The Hungarian opposition media is abuzz with a new poll from what they assure us is the country’s most reputable pollster, Medián. It shows the challenging Tisza Party leading the long-reigning incumbent Fidesz Party by a whopping 20 points among likely voters.
Just to be clear, Fidesz beat Tisza in the 2024 European Parliamentary elections by 15.5 points—one of the largest margins in Europe—in June 2024. Thus, the ‘reputable’ Medián is forecasting a casual 35.5-point shift in the national popular vote margin in Hungary within less than two years. For the record, the largest shift in the popular vote margin between an EP election and a parliamentary election in Hungary was 16 points, between the 2019 EP and the 2022 parliamentary election. This would be more than double that movement to the left, and it would have to take place within a two-year span, not three…
For further comparison, in the two years between the 2022 parliamentary election and the 2024 EP election, the national popular vote margin moved left by 4.5 points, going from Fidesz +20 to Fidesz +15.5.
A Tisza supermajority, which is happily talked about in the opposition camp today thanks to that funny poll by Medián, is just not on the table.
Do you know who agrees with that point? As of 30 January 2026, just a couple of weeks ago, Endre Hann, head of the Medián polling firm, himself. The firm’s official website has a post dated 30 January with the headline ‘Endre Hann: I don’t think it is likely that Fidesz will suffer a landslide defeat’ which covers Hann’s recent appearance on a Hungarian podcast.
That post was published on the site before the infamous Tisza +20 poll came out. However, at that point, the latest Medián survey still showed Tisza up by 12.
So what is the point of publishing such a blatantly absurd polling result?
The answer may be nefarious. It may be part of a tactic to delegitimize the 2026 Hungarian parliamentary election results in case Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary wins re-election.
Then, Western media could point to the discrepancy between the numbers of ‘independent pollsters’ and the official vote count to sow the seeds of doubt about the legitimacy of the results. This tactic was deployed after the October 2024 election in Georgia, where the pro-EU United National Movement refused to accept defeat, based on the discrepancy in exit polling numbers by Western pollsters and the official vote count.
Thus far, this narrative only has rumblings on the social media site X, but not among the mainstream Western media outlets.
It is not the only explanation, however.
Medián may be looking to boost Tisza voter turnout. Fidesz won the last four elections in a row with a constitutional supermajority. The last time a man not named Viktor Orbán was elected Prime Minister of Hungary was in 2006. The people born that year are now old enough to vote in this year’s election. In a historic context like that, you need something ‘big’ to energize the anti-Fidesz voting base and break the perpetual losing streak—polling that shows Tisza up a couple points, the absolute edge of the realm of possibilities for the party, may not cut it.
If Magyar’s party were to win the popular vote by 2–3 points in April, they would have to overcome Fidesz’s advantage in Hungary’s rural parliamentary districts. In the Hungarian election, 93 seats in the National Assembly are allocated proportionally to the national popular vote, provided a party meets the 5-per-cent threshold. The majority, 106 seats, are won in regional contests, where a simple plurality is enough to secure a mandate for the individual candidates.
There is a plausible scenario where Tisza gets more seats from the so-called ‘national list’ based on the popular vote. However, they could do so by running up their margins in big urban centres, while Fidesz can take a hefty majority of the seats in the geographically proportional rural districts in the regional MP elections, and thus still win a majority of seats.
In such a case, or even in the case of less favourable election results for them, Péter Magyar and the Tisza surrogates across Hungary and Europe will most likely deploy the ‘stolen election’ narrative.
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