We were the “happiest barracks” of the Warsaw Pact, and since there was no real revolutionary push in the 90s, the people in power never really left. The current minister of interior was chief of police for example.
Also, he’s not that popular, never was. What happened is that the remains of the old regime, the Hungarian Socialist Party was so corrupt and inefficient that there was a major upheaval against them in 2006. Orbán rode that wave to a supermajority in 2010, and immediately changed the election system from something okay to the most fucked up version of FPTP imaginable, literally worse than the US system.
Then the disgraced socialist leader never left, and still had enough followers to keep a 5-15% party alive, which basically destroyed the hope of any opposition party emerging and succeeding on the left, since he would be a spoiler to any opposition party that wasn’t him, and he was and still is so unpopular that people still choose Orbán over him.
So Orbán could very easily keep a 2/3 supermajority with a ~30% approval rating up till last year. The new opposition is trying to form a new right-wing party that is not aligned with the old leftist opposition. It seems to be working.
We were the “happiest barracks” of the Warsaw Pact, and since there was no real revolutionary push in the 90s, the people in power never really left. The current minister of interior was chief of police for example.
Also, he’s not that popular, never was. What happened is that the remains of the old regime, the Hungarian Socialist Party was so corrupt and inefficient that there was a major upheaval against them in 2006. Orbán rode that wave to a supermajority in 2010, and immediately changed the election system from something okay to the most fucked up version of FPTP imaginable, literally worse than the US system.
Then the disgraced socialist leader never left, and still had enough followers to keep a 5-15% party alive, which basically destroyed the hope of any opposition party emerging and succeeding on the left, since he would be a spoiler to any opposition party that wasn’t him, and he was and still is so unpopular that people still choose Orbán over him.
So Orbán could very easily keep a 2/3 supermajority with a ~30% approval rating up till last year. The new opposition is trying to form a new right-wing party that is not aligned with the old leftist opposition. It seems to be working.