Countless analyses have already been written about the causes of Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party’s landslide success and the resulting electoral realignment. Yet, there is a crucial factor that receives relatively little attention: the complete depoliticization of political struggle. In my view, the parliamentary elections birthed the newest and most successful product of the 21st-century Hungarian wasteland: anti-politics has become the new politics, a trend that Tisza is now driving to its absolute peak in government.
It is worth observing Péter Magyar’s and his party’s communication. The cornerstone of their rhetoric is that they themselves are not part of the political class in the classical sense. A recurring trope during the election campaign was that the people behind Tisza are not career politicians, but civilians and patriotic professionals. He also stated, “This homeland does not need street fighters or rusted terminators but decent, honest people working so that every Hungarian can feel Hungary is their own.” Or consider another statement: “I didn’t embark on this to topple the entire power elite; I am merely a spark that can start the engine”—all these points in a single direction.
Through a calculated marketing strategy, they have distanced themselves—and continue to distance themselves—from ‘politics’ and the word ‘politician.’
A calculated political marketing strategy
The communication framework employed by Tisza’s politicians appears to be an effective strategy during the post-election honeymoon phase. Yet, simultaneously, they are engaging in a highly classical power game. In his seminal work The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt warned that the sharpest and most ruthless political weapon is attempting to depoliticize political struggle while cloaking one’s own position in a veil of morality. According to Schmitt, anyone who claims not to engage in politics but merely represents “the good” or “the pure people” against a “corrupted elite” does not treat their opponent as a rival but brands them a moral monster.
However, this calculated distance creates a trap. As painful as the realization might be for the newly minted representatives and Tisza voters alike, the moment they ran in the elections, secured mandates, and assumed positions of public authority, they, too, became politicians.
The total collapse of the word ‘politics’
This Schmittian strategy can be sold so masterfully in Hungary today because the word ‘politics’ has become irredeemably pejorative—degraded and sullied.
In the 2010s, numerous studies conducted among university students revealed that, for the youth, the concepts of ‘public life’ and ‘politics’ had completely divorced from one another. Students wanted to engage with their shared public affairs while simultaneously harboring a deep aversion toward political parties, traditional institutional frameworks, and, above all, politicians. What was merely the distinct sentiment of a single generation just over a decade ago now permeates the entirety of Hungarian society. In the collective subconscious, politics is synonymous with everything wrong with the world: war, inflation, theft, incompetence, baseness, and endless scandals. In the eyes of many, politics has become indistinguishable from thoroughly corrupt and destructive social processes.
For years, domestic research on institutional trust—particularly studies focusing on the post-communist region—has highlighted that confidence in political institutions in these societies, especially in parties and parliament, is drastically low. This is unequivocally a bad sign; when institutional trust erodes to such an extent, a demand inevitably arises for an ‘outsider’ (in politics, not in a partisan sense)—a savior arriving from beyond the existing establishment. When voters feel that the playing field itself is flawed, they no longer simply demand a change in the rules; they want to flip the entire table.
Collective overload
This profound, collective societal disillusionment gives rise to the immense cognitive dissonance that characterizes the country today. Everyone is now pretending as if it is not Hungarian society itself that produces its own politicians. The majority looks at Fidesz and the past sixteen years as though an alien power had forced the political elite upon us, rather than acknowledging that we elected them ourselves—time and time again, with two-thirds supermajorities. It is as if we, ‘the people,’ are forged from some entirely different, nobler substance than those making the decisions ‘up there.’
The reality, however, is that society is what provides the politicians. The masses are just as diverse, full of good and bad individuals, and possess both virtues and flaws, much like the political elite itself contains both decent people and scoundrels.
In my view, this is precisely the illusion that Tisza recognized and so masterfully commodified, all while drawing the existential ‘us versus them’ fault line on an entirely different plane. The narrative is infinitely simple and appealing: it is not an abstract geopolitical vision but a picture of the ‘corrupt state machinery’ (the despised bureaucracies, authorities, and the economic-political elite) pitted against the vulnerable citizen, further supplemented by the message that you are the virtuous ones, while the pompous politician running the system from above is the villain.
Who will replace the politician?
This is exactly where the greatest danger lies. In his classic work In Defence of Politics, British political scientist Bernard Crick warned, among other things, that politics is not a necessary evil, but rather civilization’s greatest achievement—the art of resolving conflicts without violence. Anti-politics ostensibly promises voters an epistocracy (the rule of the knowledgeable, the intelligent, and independent experts) whereby ‘the thoroughly corrupt state apparatus will magically be fixed.’ In reality, if we eliminate politicians, their place can be taken by only two types of people.
The first is the technocrat, who governs by appealing to their expertise. However, as Max Weber pointed out, these individuals are mere executors who lack both political passion and the sense of responsibility required for a political vision. The second—and more realistic—danger is kakistocracy, or the rule of the incompetent. When political routine, a willingness to compromise, and a knowledge of state administration are stigmatized, amateurism suddenly transforms into a virtue. By repackaging outsider status as freshness and inexperience as innocence, we pave the way for chaos.
It is therefore a dangerous illusion to believe that politics can be eradicated or substituted with experts and civilians. Politicians remain a necessity, especially during uncertain times riddled with crises. At present, the duty of citizens is not to abolish politics for good but to continue demanding its responsible and professional practice. The death of politics never brings purification; rather, it spells the end of discourse and the birth of autocracy—or chaos.
