ABSTRACT

Introduction In the context of new democracies, party leaders are often their parties’ founding fathers who guide their organisation through the process of formation and institutionalisation and lead them to success – or failure. This is the context that provides the background for party leadership elections in Hungary. Party change and party system change characterise even the relatively stable cases, like Hungary. More recently, as the result of the 2010 elections, the Hungarian party arena has undergone substantial changes: parties dating back to the period of democratic transition disappeared, new parties emerged and the formerly dominant left party suffered a serious electoral loss. In our analysis we focus on the parties that are represented in the parliament in 2010 while the large parties of systemic change like the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) or the conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF ) that actually disappeared in 2010 are only sporadically mentioned when they are relevant for comparative or analytical reasons. The post-2010 parliament offers a particular picture about the Hungarian political landscape: two ‘old’ parties date back to the time of regime change and two new ones entered the legislative arena for the first time in 2010. The strongest governing party, the Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Union (Fidesz) is a right-wing conservative party that is currently running a coalition government with its ally, the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP). Fidesz is led by a strong leader, Viktor Orbán who has occupied this post since 1993 with only a short interruption. This party then offers an example of leadership continuity since the party’s birth. Its junior coalition partner, the KDNP plays an inferior role to Fidesz. Some even claim that KDNP cannot be regarded as an independent party: in the last two elections the party ran on joint party lists with Fidesz, its critical decisions (including leadership selection) is influenced strongly by Fidesz, and dual party membership is allowed. For this reason the party is only marginally covered in our analysis. The other ‘old’ party, the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) was founded in 1989 as the successor to the former communist party. Its heritage included a well-established institutional base. Indeed, MSZP was the only party with clear-cut organisation, administrative and bureaucratic

skills and local resources during and after systemic change. In contrast to Fidesz, in the Socialist Party competing groups of politicians have always been visible, with rivalry between groups emerging from the socialist era and those representing the new reformist generation presenting MSZP as a case of party renewal along with leadership renewal. These two parties, Fidesz and MSZP have become the pillars of the Hungarian party system that by the middle of the 1990s was regarded as consolidated, stable and even frozen (Ágh 1995; Márkus 1997). Still, the original cartel of the parties triggered by the context of the negotiated transition (Ilonszki and Várnagy 2012), was shaken at the 2010 elections when the two largest parties of systemic change, the liberal SZDSZ and the conservative MDF disappeared. At the same time two genuinely new parties entered the parliament: the extreme right-wing Movement for a Right Hungary (Jobbik) and the left-ofcentre Politics Can Be Different (LMP). They represent a new party type, the ‘movement party’, with Jobbik a post-industrial extreme right party and LMP a left-libertarian party (Gunther and Diamond 2003). While the highly centralised Jobbik followed the single leader path by electing one president, the LMP struggles to maintain a collective leadership in a highly personalised and leaderfocused political context. The distinction between the old and new parties is relevant not only chronologically but in the analytical sense as well. Just as political regimes have gone through different thresholds of democratisation (Rokkan 1968), Fidesz and MSZP have gone through the thresholds of institutionalisation: party formation, when the party is born; parliamentarisation when the party enters the legislative arena; and governmentalisation when the party occupies a governing position either alone or as a partner in a coalition. Fidesz and MSZP were formed as extra-parliamentary parties then entered parliament and formed strong parliamentary groups (PPGs) that played a decisive role in leadership contests. Along with the PPG, holding government post(s) also elevated the position of the leader(s), thus potential challengers were disadvantaged and low level of competition for leadership prevailed. Concerning the formal procedures of selection, despite their different ideological, structural and historical characteristics, these parties display a surprising similarity. Although the selection process has become more sophisticated over time, the low level of competition along with centralised decision-making structures highlights the insignificance of formal rules. These findings also imply the importance of background negotiations between elite actors. In contrast, the two new parties, Jobbik and LMP are at the beginning of this road, that is in the phase of parliamentarisation and face the challenge of establishing themselves as relevant political actors. Both parties struggle to keep a balance between the parliamentary group and the party on the ground, the latter of which includes radical paramilitary groups like the Hungarian Guard in the case of Jobbik and loosely formed grassroot organisations in case of LMP. While Jobbik lacks transparency, and thus its internal conflicts are only occasionally visible for the public, the LMP’s internal conflicts led to party split early in

2013, highlighting the difficulties emerging from collective leadership amongst the conditions of parliamentary politics.