ABSTRACT
The story of the Hungarian centre-right between 1994 and 2002 is one of progressive electoral and organizational concentration in a single party, Fidesz. 'Electoral concentration' is understood as a process in which one continuously existing party gains a larger share of the vote over time, while the vote shares of other parties shrink, sometimes to effective nonexistence. Individual party performances, and the factors behind them, played a major role in Hungarian centre-right concentration, and will therefore be encompassed to some extent by this study. The Christian Democrats and Smallholders had distinct socio-economic voting bases, in the shape of elderly, regular (primarily Catholic) churchgoers in the case of the former, and elderly, poorly educated, rural residents linked to private agriculture in the case of the latter. The divergent trajectories of the Christian Democrats' two wings in the summer and autumn of 1997 seemed to confirm a continuing division between a more moderate Fidesz-led centre-right and a more radical Smallholder-centred strand.
