Hungary is experiencing an unprecedented crisis as record-low Danube levels, extreme heat and rising electricity demand push its only nuclear power plant towards a complete shutdown for the first time in 44 years.
Paks, which normally produces close to half of the country’s electricity, was operating at barely 10 per cent of its 2,000 MW capacity on Monday. Its final turbine may continue operating until Tuesday, while voluntary reductions by households, companies and institutions cut Sunday’s demand by 700 MW, easing immediate pressure as Hungary increases imports and reserve generation during what Prime Minister Péter Magyar has frequently described as the ‘most critical five days’ ahead.
The crisis, however, is testing more than the grid. The week ahead will not only be the ‘most critical’ for the country’s energy security, but equally significant for the new government, as it is the first major crisis Péter Magyar’s cabinet has had to face since taking power three months ago.
Honeymoon’s Over
Tisza won its April landslide partly by arguing that Viktor Orbán’s system had confused concentrated political control with governing capacity: Fidesz could project strength and stability, Magyar maintained, while corruption, patronage and the displacement of expertise weakened the state beneath the surface. The durable Fidesz proposition was that, whatever the system’s democratic or ethical costs, Orbán could govern and defend the national interest and the Hungarian people from external crises. Tisza’s competing promise was not merely cleaner government, but a more capable one—technocratic, expert-led and prepared to correct mistakes rather than conceal them.
During its first three months, the government largely advanced its agenda using its parliamentary constitutional supermajority, addressing mainly issues that required political rather than technical solutions. The mandate given to Tisza on 12 April enabled it to remove President Tamás Sulyok, impose new political and judicial term limits and begin drafting a new constitution; overhaul public media; establish an anti-corruption and asset-recovery supe-ragency with prosecutorial powers; and reach an agreement with the European Commission that opened the way for €16.4 billion in previously frozen funds.
These were consequential measures, but their immediate implementation depended mainly on legislation, appointments and negotiations, most of them taking place in areas where the government had control over what would happen next.
‘These were consequential measures, but their immediate implementation depended mainly on legislation, appointments and negotiations’
Tisza was most effective where policy and political contrast reinforced one another. It could identify an inherited failure, attribute it to Orbán-era corruption, neglect or politicization, replace personnel or institutions, and present the intervention as proof that professional government had returned. Everything from parliamentary sessions and speeches to government communication focused on dismantling the ‘political and economic patronage network’ built around Viktor Orbán over the past 16 years and making sure that the narrative became ingrained in voters’ minds.
Coupled with Magyar’s remarkably fast and effective communication skills and understanding of social media, that period was a clear political victory for Tisza in many areas. This is well reflected in polling data from the past three months: survey after survey showed an unprecedented winner’s surge after the election, with Medián’s late-June poll placing Tisza at 73 per cent among decided voters, compared with Fidesz’s 21 per cent.
The honeymoon, however, ended just before the new government’s first major crisis appeared. The precise moment marking the end of that period was the controversial failed presidential nomination of Judit Polgár; ironically, it was, besides the natural duration of the honeymoon itself, Magyar’s own communication failures that visibly brought it to an end. Medián soon released its July poll, which empirically confirmed this: for the first time since April, Tisza’s popularity fell, from 73 to 68 per cent among decided voters and from 60 to 57 per cent among all adults. The gap is, of course, still very large, but it is no longer expanding.
First Test Beyond Political Power
Against this background came the current crisis, which is fundamentally very different from the tasks the government has so far had to manage. Tisza cannot legislate additional electricity into existence; it must keep the grid stable, secure imports at tolerable prices, protect essential services, manage industrial reductions and communicate uncertainty accurately.
The stakes are equally high and will be of utmost significance for the party’s political future. Success would provide Tisza’s first operational evidence that its model is more than an effective account of Orbán’s failures. Failure—through avoidable outages, prolonged factory stoppages, confused instructions or uncontrolled import costs—would allow Fidesz to argue that Magyar built a façade of competence through social media and campaigns blaming previous administrations. That evidently would not restore Fidesz’s damaged credibility in the eyes of the electorate, but poor management would create a potential credibility problem for Péter Magyar’s government.
