Magyar’s aim, his allies say, is to get voters asking what Orbán’s nationalist rhetoric has actually delivered.
“It’s not that we turned his nationalist language against him,” said Márton Hajdu, the Tisza party’s chief of staff in the European Parliament. “We turn his lies about protecting Hungarian national interests against him.”
Outflanking Orbán
Magyar — a former insider in Orbán’s nationalist Fidesz party — has moved to outflank Orbán on some of the most sensitive nationalist terrain: ethnic Hungarians living beyond Hungary’s borders, and the country’s Roma minority.
Fidesz has historically secured strong support among ethnic Hungarians by granting them citizenship and voting rights, enshrining their protection in the constitution, and funding Hungarian-language schools and media outlets that promote the ruling party’s narrative outside Hungary.
But recent missteps by Orbán have given Magyar an opening.
One flashpoint came late last year after Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico pushed through legislation penalizing public criticism of the postwar Beneš decrees, a set of World War II–era laws that stripped ethnic Hungarians and Germans in former Czechoslovakia of citizenship and property.
While Orbán — who has allied with Fico when dealing with Brussels — responded cautiously, Magyar publicly called on Bratislava to withdraw the measure and accused his rival of ignoring the issue. Since then, both sides have escalated the matter.
“Orbán’s initial caution reflects a strategic trade-off,” said Márton Bene, an analyst at the TK Institute for Political Science. “Orbán was reluctant to jeopardize that relationship [with Fico] over a minority issue that could provoke conflict with Bratislava.”