Introduction

Hungary, as a post-communist country of Central and Eastern Europe, is characterized by strong anti-party attitudes and sentiment. Nevertheless, parties are still the key players in public life due to the amount of resources they possess and their level of centralization, being higher by orders of magnitudes than civic organizations, trade unions or movements could expect.

The party system is currently tripartite. The right-wing and conservative Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz) and its small satellite party, the Christian Democratic People's Party (KDNP) are located in one block and have been governing since 2010. Fidesz shows characteristics of the central party of dominant party systems, as (with the formally independent KDNP) it managed to acquire a supermajority (i.e. two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly) in the last two elections. The leftist block is fragmented, with several left -wing and liberal parties. Among them, the two relevant ones discussed in this chapter are the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP), the successor to the communist state party; and the Democratic Coalition (DK), an MSZP splinter party, led by a former Prime Minister. While the latter lacks a parliamentary group, membership numbers and popular support are currently on the rise. Finally, Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik), classified as both a radical and far-right organization, is the sole party appealing to the voters of the third bloc.

Some authors interpret (Tóth and Török 2014) the party system as a continuum of a culturally and ideologically understood left and right, i.e. that all parties can be placed somewhere on an authoritarian–libertarian scale. Fidesz occupies a central position on the scale, with fragmented leftist opposition on its left, and a radical-extremist right represented by Jobbik. Others (Horváth and Soós 2015) believe structural differences between parties are deeper than mere shift s of cultural–ideological positions on a scale. According to this view, the relevant cleavages are the ones that separate Fidesz from the two oppositional blocks: open racism in the case of Jobbik; and differences in the majoritarian and liberal conceptions of democracy on the left. This approach also claims that the most important symbolic difference is the party label, understood as a “brand” itself.