The Questionable Christian vs. the ‘Voice of the People’

Donald Trump’s electoral success relies heavily on the large evangelical Christian segment of the U.S. population, which explains why he has adopted the strategy of pretending to be a Christian himself. However preposterous this may seem, his favorite European leader, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, has chosen an even stranger method: pretending that his own voters are Christians.

It’s part of what is now a well established political message from Orbán, mixing fear of Islam, traditional Central European xenophobia and pie-in-the-sky promises of brilliant economic successes. That message is suddenly, and for the first time, getting a cold bath in the shape of Peter Magyar and his Tisza party, which currently stands 10 percentage points ahead in the polls for April’s elections. Magyar has kept the best bit of Orbán’s policy — his still popular anti-immigration stance — but is throwing out the rest of it, aiming at the corrupt oligarchs who, he says, own the country. To Magyar and his party’s benefit, Orbán’s vision of Hungary as a Christian nation has always been an illusion.

Like in the rest of Eastern Europe, after two generations of communist rule, there is widespread atheism in Hungary. A 2023 study by Republikon looked at the core voters of Orbán’s party, Fidesz, over 10 years and found that they were very stable. Only 15% have any college education and only 26% identify as Christians, about the same as the proportion identifying as atheists. They were also statistically neutral throughout the study about gay rights.

However, these uneducated people are predominantly from villages and small towns in the provinces, cut off from non-state media, and susceptible to Orbán’s conservative propaganda. The general population lists health care, inflation and living standards as their main concerns. But after Orbán’s alarmist campaign for the 2022 elections, his core voters suddenly decided that “gender ideology” was the No. 2 threat to the country after immigration. He doubled down, while seeking to identify himself with Trump in 2025, when a constitutional amendment declared that all Hungarians are either male or female; Orbán described it as a measure against “gender madness.” 

In 2011, Orbán instituted a constitution, and then amended it in 2018, to protect “Hungary’s self-identity and its Christian culture,” and has made many statements expressing a supposedly Christian message. In 2015, during the European refugee crisis, he justified closing the borders against Muslims by saying that “Christian culture is the unifying force of the nation.” As professor emeritus Gábor Halmai from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest puts it, the constitution established by Orbán “characterizes the nation not only as the community of ethnic Hungarians, but also as a Christian community, narrowing the range of people who can recognize themselves as belonging to it.”

Like Trump, Orbán’s own Christianity is questionable. Fidesz used to be a liberal and anticlerical party, and former party members describe him as previously having been an atheist. However much Trump sycophants admire his Christian-nationalist rhetoric, the version Orbán has offered to the Hungarian public differs from what you’ll find in Oklahoma.

The “Christian nation” described in party propaganda is difficult to pin down. Hungary is neither Protestant nor Catholic; traditional nationalism has a significant pagan element. In fact, the mythical pre-Christian Turul bird from Turkic tradition is widely promoted by Fidesz as a national symbol.

Orbán said in 2015 that the “Christian-national idea and mentality will regain its dominance not just in Hungary but in the whole of Europe.” But after 10 years of this rhetoric, there is little sign of it happening. Indeed, he makes no attempt to identify with other European Christian countries. As professor Halmai points out, while Orbán admires non-Christian authoritarian regimes like those in Turkey, China and India, the only Christian country he seems to identify with is Russia (which he also describes as a peace-loving country). In his eyes, the European Union is a body of warmongers, and Ukraine is the oppressor of its small Hungarian minority.

He has a tried and tested way of astroturfing these opinions, called the National Consultation. Every now and then, his government releases a questionnaire about government policy. According to Poland’s OSW Center for Eastern Studies: “In the 15 previous instances of such consultations, the questions were phrased in a biased manner to suggest answers aligned with the government’s position. While the forms are distributed to all citizens living in Hungary, only around 10-20% typically respond — mainly those who comprise Fidesz’s core voter base.”

This fraudulent system of manufacturing popular support for predetermined policies has been used to prop up a system that has just been scored by Transparency International as the most corrupt in Europe for the fourth year running (this time, it shared the distinction with Bulgaria). The economy is stuck in park as far as the population is concerned, but the state funnels billions to the oligarch elite through sweetheart public service contracts, especially in health care.

The Tisza rises

In February 2024, disaster struck the government: a child sex scandal. Orbán’s anti-LGBTQ+ policy was supposed to be based on family values, and when it was revealed that the government had secretly pardoned a man implicated in an attempted cover-up of decades of abuse in a state-run children’s home, some 100,000 people took to the the streets in Budapest. This created a wave of revulsion against Fidesz that never went away.

