Fidesz
The Hungarian party of Viktor Orban, founded in 1988 as a young liberal movement, governing since 2010.
Overview
Fidesz began in 1988 as the Alliance of Young Democrats, anticommunist liberals against the aging regime, and Orban demanded Soviet troops leave in 1989. After Socialist defeat of its 1994-98 coalition turn, Orban first premiership 1998-2002, the party rebuilt as a national conservative mass organization winning supermajorities in 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022. Governance remade the constitution, judiciary, media, and electoral law, clashing with the EU over rule of law while expanding family subsidies and utility price caps. Orban coined illiberal democracy as a label for the model. Fidesz dominates rural Hungary and parliament, the paradigm case of democratic backsliding debates in Europe.
Related Parties
Scottish National Party
The SNP formed in 1934 from a merger of nationalist bodies and spent decades on the fringe, its breakthrough coming with Winnie Ew...
UK Independence Party
UKIP formed in 1993 to campaign for withdrawal from the European Union, growing under Nigel Farage from a fringe into the largest ...
Alternative for Germany
The AfD began in 2013 as a Eurosceptic professors party opposing euro bailouts, riding the euro crisis to near the five percent th...
National Socialist German Workers Party
The NSDAP grew from the German Workers Party, which Hitler took over in 1919-1920, fusing racial antisemitism, virulent nationalis...