ABSTRACT
The opposition of the second and third Orban government was mainly concerned with the transformation of the constitutional system and the centralization of political power carried out by the ruling government. Some public policies that favored the Fidesz clientele were also heavily criticized during the period. Environmentalism was not a salient issue even during the 2010 elections. What made Politics Can be Different an attractive option in the eyes of voters was their novelty, the general disappointment with the established political parties and the void left in the political arena after the de facto dissolution of the liberal party. The invisibility of political ecology in mainstream politics does not mean that environmentalism has been fully absent from Hungarian political life. The ecological movement has been an important breeding ground for civil initiatives since the 80s. The alternative movement in Hungary – just like in Western European countries–criticized the patterns of bureaucratic modernization, the colonization of the "life-world" by "the system".
