A “Phased Leadership Transition” Might Have Saved Fidesz

Cultivating a younger successor untouched by his scandals and announcing plans to retire after the election a year before it was held would have been the best bet for Orban’s party in hindsight.

Conservative-nationalists across the West are still reeling after their icon Viktor Orban’s stunning loss in the latest parliamentary elections that saw the opposition win a two-thirds supermajority while his Fidesz party only received a little more than one-quarter. To be sure, this outcome was due in no small part to EU and Ukrainian meddling, which respectively took the form of freezing €17 billion in allocated funds and energy blackmail, while both waged an intense information warfare campaign against him.

Nevertheless, as explained here, arguably much more important were the increasingly widespread perceptions of Orban as out of touch with the youth, corrupt, and a poor manager of the economy. It doesn’t matter what observers think about these views since all that’s relevant is that they influenced voters, including through EU and Ukrainian media campaigns that amount to meddling, and were exploited to the hilt by opposition leader Peter Magyar. The deck was therefore stacked against Orban.

Fidesz’s internal polling would have reflected this to an extent, however, so it’s unclear why drastic action wasn’t undertaken to counteract these perceptions that ultimately doomed the party. In particular, a “phased leadership transition” might have saved them, such as Orban cultivating a younger successor untouched by his scandals and announcing plans to retire after the election a year before it was held. He might have declined doing this out of concern that it would lend credence to these perceptions.

Be that as it may, the crushing defeat that Fidesz just suffered suggests that something of the sort should have been attempted in retrospect even if it would have been painful for him personally, but now his legacy is shattered since everything that he achieved is expected to be reversed. Time and again across the world, empirical evidence shows that younger foreign-backed opposition leaders tend to “democratically depose” older long-serving incumbents, and Hungary is just the latest example.

With this in mind, when leaders that fit Orban’s profile face similar such challenges, it’s advised that they consider a “phased leadership transition” for the greater good of saving their party and thus also the legacy that they worked so hard to build. This is especially so if foreign forces have an interest in regime change in their country and are meddling to that end. What made a “phased leadership transition” more difficult to attempt in Hungary than elsewhere, however, was that Magyar used to be a Fidesz insider.

This in turn enabled him to more easily discredit whoever Orban chose as his successor in the eyes of the population since many would have assumed, whether rightly or wrongly, that he’s telling the truth. Accordingly, the “Magyar model” might be implemented in the future by those foreign forces working towards regime change in targeted countries, which can see former insiders flip-flop to opposition leaders as a means of preemptively limiting the effectiveness of “phased leadership transitions”.

Orban’s downfall was therefore due to a foreign influence campaign that exploited preexisting negative perceptions about his rule which were made all the more compelling due to the opposition leader being a defector from the ruling party who fiercely criticized it. Orban’s decision not to attempt a “phased leadership transition” within Fidesz in the two years between Magyar’s defection and the elections sealed its fate. That’s the most important lesson to be learned from the “Battle for Hungary”.