Every September since 2004, the Hungarian right has gathered at a manor house in Kötcse, a village near Lake Balaton. Officially, it is a picnic for civilians. In practice, it is the annual synod of Fidesz: politicians, businessmen, editors and intellectuals within the party’s orbit assemble to hear Viktor Orbán set the line for the coming year. Last year, he used it to launch his re-election campaign. This year, on 12 September, the party met for the first time in sixteen years as an opposition.
Orbán had just returned from a summer holiday of nearly two months. Asked about it on arrival, he replied that, after sixteen years of governing, he was tired and had earned some rest. Expectations for the speech were correspondingly high.
It was delivered behind closed doors, yet a radical pro-Russia site called Vadhajtások, a one-man news outlet Orbán himself called his main source, published the recording in full. Reading it, one remembers what Talleyrand is said to have observed of the returning Bourbons: They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing.
The Oracle Returns
Arrogance is back in Fidesz, mixed with a sense of victimisation. Orbán speaks as the origin and the oracle of the Hungarian opposition - the man who decides what the defeat meant and who is to judge and forgive.
The register is biblical and military at once. A defeat of this size, he told the room, must be handled as one handles an earthquake: first, “the dead must be buried” - the political dead in the ground, traitors in the heart. He declared the post-election grace period over and the time of “national resistance” begun, and put the camp’s losses at five to ten per cent, worse than anyone expected.
What is missing is a cause. Orbán ruled out the obvious explanations one by one. Not his person, his figure - he has visibly gained weight - or his age, as he will be 67 by the next election. Not corruption or luxury scandals, which, in his account, never stopped Fidesz from winning before - sic!
What remained was a puzzle they had failed to solve: how to win a fifth term after sixteen years in power. Instead, he pointed to a conspiracy involving “Brussels’ blackmail, alongside interference from the German, French and British secret services”, and, of course, the Soros network.
If the defeat was caused by a hostile Europe, three foreign intelligence services, a global financier and an economy that refuses to grow, why should any of it be gone by the EU elections in 2029 or the national elections in 2030?
“Let’s Stop This, That’s My Proposal”
The most revealing passage came shortly afterwards, and it was aimed at his own side.
Since the spring, the most interesting conversation on the Hungarian right has not been about Orbán at all. It was started by Márton Békés, one of the intellectual architects of Fidesz. He introduced a phrase that spread within weeks: mozaikjobboldal, the mosaic right.
The idea is simple. The state-building of the right is over, with no restoration in prospect. What replaces it is not a party but a pattern: autonomous parties, movements, media outlets, intellectual workshops and activists, each maintaining its own character and methods while cooperating towards shared goals, and, at the edges, cooperating even with greens, liberals and the left where their interests happen to meet.
Békés said the right should be “colourful”. In an August interview, he criticised the last government’s economic record and its campaign chief by name.
At Kötcse, Orbán answered him. There is no point speculating about future candidates, he said, and no point speculating about the proportions within the right; he sees no sense in it. Then, more bluntly: “Let’s stop this, that’s my proposal.”
The idea was rejected because it threatens the one thing the speech exists to protect: the unity of a defeated party, which, in practice, means the unity of the right under a single man. Instead, Balázs Orbán, the campaign chief who lost the election, was praised for taking on an impossible job.
The loyalist is thanked; the critic is told to stop talking. That is the whole selection mechanism of the last decade condensed into one hour.
The Circle Gets Smaller
This brings us to the claim at the centre of Orbán’s authority, and the one least examined abroad: that only he can hold the Hungarian right together.
In fact, it is a narrative he produced. In twenty-three years as party president, he has never built a successor, never raised a generation of thinkers capable of standing beside him, and never allowed other centres of gravity to form. The circle around him has narrowed year by year, selected ever more tightly for loyalty rather than judgement.
June’s leadership congress showed the machinery at work. Orbán was the only candidate for the presidency, while the four vice-presidential candidates, all nominated by him, were elected alongside him. He told delegates that he wants to hand Fidesz to the young as a party capable of winning again, while making clear that the party itself will not change.
Quietly, Tibor Navracsics, a minister until May, broke ranks in July, refused collective responsibility for the sixteen years and launched his own civic initiative.
The mosaic right was the first serious attempt in sixteen years to imagine Hungarian conservatism as something larger than one party and one leader. Its author has now fallen outside the circle. The circle is that much smaller again.
Three Departures
This is why a split is coming, and why it will probably arrive within a year or two, around the next major test at the latest.
It would be the third major break in the post-2024 period. The first was Péter Magyar, who walked out of the Fidesz elite in 2024 and took a portion of its support base with him. The second came after April: resignations at branch level while the old guard remained at the top. Analyst Gábor Török suggested that the formal disintegration of Fidesz had begun.
The pressure increased. Europion’s latest poll found László Toroczkai of Mi Hazánk level with Orbán in public acceptability, and far less widely rejected. In August, 28 per cent could see Orbán in an important public role, while 56 per cent could not.
The third break will be the most spectacular, and everyone who wishes Hungary well should hope that something genuinely new emerges from it.
The Alliance That Is No Longer There
The international consequence is already visible. Orbán founded Patriots for Europe in 2024 with Herbert Kickl and Andrej Babiš, and after April, one of the group’s own MEPs called it “the end of an era”. Babiš is now the only Patriot with real power and shows little appetite for inheriting the role of Europe’s chief illiberal. The patriotic alliance is broken, and the Czech prime minister will carry the weight alone.
This leaves the question that conservatives outside Hungary should be asking: when will conservative thinkers learn not to abandon their own values?
Fidesz abandoned them. It became an enthusiastic promoter of IVF and egg-freezing while calling itself pro-life, and left abortion policy where it found it. It suppressed civil society - first the left’s, then anything independent, including allies on its own side. It tolerated financial and moral corruption and covered it up. It hollowed out the checks that exist to control power. It centralised everything into a state that decides how children are taught, how families are supported and how medicine is practised. After sixteen years of Christian rhetoric, individual freedom emerged from the period weaker than it had been at the beginning.
Without You
Lastly, one passage deserves more attention than it received. Orbán told the room that a generation raised on mobile phones has reached voting age, that this wires their brains differently, and that these young people make different demands of politics.
But there is nothing new in stating that the young want to be looked after. It is a citizenry produced by Fidesz and other governments during thirty-six years of post-communism. The paternalist, statist state is not a youth problem. It is the central sin of the entire Hungarian political elite since 1990, and Orbán perfected it.
The hope is that the coming split produces a genuinely freedom-based conservative movement, one capable of speaking to young people as effectively as the left does elsewhere in the West, while remaining true to the principles it advocates.
Until then, the show goes on, and it helps the government. Everything Orbán says now confirms Tisza’s story about the sixteen years and the need to start again. Fidesz raised Péter Magyar, fuelled his movement, argued him into office, and is now keeping him there through self-pity and an open hope for disaster. Forecasting energy shortages and state bankruptcy so that you can return to power is not a message anyone votes for.
No Fidesz rally can end without Nélküled, “Without You”, the melancholy campaign song that became the anthem of the system. It turned out to be a swan song.
The end may have begun with the European elections of 2024 or with the vote in April. At a picnic in Kötcse in September 2026, it materialised. Orbán took the Hungarian right hostage. Now the Hungarian right cannot let him go.
