Hungary’s democratic renewal after the last 16 years can not succeed through legal, constitutional changes only. The durability of Viktor Orbán’s hybrid regime stemmed not only from formal institutional capture, but from deeply embedded informal power throughout society. Rebuilding democracy therefore needs more than legal repair: it requires institutionalized participatory chains, decentralized power, and directly embedded civil society into political decision-making.
This is especially important because Viktor Orbán’s hybrid regime did not hollow out institutions only, it also reshaped political culture and civic engagement. During the last 1,5 decades Hungarians believedthat political participation was meaningless, that loyalty produced benefits, and that power remained distant and unaccountable. It was a hyper-centralised political machine built both on “autocratic legalism” and informal power; robust media capture, clientelist corruption and the systematic erosion of institutional checks and balances. And yet, the regime collapsed through electoral means in April much faster than anyone expected. The reasons behind that lie not simply in successful opposition mobilisation. Tisza Party, led by Péter Magyar, achieved something unprecedented in post-1990 Hungarian politics. It transformed diffuse generational frustration into real engagement and gave large parts of Hungarian society a renewed sense of political efficacy.
Democratic renewal must therefore also become a cultural transformation: Hungary needs institutions that do more than engaging citizens to participate. Democratic innovations need to create sustainable pathways through which civic participation can translate into sustainable political influence. This is particularly crucial in post-Orbán Hungary, where the Fidesz government systematically captured and biased consultation on the national level. At the same time, participatory and deliberative innovations have so far been very sporadic and predominantly local. Citizens’ assemblies have been organised mainly in Budapest and smaller oppositional municipalities, with no established national tradition of deliberative democracy. It is embedded in the legacy of the democratic transition in 1989, when the National Roundtable was a negotiation dominantly among political and social elites, with comparatively less mass mobilisation and grassroots participation than in Poland, for example. Local experiments have demonstrated that deliberative and participatory practices can work in Budapest, but they never become a stable part of national democratic governance since 1989.
FROM PARTICIPATION TO DELIBERATION WITH REAL POLITICAL INFLUENCE
The post-Orbán period therefore offers a historical opportunity for the Tisza government to develop the capacity and civic culture to deliberate. Deliberation is a political method that requires institutional knowledge and practical skills: how to recruit representative participants in an inclusive way, structure discussion, manage disagreement, involve qualified experts without allowing them to dominate, translate and synthetise collective recommendations into political decisions. These capacities have to be developed among civil servants, politicians, facilitators, civil society organisations and citizens themselves. Hungary’s democratic renewal could therefore benefit from treating deliberation as an institutional competence that needs to be taught and practised in a systematic way. Robust research on deliberative polling provides a useful indication of what such practices can achieve. Fishkin’s work on deliberative polling has shown that structured deliberation can increase political knowledge, foster more considered opinions and reduce hyperpolarisation. Deliberation’s democratic value lies in creating conditions in which people exchange competing arguments, might reconsider their preferences and develop more informed collective judgements.
A good experience of Mongolia illustrates how deliberative polling can generate institutional change. A nationally representative group of citizens participated in a deliberative poll on constitutional reform in 2023. Participants deliberated with access to information and competing perspectives, and their conclusions provided a clear basis for constitutional amendments, including support for expanding parliament and introducing a mixed electoral system. The Mongolian case showed that deliberation can be directly connected to constitutional and political decision-making rather than remaining an isolated participatory exercise. The question is how Hungary could develop its own versions of democratic innovations and adapt it to its own political context.
INNOVATION IN DIGITAL PARTICIPATION
A new infrastructure for a more participatory democracy has already emerged in Hungary. In August 2026, the Tisza government launched Közhang, a digital public-consultation platform with new ways of engaging in public consultation. It provides space for gaining and deepening knowledge about given topics, like the future of public media, among others. Közhang first gives interactive ways to explore the functioning of various public media across Europe and also shares opinions of Hungarian citizens about how the local system should look like – representing both anonymous and non-anonymous opinions from different strata of the society. Then participants can express their views and own preferences online about how they envision the democratic functioning of an independent public media.
Közhang appears as a highly informative and innovative platform for public consultation that was visited by 36,000 citizens on its first day. Its development is potentially significant because it suggests that participation may become part of Hungary’s national digital infrastructure rather than remaining confined to individual local experiments. Yet, it is still unknown how public opinion will be incorporated into political decision-making, or how the personal data of participating citizens will be managed and protected by the government. Although the process itself is coordinated by Márk Radnai, the Government Commissioner responsible for a Functioning and Humane Hungary, Közhang is technically managed by a private company that is registered in Budapest’s 8th district. Moreover, digital participation cannot automatically be equated with inclusive participation. People with limited digital skills can be easily excluded from an interactive online consultation, and it is also not yet known how representative the participants are of society as a whole. Közhang could become an important component of a participatory system only if digital consultation is connected to broader mechanisms of representation, deliberation and institutional response.
