It seemed unlikely a few months ago, but Fidesz' star is on the rise. Already towards the end of last year it had managed to halt its steady decline in the polls, and since January it has been expanding its base while the opposition is apparently struggling. This is unsurprising, since Fidesz is resorting to tried and tested methods of financial po...

Hungary's new constitutional regime is proving far less stable than its creators had promised. Even before it entered into effect last January, the governing parties had added a number of provisions to the Fundamental Law, some of which the Constitutional Court quashed on formal grounds.

Fidesz is experiencing a slight tailwind going into 2013, reinforcing an already relatively strong position. After the Constitutional Court scuttled its main strategy for keeping the biggest risk factor, disaffected voters, at home during the election, however, the strategic choices available to the governing party for the remainder of its term are...

2012 has not brought a massive shift in the political fortunes of the key Hungarian political players, but even the slight changes reveal a dynamic that will cause the governing party, Fidesz, some headaches. Still, despite significant troubles Fidesz remains in a far stronger position for 2014 than MSZP was during the same period of its most recen...

Another senior governing party politician is embroiled in a plagiarism scandal, and the details of the affair look very similar to the imbroglio that ultimately brought down former President Pál Schmitt.

The much awaited new Act on Electoral Procedures has been finally adopted, and from new rules on voter registration all the way to peculiar campaign advertisement regulations, it contains all the controversial elements that critics have lambasted for months.

Hungary’s green party, LMP is a young party facing weighty choices. Its policy of maintaining equal distance to MSZP and Fidesz appears untenable as pressure mounts to join a left-wing alliance to oust the Orbán government in 2014.

Gordon Bajnai came close to declaring his candidacy for prime minister, but ultimately shrank back from a pledge to run.

The political parties on the left are lucky that they had no major events planned for the 23 October commemoration of the 1956 revolution, for they would have been upstaged by the pre-announced announcement of former Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai’s return to political life.

To keep the budget within EU mandated limits, the government has introduced new austerity measures after admitting that its pessimistic growth projections were in fact wildly optimistic.