A year ago, the story of Europe's nationalist right was one of accumulation: Marine Le Pen fighting her way back onto the 2027 ballot, Nigel Farage burning his own seat to stage a comeback, the AfD's European party facing defunding in Strasbourg. Three fronts, one direction of travel. The movement was ascendant at the ballot box and tangled with the institutions it campaigned against.
That framing no longer covers the whole picture, because the movement's most durable government fell. On 12 April 2026, Hungarians turned out at close to 80% and gave Péter Magyar's Tisza Party 141 of 199 parliamentary seats on 53.2% of the list vote. Viktor Orbán's Fidesz–KDNP alliance took 38.4% and 55 seats. The far-right Mi Hazánk took six. Orbán conceded on election night, ending 16 years in office.
The number that mattered was not 141 but two-thirds. Orbán governed Hungary through constitutional supermajorities, rewriting the basic law, the courts and the media rules to lock in his position. Tisza won the same instrument, and it has started using it in exactly the way its predecessor did.
The clearest case is the presidency. Tamás Sulyok, nominated and confirmed by Fidesz in 2024, refused to resign after the election. Tisza passed a constitutional amendment ending his term, which Sulyok signed in July. An early indirect presidential election followed on 11 August. Tisza's nominee, András Baka, was elected 140 votes to six in a secret ballot. Fidesz boycotted.
Baka is 74. He sat on the European Court of Human Rights from 1991 to 2008 and served as chief justice of Hungary's Supreme Court from 2009 until Orbán's government removed him three years early in 2011 — a removal the Strasbourg court later found had violated his rights. Tisza lawmakers said his experience would be an asset as the party lays "the foundations for Hungary's new constitutional order."
This is the first Hungarian presidential election since 1995 not won by a Fidesz-backed candidate, and the first in which Fidesz put up no candidate at all. It is also, unmistakably, a supermajority removing an inconvenient office-holder by amending the constitution. The direction has reversed. The method has not.
Warsaw is running the opposite experiment. Law and Justice, out of government since 2023 and out of the presidency since 2025, has spent the summer tearing itself apart. In late July, more than 30 MPs left the party after a power struggle between Jarosław Kaczyński and his former prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki — the largest split in Poland's main opposition party in over two decades.
The trigger was a loyalty declaration. Kaczyński demanded that Rozwój Plus, the association Morawiecki founded with his allies, be dissolved, and that its members sign a pledge not to belong to internal factions. Morawiecki refused, saying the document carried unwelcome historical connotations. Underneath the procedural fight is a strategic one: Kaczyński has pushed Law and Justice further right, while Morawiecki argues the party needs the centre-right to win.
Morawiecki confirmed in early August that he will register a separate party by 15 October at the latest, when Rozwój Plus holds a convention. He has ruled out ever working with Donald Tusk, but left open cooperation with the agrarian PSL — currently in Tusk's coalition — and with the hard-right Confederation.
Current polling averages give Tusk's Civic Coalition around 32%, Law and Justice around 22%, Confederation around 14% and Morawiecki's Rozwój Plus around 6.5%. Read one way, the Polish right collectively outpolls the governing coalition. Read another, it is now four parties that must agree on a candidate, a programme and a leader before 2027 — and two of them exist mainly because their founders will not work together.
Put Budapest and Warsaw side by side and a pattern shows up that the "far right is rising" frame misses. Both movements built their strength on control of a single dominant party and, in Hungary's case, of the state itself. Both have now discovered that this is a fragile way to hold power. Hungary's fell to a challenger who beat it at its own game, using its own constitutional tools. Poland's is fracturing from the inside, over the question of whether to broaden or purify.
Neither outcome is a defeat for the ideas. Fidesz still holds 38% of Hungarian voters, and Mi Hazánk sits to its right in parliament. The Polish right's combined support is close to a governing majority. In France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, the electoral trend has not turned. What has changed is the assumption — widely held a year ago — that once these parties take a state they do not give it back. Hungary just did.
The most consequential fact for Brussels is not Orbán's defeat but what replaced him. Hungary's new government has a constitutional majority and is using it to remake the state at speed, starting with the head of state. That is a legitimate outcome of a free election with near-80% turnout. It is also the same instrument the EU spent a decade litigating against when Fidesz held it, and the Union has never worked out how to say that a supermajority is legal but a rewritten constitution is a problem.
The second lesson is about coalitions. Europe's nationalist right has always been better at winning elections than at holding together afterwards — the reason its European Parliament groups keep splitting and re-forming. Poland is now running that experiment at national scale, with a real prize at the end. If Morawiecki's party takes 6% off Law and Justice and cannot reunite with it, the Polish right will have lost 2027 to itself. Kaczyński appears to have concluded that a smaller, purer party is worth the risk. He has until October 2027 to find out.
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