PARTICIPATORY CHAINS ARE THE FUTURE
The key issue, therefore, is not simply creating more opportunities for civic participation. It is to connect them into what we in the YouthDecide2040 project call participatory chains by linking different forms of participation across time and governance levels into a coherent democratic ecosystem. We argued that rather than treating public consultation, citizens’ assemblies, deliberative polling and other consultative methods as isolated, one-off instruments, participatory chains should connect them into feedback loops. This way, democratic innovations can become mutually reinforcing components of a broader ecosystem, where engagement travels across institutions, communities, and levels of governance. In other words, participation itself becomes institutionalised rather than episodic.
This is crucial because participation without political follow-up can easily become symbolic. Citizens invest time and energy, formulate recommendations, but if institutions are not required to respond and provide a feedback loop, participation can produce culminating frustration rather than civic empowerment. Similarly, deliberation without mechanisms for implementation can remain an exercise in consultation rather than a source of political influence. Citizens need to know what happened to their contribution, why a recommendation was accepted or rejected, and who exactly was responsible for these decisions.
The task is not less than transforming this newly emerging civic resilience into a permanent, democratic infrastructure in Hungary. In practice, this is rebuilding the relationship between citizens, organized civil society, local municipalities and the state. Poland offers an intriguing comparison in this regard. During the PiS government (2015-2023), democratic resilience was partly sustained through what could be described as “local pockets of democracy”: autonomous local governments, civic organisations and community networks that co-jointly reclaimed alternative spaces for participation and public oversight despite national-level democratic backsliding. Local authorities (in Warsaw, Gdansk, Krakow, to name a few) cooperated with NGOs, grassroots initiatives, and civic organisations to maintain forms of democratic participation and accountability even under increasingly hostile political conditions.
Hungary recently possessed the early foundations of a similar model, although in a very different format. The emergence of the so-called “Tisza Islands” during the recent election cycle illustrates the democratic potential of locally embedded civic mobilisation. While they are connected to the broader Tisza movement, these groups remain formally independent from the Tisza party and the government itself. Their significance lies in hybridity as they combine central political mobilisation with bottom-up social embeddedness. Importantly, they should not be understood merely as campaign infrastructure. These locally integrated groups have the potential to function as connective tissue between society and politics. During the 2026 election campaign, they created spaces for participation, democratic dialogue, political education, and collective problem-solving in communities where engagement had long been weakened by apathy, dependency, and lack of trust and efficacy.
After 16 years of top-down centralization, Hungarian local governments need genuine decentralization, new resources and autonomy, but citizens also need meaningful ways to scrutinise local power, shape decisions and hold authorities accountable. Civil society organisations should play a crucial role as facilitators, watchdogs and intermediaries between citizens and institutions. The goal should therefore be to develop an ecosystem in which different forms of participation reinforce one another.
HOW TO CREATE A PARTICIPATORY CHAIN IN PRACTICE?
For example, national consultation about public media could start on Közhang, where citizens identify priorities and arguments, but the process would then move offline into deliberative forums. It could be co-jointly organised by local municipalities and civil society across the country to ensure that digitally excluded citizens are also represented. The output emerging from these local processes could subsequently feed into a nationally representative deliberative poll or citizens’ assembly, selected by sortition. Its recommendations would then be formally submitted to the National Assembly and the government, which would be legally obliged to publish a response explaining which proposals are accepted, modified, or rejected. Civil-society organisations could monitor the implementation process and use open-data and civic-tech tools to track government commitments. At the same time, municipalities could pilot accepted reforms locally before their results feed back into subsequent national deliberation.
This is where Hungary’s democratic transition in the making could become genuinely innovative. Rather than simply returning to the institutional arrangements that existed before 2010, the Tisza government should experiment with new ways of connecting citizens to political decision-making. The lesson learned is that democratic resilience cannot be secured only by changing governments or restoring formal checks and balances. Informal power thrives when citizens are disconnected from political decision-making and when institutions are not required to respond to them. Rewiring democracy therefore means changing the relationship between citizens and political power itself. It should mean creating rules and democratic practices that distribute power more broadly and make political authority more responsive and accountable regardless of who governs on the national level.
The author is the Head of REWIRE – Center for Democratic Renewal and Innovations and an Assistant Professor at IFiS PAN.
ABOUT
Dr. Edit Zgut-Przybylska is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology (IFIS) in the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) and a Research Affiliate at CEU Democracy Institute. Her research interest covers informality and populism in the context of democratic backsliding and the constraining role of the European Union. Edit conducts policy analysis about Russian and Chinese influence, including disinformation. She is also a visiting lecturer at the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department. Synthetic versions of her work are available on POLITICO EUROPE, Foreign Policy and Visegrad Insight. Edit held a re:constitution fellowship 2022/2023, a Rethink.CEE fellowship at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a Visegrad Insight Fellowship. She previously worked at Political Capital Research Institute and prior to that, she was a journalist at various media outlets in Hungary.
CONTACT
REWIRE – Center for Democratic Renewal and Innovation
European Studies Unit (IFIS PAN)
Nowy Świat 72, 02-032 Warsaw
Room 104
Email: ezgut@ifispan.edu.pl
