Abstract
Since the democratic transition of 1989–1990 Hungarian politics produced a clear shift in the process of personalization and presidentialization over the years. The growing autonomy of party leaders highlights the role of leadership and the necessity of studies written about their characteristics and behaviors in office. This chapter compares Viktor Orbán, the longest-serving Hungarian party leader, and Gábor Vona, the former president of the radical right party Jobbik, based on their characteristics and behaviors as party leaders. Both leaders have driven their party through ideological transformation and their personality traits played an important role in achieving this. Although the impact of the two leaders on the Hungarian political landscape is very different, the comparison offers interesting insights for the understanding of the role of party leaders in Hungarian politics.
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- 1.
- 2.
Since the election of 2006, the Christian Democratic People’s Party runs on joint party lists with Fidesz. It is not regarded as an independent party (Illonszki & Várnagy, 2014; Kovarek & Soós, 2016), because of the two parties’ close institutional (dual party membership) and political (absence of open conflicts on policy and political issues, surplus majority governments) relations. In contrast, MDF, Fidesz’s electoral coalition partner in 2002, was more independent. Therefore, in Graph 1 MDF is treated separately from Fidesz, but KDNP isn’t.
- 3.
One of his biggest challengers was Ferenc Gyurcsány, whose politics showed a meteoric rise (Körösényi, Ondré, & Hajdú, 2017) by following the trends of presidentialization and personalization. However, his popularity dropped suddenly after his cabinet introduced unpopular austerity measues and his Őszöd speech about them was leaked.
- 4.
His self-confidence was shaken only in 2006, when had to face a charismatic leader, Gyurcsány for the first time. He lost the television debate with Gyurcsány since he was more moderate, and less dynamic, authentic, convincing and powerful than he was in his previous public debates (with Gyula Horn in 1998 and with Péter Medgyessy in 2002).
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Orbán: “Then I learned, that world of politics is moved by different morality. Its rules are different from the everyday life. I never agreed with those who said that the politics is immoral. Politics has its own morality, it is just different from everyday life” (Orbán & Kéri, 1994, p. 30).
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Changes in membership of Jobbik: 1200 (2003), 3000 (2008); 5000 (2009) 11,000 (2010), 12,340 (2011) 14,000 (2013) 17,943 (2016) (Pirro, 2019b).
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the editor of this book, our colleagues at the Institute for Political Science, Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Róna Dániel, Assistant Professor, Corvinus University of Budapest and Amy Forster Rothbart Associate Professor and Department Chair of Political Science Department of Hartwick College for their helpful comments and suggestions. We also would like to thank our trainee, Botond Árpási for helping with data collection. The usual disclaimer applies.
Funding
The research was sponsored by Hungarian National Research Fund (no. K 128139).
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Metz, R., Oross, D. (2020). Strong Personalities’ Impact on Hungarian Party Politics: Viktor Orbán and Gábor Vona. In: Gherghina, S. (eds) Party Leaders in Eastern Europe. Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32025-6_7
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