Nick ThorpeCorrespondent in Budapest
Péter Magyar and his victorious Tisza party wasted no time preparing for the transfer of power in Hungary following their crushing defeat by Viktor Orbán last Sunday.
They won 52% of the vote to end his party’s 16-year continuous rule, translating to 140 seats in the 199-seat National Assembly.
Orbán’s Fidesz fell from 135 to 53 seats.
The count will be finalized on Saturday – including recounts in closely related precincts and votes cast overseas.
Magyar obtained a commitment from President Tamás Sulyok to bring forward the formation of the new parliament to the week of May 4. Parliament will then be able to elect the new government.
He has also given combative interviews to public service television and radio, which have largely ignored or attacked him over the past two years.
He promised to pass laws to suspend their news programs, until impartial editors could be appointed.
Armed with a so-called supermajority of more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, he also plans to retroactively limit the number of terms a prime minister can serve to two.
Viktor Orbán has already served five. If this comes to fruition, the Magyars could slam the door on Orbán’s return.
It was only late Thursday that Orbán finally broke his silence after Sunday’s defeat, in an interview on the Patrióta YouTube channel.
“It’s the end of an era,” the defeated Hungarian leader said. “We must bear this defeat with dignity.”
He spoke of feeling “pain and emptiness” in the face of defeat, taking full personal responsibility for what happened. But he offered no analysis of the main errors of his campaign, apart from the failure to complete the Russian-designed Paks 2 nuclear power plant, which is six years late.
A meeting of Fidesz’s top leadership is scheduled for April 28, ahead of the party’s congress in June.
In the interview, Orbán said he would continue to lead Fidesz if re-elected, but added that the party needed a “complete renewal.”
Of the 53 seats Fidesz will occupy in the new parliament, only 10 will come from individual constituencies, with the rest coming from party lists.
Many new MPs on party lists should be replaced because they are not fit to work in opposition, he said. Calls for change have already been made, within a party where dissent is rarely expressed in public.
“I think [Orbán] is not obliged to resign at the moment,” said András Cser-Palkovics, Fidesz mayor of the western town of Székesfehérvár. “He should wait for the national caucus and then start evaluating [the result]. Then we should have a leadership election. »
There is no obvious successor to Orbán in the party, and none with the ability or charm to integrate different opinions and ambitions.
US and British advisers criticized Fidesz’s main campaign slogan, “safe choice”, for alienating young voters.
But it was difficult for a party in power for so long to present itself to voters as the party of change, a source told the BBC.
In response, two young politicians, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó, 47, and Transport Minister János Lázár, 51, often appeared at Orbán’s rallies. But rather than reinvigorating the party, their dynamism simply made its leader look old and tired.
Orbán turns 63 next month, but the wear and tear of 38 years in front-line politics is evident even to his most die-hard supporters.
There is a climate of fear and recrimination within the ruling party.
Rumors of imminent arrests for corruption are circulating in Budapest. On social media, Tisza supporters are eager for those who enriched themselves illegally under the previous government to be held accountable.
Péter Magyar leads the chorus.
“My message to the leaders of Fidesz and their cronies: there is no point in playing the innocent little dancer now and pretending that nothing happened,” he posted on Facebook. “We know what you have done to our beloved homeland and to the Hungarian people. And do not doubt for a moment that ‘you will reap what you sow’.”
In downtown Budapest, almost all Fidesz posters have been defaced. On many, the word Veggie – the end – was spray painted. Others were torn apart and redecorated with swear words.
The sudden disgrace of the party in the eyes of the population, and even of some of its former supporters, was spectacular.
The tough tone of the new Tisza leaders appears to be both emotional and tactical.
They are taking revenge for the demonization campaign that the government-controlled Central European Press and Media Foundation (Kesma) orchestrated against them and the Magyars personally. Kesma includes 476 titles, around fifty of which are mainly media.
One of the first problems Tisza faces is preventing the outflow of money from the country by businessmen close to the ruling party. Dubai is a favorite destination for Hungarian oligarchs.
Another solution is to prevent the destruction of evidence of corruption, for example in government ministries.
While papers are being shredded in some offices, two Tisza insiders told the BBC, officials are offering Tisza USB drives with digital copies, in exchange for keeping their jobs or immunity from prosecution.
In the week before the election, when opinion polls consistently predicted a large opposition majority, Tisza says dozens of contracts were signed with favored companies, committing the state to future IT, research, construction and other projects.
With their new two-thirds majority, they will be able to pass laws to restore the checks and balances eroded or destroyed by Fidesz over the past 16 years.
During his campaign, Magyar promised to create an office to recover stolen public property.
This week, he reiterated his promise to join the Luxembourg-based European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO). This would help demonstrate to the EU that it is keen to fight corruption, but only has the power to investigate the misuse of EU funds.
He also spoke with Zsolt Hernádi, CEO of MOL, the Hungarian energy giant, which operates two refineries in Hungary and Slovakia, on which both countries depend.
The urgent restoration of oil supplies via the Druzhba (Friendship) pipeline from Russia to Ukraine is one of the few issues on which Magyar and Viktor Orbán agree. It has been closed since late January, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said this week that oil could start flowing by the end of the month.
Hungary’s new prime minister has said he wants to diversify the country’s oil supplies, notably by making better use of an alternative pipeline from the Croatian island of Krk.
Nearly three-quarters of 18- to 29-year-olds are estimated to have supported Tisza, and a former Hungarian ambassador to the United States under Orbán, Réka Szemerkenyi, told the BBC she was impressed by the messages Hungary’s younger generation had given to their new leaders.
“’Ria, Ria Hungaria,’ which means we love our country,” said Szemerkenyi, today at the Equilibrium Institute in Budapest. “Then the slogans ‘Europa’, and the third one I heard repeatedly was ‘The Russians are going home’. These three together are like a foreign policy program.”
On Friday, a high-level delegation from the office of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen arrived in Budapest for informal talks with officials from Tisza, headed by Péter Magyar.
To access the 17 billion euros (£15 billion) in EU funds withheld by the Orbán government, his new government will have to meet 27 criteria: the independence of the judiciary, the fight against corruption and the liberation of the media from government control.
The Hungarian economy is in a deep recession, and Magyar and his team know they will have to get back on their feet.