The government seems to be aware of this, with its strategy so far consisting of four identifiable core elements. The first is national burden-sharing and national unity. Magyar has repeatedly thanked households, municipalities, companies and institutions, translating reduced consumption into the equivalent output of nuclear reactors and presenting restraint as a measurable contribution to national capacity. Several hundred companies are participating, and the government believes voluntary corporate reductions could reach 500 MW; Richter said it would cut its electricity use by more than half for three weeks and contribute four megawatts a day from its solar park.
The second is protecting households by placing the first compulsory burden on large consumers. Voluntary industrial reductions would be followed, if necessary, by mandatory curtailment and temporary disconnection, with residential restrictions left until other options are exhausted. The approach is socially defensible and technically efficient because large loads can be removed quickly, but it transfers risk to export-oriented manufacturing, where interrupted shifts could later affect households through wages, prices, tax revenues and weaker growth. That closely resembles how Fidesz addressed different crises in recent years, especially energy crises, with price caps frequently used in varying forms to protect ordinary people.
Extending political coordination to the opposition under terms established by the government is also an important part of Tisza’s strategy. Acting head of state and parliamentary speaker Ágnes Forsthoffer convened Magyar and parliamentary group leaders at the Sándor Palace on Monday, where Magyar called on political parties to manage the crisis as responsibly as citizens and businesses.
By doing so, the government both strengthened its national-unity message and placed opposition parties in a situation where they did not really have a good option, while Tisza could benefit from either choice. Not attending the meeting would have appeared highly negative at a time of national crisis, while accepting an invitation from an acting head of state whom Fidesz does not recognize as legitimate exposes gaps in Orbán’s resistance strategy. It also distributes responsibility among the government and opposition parties, which could be important if the management of the crisis ends less favourably for Tisza.
‘Crisis communication overall is very similar to that of the Orbán government during the Covid-19 crisis’
The fourth and probably most important element is control over the causal explanation of the crisis. Tisza argues that exceptional heat and drought exposed failures inherited from Fidesz: a cooling-water intake insufficiently adapted to extremely low water levels, the delayed Paks II expansion, limited storage and inadequate contingency planning. Minister of Energy and Economy István Kapitány said a HUF 10 billion investment in the pumping system would have prevented the current shutdown and has already promised an inquiry into why such a project did not take place over the past 16 years.
The government has heavily prioritized this explanation within a tightly centralized, keyword-driven communications strategy, repeatedly coupling the inherited-failure argument with phrases such as ‘energy saving’, ‘voluntary consumption reduction’ and ‘national responsibility’. Crisis communication overall is very similar to that of the Orbán government during the Covid-19 crisis: every major announcement is made by the prime minister, mostly on social media; other channels, such as government spokesperson briefings, are suspended; and few or no government members, relevant state officials or experts appear in the media. It places Magyar at the centre of the crisis as the leader who protects the nation and comes up with a solution—just as was the case with Orbán.
Why First Crisis Matters
How important a first major crisis can be in the development of a political party and government is clearly illustrated by the nationwide floods of 2010—the first challenge faced by the Orbán government after returning to power with a landslide and constitutional majority that year. While the two crises cannot be compared in terms of management strategy, effectively addressing the floods gave the administration an opportunity to visibly demonstrate centralized leadership right at the beginning of its mandate. The management of the emergency later became one of the important parts of Orbán’s political myth, with supporters frequently recalling it as proof of exceptional governing ability.
The same could very well happen if Tisza manages the current crisis well, although the nature of the challenge gives successful management less visible results, largely in the form of events that do not occur—no widespread blackout, no collapse in industrial output and no panic.
The initial position is encouraging so far: voluntary savings have removed hundreds of MW of demand; the final turbine at Paks has remained online longer than expected; and household cuts have been avoided. Yet there are equally important factors that cannot currently be evaluated, such as the extra cost of electricity imports, the effect of voluntary reductions on the scale of industrial output and exports, and eventually how much of that cost will actually fall on households and citizens in the coming period.
While the core of the problem depends on an uncontrollable external factor, precisely nature, minimizing the negative effects could ultimately deliver Tisza a huge victory, while failing to do so could result in a defeat of equal scale.
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