. The remarkable swing toward Tisza between 2024 and 2026 was fairly even across Hungary’s electoral districts.
What’s the big takeaway from this Hungarian campaign?
Even if individual visits didn’t move the needle in the districts Magyar visited, that doesn’t mean the strategy failed. The tour generated extensive media coverage and projected an image of a candidate concerned about rural voters and rural issues, which likely boosted Tisza’s support across the country. The countryside strategy may have been more effective in 2024, when Magyar was a newcomer who had recently defected from Fidesz and was still introducing himself to Hungarians.
And, of course, any findings from Hungary may not apply to other places. Hungary is a country of fewer than 10 million people. Visiting nearly every electoral district in six months was feasible – but candidates in larger countries like the United States would find it difficult to match that pace.
But two broader lessons do apply: Take neglected rural areas seriously, and build a coalition wide enough to win them. Hungary’s leftist opposition did exactly that, rallying around a center-right candidate who could reach the voters Tisza needed to peel away from Fidesz. Then again, after 16 years in the wilderness, Hungarian leftists and centrists were ready to back almost any candidate who could defeat Orbán. Whether the same would hold true for American voters in 2028 remains to be seen.
Isabelle DeSisto is a PhD candidate in politics at Princeton University, and a 2025-2026 Good Authority fellow.
Grigore Pop-Eleches is professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.
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