Heads had to roll, and then-President Katalin Novák and the former justice minister who had countersigned the order, Judit Varga, ultimately resigned. Varga, a leading light of the party until the pardon scandal, has disappeared from public life. But since that uproar, the real threat to Orbán’s regime has come from Varga’s ex-husband, Peter Magyar, who seized the moment to leave the Fidesz party and join the protests. His party, Tisza, has quickly grown to the size of Orbán’s (2 million members each), and is currently going from strength to strength at all levels: international, national, municipal and local policies are all bringing new ideas to a system that has been static for 15 years.

Magyar is a serious threat because he was once a member of Orbán’s inner circle within Fidesz and knows how the game is played. And, at 44, he is demonstrating convincingly that he is much more energetic and skilled at election tactics than the 62-year-old Orbán. He burst on to the scene after the pardon scandal protests with a hugely popular YouTube interview, and ever since he has insisted that Orbán’s government supports a small group of kleptocratic oligarchs. Given his connections, he should know. He has also established an effective presence on Facebook.

In March 2025, Magyar created his own online questionnaire about policy issues, snappily called “Voice of the People.” With over 1 million responses, it revealed a different set of opinions among the public than Orbán’s National Consultation.

Question 9, for instance — “Do you agree with Hungary remaining a member of the European Union and NATO?” — was answered ‘Yes’ by 98.72% of respondents. But after hosting Marco Rubio in Budapest after the annual Munich Security Conference earlier this month, Orbán’s behavior doesn’t reflect that view. Orbán spoke to his followers, claiming that a secret deal had been made in Munich among Berlin, Brussels and Kiev to interfere in the upcoming elections and ensure that a pro-Brussels regime is installed — a line already being promoted by Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service. This, he claims, will lead to war. Brussels, he says, is a greater threat to Hungary and Europe than Russia.

Magyar is indeed approaching European leaders, and says he wants Hungary to adopt the euro and integrate Hungarian foreign policy with the rest of the European Union. In this case, Orbán would no longer be in a position to veto EU aid to Ukraine and in the medium term would probably allow Ukraine to begin accession talks with the EU, something all EU member states except Hungary agree on.

Magyar also has a flair for slogans and sound bites. The party name is short for “respect and freedom,” but is also the name of Hungary’s second-longest river, long a national symbol, and so the rallying cry “The Tisza is rising!” And one strong argument given Hungary’s flailing economy is that by restoring democracy and the rule of law, his government would unfreeze 20 billion euros that the EU blocked to protest authoritarian and antidemocratic measures by Orbán. This, he says, will be used to fund a Hungarian New Deal to boost the rural economy, address a broken national health care system and help small businesses. 

He’s put a more youthful face on the party as well. In a transparent system of primaries to select candidates for the upcoming elections (mostly local doctors, teachers and other professionals), he allowed 16-year-olds to vote in the party’s primaries and caught the imagination of the youth, who are even less interested than their grandparents in buying into Christian-nationalist ideology.

The temperature is rising. Orbán is doing his best to get Trump on his side, claiming to be part of a Trump-Putin-Netanyahu Peace Party. He has made a point of supporting Trump’s Peace Board, attending its inaugural meeting in Washington on Feb. 19, where he earned a ringing endorsement from Trump in the elections. But he came away without a promise for a visit during his election campaign, for which he has been hoping. There is already some evidence of covert Russian operations against Magyar and his followers, plus dirty tricks from Orbán and his cronies, most recently including a mysterious website promising salacious details about Magyar’s sex life. Nevertheless, so far he is not backing down. 

Orbán has no answer to the question of the 20 billion euros from the EU, unless Trump is going to bail him out, but there is a deeper strategic issue.

Much like other populist leaders all over the world, Orbán has relied on low-information rural voters to accept the message of bigotry. He tells them that they are real Hungarians, not like the decadent city dwellers with their evil values, big words and long sentences. (Budapest elected an ecologist mayor in 2024, and hosted a Pride march until it was declared illegal.) But Magyar saw this coming.

He created a network of “Tisza Islands,” with volunteers, often teenagers, standing outside provincial railway stations and village supermarkets and handing out party materials. While Magyar is a metropolitan millionaire — he had a 3 million euro government salary awarded to him by his ex-wife — he has devoted a lot of energy to man-of-the-people events in the sticks, like walking across Hungary with his followers.

A showdown is coming on March 15, when there will be dueling marches. Magyar has announced a National March “to dismantle the system of corrupt and hateful powers,” and Fidesz simultaneously announced a Peace March (i.e., a pro-Trump, pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine event) on the same day. 

For the first time since Orbán rose to power, voters have a choice: between the Russia-aligned “Christian nation” of his propaganda and Magyar’s pro-Europe, anti-corruption message. Whether April’s elections lead Hungary in a new direction remains to be seen.