Party Analysis: Mi Hazánk Mozgalom (Hungary)

The Persistence of Hungary's Radical Right

Mi Hazánk Mozgalom (’Our Homeland Movement’) is Hungary’s most significant far-right challenger outside Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz system. Founded in 2018 by László Toroczkai following his expulsion from Jobbik, the party has positioned itself as a custodian of “uncompromised” nationalism - combining social conservatism, agrarian populism, Euroscepticism, and hardline security politics. While its electoral footprint remains modest, Mi Hazánk has consolidated a stable niche within Hungary’s fragmented opposition landscape.

In the 2022 parliamentary election, Mi Hazánk crossed the five per cent threshold with 5.9 per cent of the party-list vote, securing six seats and becoming the third-largest opposition force. Its performance improved slightly in the 2024 European Parliament elections, where it won 6.7 per cent and secured a single MEP, while simultaneous local elections delivered dozens of council seats and several mayoralties in smaller towns. By late 2025, polling placed the party at around seven to eight per cent - behind Fidesz and the emerging Tisza Party, but ahead of much of the fractured left. This trajectory suggests not a surge, but a durable presence.

Why Mi Hazánk Exists

Mi Hazánk emerged from a strategic rupture within Jobbik, once Hungary’s dominant radical-right party. After 2015, Jobbik’s leadership pursued a process of “detoxification,” moderating its rhetoric and cooperating with centre-left forces in an effort to challenge Fidesz electorally. For Toroczkai and his supporters, this shift represented ideological abandonment rather than pragmatism.

The split was both ideological and organisational. Toroczkai, then Jobbik’s vice-president and mayor of the border town Ásotthalom, lost a leadership contest in 2018 to a more centrist faction. His subsequent expulsion provided the catalyst for Mi Hazánk’s formation, framed as a defence of national sovereignty, cultural homogeneity, and political authenticity. The party thus filled a space left vacant by Jobbik’s transformation: a vehicle for voters who regarded Fidesz as insufficiently radical and Jobbik as no longer credible.

This appeal was reinforced by broader structural anxieties. The aftershocks of the 2015 migration crisis, persistent regional inequality, rural depopulation, and scepticism toward multinational capital created fertile ground for a party combining border politics with agrarian protectionism. Mi Hazánk’s early activism - border patrols, protests against COVID-19 restrictions, and opposition to supranational governance - helped anchor its identity among voters who felt alienated both from liberal opposition parties and from what they perceived as Fidesz’s instrumental pragmatism.

What the Party Has Achieved

Mi Hazánk’s progress has been incremental rather than explosive. Its first electoral successes came at the local level in 2019, when it secured representation in several county assemblies, particularly in eastern and southern Hungary. The 2022 parliamentary election marked a decisive breakthrough: by clearing the electoral threshold, the party converted marginal activism into institutional footholds.

Since entering parliament, Mi Hazánk has used its limited platform to elevate issues largely absent from mainstream debate. These include opposition to mRNA vaccination, calls for the reinstatement of capital punishment and conscription, and proposals to segregate “disruptive” pupils in schools - policies framed in behavioural rather than explicitly ethnic terms, but widely criticised by rights organisations. On migration, the party has shifted attention from asylum to labour mobility, campaigning against the growing use of guest workers and portraying integration efforts as costly failures.

Although Mi Hazánk lacks coalition leverage, its agenda-setting capacity should not be dismissed. On cultural and security issues, Fidesz has occasionally echoed its rhetoric, particularly on LGBT rights and border enforcement. At the local level, Mi Hazánk councillors and mayors have gained influence over planning, community services, and symbolic politics. Organisationally, the party claims a membership of around 3,000 - small by mass-party standards, but sufficient to sustain grassroots mobilisation.

What Success Would Look Like

For Mi Hazánk, success is less about immediate access to power than about reshaping the ideological boundaries of Hungarian politics. In the short term, this means consolidating support at around ten per cent and expanding parliamentary representation in the 2026 election. Achieving this would position the party as a permanent fixture rather than a protest vehicle vulnerable to electoral squeeze.

Medium-term ambitions focus on policy impact. These include pushing for a more confrontational stance toward the European Union, reversing liberal norms in education and public health, expanding state intervention in agriculture and food processing, and institutionalising a tougher security regime centred on border control and deportation. The party also seeks to embed what it calls “green conservatism” - environmental protection rooted in rural preservation rather than climate internationalism.

In the longer term, Mi Hazánk’s vision is openly revisionist. It advocates a referendum on EU membership, strategic neutrality, and closer ties with non-Western powers, including Russia and Turkey. Whether these goals are realistic is secondary to their signalling function: they define Mi Hazánk as a party unwilling to accept the post-1989 settlement that underpins Hungary’s current political economy.

Electoral Rules and Strategic Constraints

Hungary’s mixed electoral system both enables and constrains Mi Hazánk. The proportional list tier allows smaller parties to gain representation if they clear the five per cent threshold, while single-member districts reward concentration and incumbency. Mi Hazánk performs strongest in rural constituencies where nationalist messaging resonates and turnout patterns favour disciplined mobilisation.

At the same time, the system structurally advantages Fidesz. Gerrymandered district boundaries, media dominance, and the absence of coalition requirements for government formation limit the leverage of smaller opposition parties. Urban areas pose particular challenges: fragmented opposition voting in Budapest and other cities dilutes Mi Hazánk’s returns, while newer actors such as the Tisza Party compete for anti-establishment voters.

The party’s prospects are therefore closely tied to Fidesz’s trajectory. A significant erosion of government support could benefit Mi Hazánk as a recipient of protest votes; a Fidesz recovery risks squeezing it below the threshold. Reliance on Toroczkai’s personal profile remains both an asset and a vulnerability.

How Critics See It

Opponents depict Mi Hazánk as an extremist throwback rather than a credible alternative. Centre-left parties and civil society groups accuse it of promoting conspiracy theories, undermining public health through anti-vaccination campaigns, and advancing policies that disproportionately affect Roma communities under the guise of behavioural discipline. Its migration rhetoric is criticised as inflammatory in a country facing labour shortages and demographic decline.

Foreign policy positions have attracted particular scrutiny. The party’s opposition to military support for Ukraine and its calls for neutrality are widely framed as pro-Russian, raising concerns about Hungary’s alignment within the EU and NATO. Even within the conservative camp, Mi Hazánk is often viewed as a spoiler - fragmenting opposition to Fidesz while lacking a plausible governing strategy.

How It May Be Remembered

Mi Hazánk’s historical significance will hinge on whether it outlasts its founding moment. If it entrenches itself as a stable force on the radical right, it may be remembered as the movement that preserved ideological maximalism in an era of strategic moderation - keeping alive a strain of Hungarian nationalism that Fidesz increasingly instrumentalised rather than embodied.

If, however, its support dissipates after 2026 or proves inseparable from Toroczkai’s leadership, it is more likely to be remembered as a symptom rather than a cause: a by-product of Jobbik’s transformation, the migration crisis, and pandemic-era polarisation. In that reading, Mi Hazánk would stand as evidence not of radical renewal, but of the limited space available for challengers in a hegemonic party system.

Either way, its presence underscores a broader point. Hungary’s radical right did not disappear with Jobbik’s moderation; it adapted, fragmented, and endured. Mi Hazánk is the clearest expression of that persistence.