On April 12, 2026, Hungary’s Tisza party defeated incumbent prime minister Viktor Orbán and his long-ruling Fidesz party after over a decade and a half of democratic erosion. Tisza’s success has quickly become a reference point for how authoritarian incumbents can be defeated even on highly uneven electoral playing fields. Most explanations emphasize the political opening created by economic decline, corruption, and the erosion of Fidesz’s credibility, alongside the effective electoral campaign of the new challenger, Tisza, and its leader, newly elected Prime Minister Péter Magyar. These factors were clearly central. But so too was broad, coordinated civic mobilization—especially a grassroots effort to counter vote buying and voter intimidation, one of the regime’s most authoritarian features and a core threat to electoral integrity.

While political scientists and commentators have extensively written about Fidesz’s authoritarian tactics, one of its central strategies has received comparatively less attention: the large-scale use of vote buying and voter intimidation, organized through local networks and exploiting extreme economic vulnerability. Investigative journalists estimate that in previous elections, Fidesz gained between 200,000 and 300,000 votes through these practices, with plans to expand further in 2026—a potentially decisive share in a country where turnout in past national elections typically has fallen between 5 and 6 million voters. This made electoral coercion a key threat to the potential for democratic reversal, as opposition victory under autocratization depends on a basic condition: whether electoral integrity can be maintained.

Leading up to the 2026 election, a broad civic initiative led by the Hungarian civic network DE Action Community developed a coordinated strategy to disrupt coercive electoral practices.

Hungary’s example shows that civic actors can play a decisive role in guaranteeing electoral integrity, despite the purposeful weakening of independent civil society under autocratization. In the months leading up to the 2026 election, a broad civic initiative led by the Hungarian civic network DE Action Community (DE) developed a coordinated strategy to disrupt coercive electoral practices where they were most prevalent. The intervention combined gathering information locally, public exposure (most notably through the widely viewed documentary film The Price of a Vote), direct engagement with vote-buying intermediaries, and the strategic deployment of over 2,400 trained volunteer observers to roughly 500 high-risk polling stations across approximately 150 localities. By drastically increasing transparency, DE made vote buying and voter intimidation riskier on Election Day and further strengthened anti-Fidesz sentiment in the electorate. Evidence from the ground and analyses of election returns suggest that vote buying was significantly reduced in targeted areas. By seeking to mobilize voters against Fidesz across the country, the initiative likely contributed to Tisza’s resounding victory.

Hungary’s experience carries two broader lessons. First, innovative, broad civic initiatives centered on increasing transparency can disrupt coercive electoral practices that are prevalent under democratic backsliding. Second, more generally, grassroots civic organization is a potent tool for countering authoritarian manipulation of elections under democratic erosion. Even after independent civil society has been weakened under democratic backsliding, targeted, coordinated, and locally embedded civic mobilization can fundamentally alter the conditions under which elections occur. Electoral turnover under democratic backsliding depends not only on opposition party strategy, institutional design, and structural conditions, but also on whether civic actors organize to counter the authoritarian tactics through which incumbents maintain power.

Vote Buying and Voter Intimidation Under Fidesz

A central constraint on opposition victory under democratic backsliding is whether elections can function as meaningful pathways to political change at all. Observers tend to associate large-scale vote buying and voter intimidation with low-income countries or consolidated autocracies such as Russia, rather than middle- and high-income countries undergoing democratic erosion. Much of the academic work and public discourse on democratic backsliding focuses on structural disadvantages facing opposition parties—media capture, unequal access to financial resources, and electoral rules biased in the incumbent’s favor—while treating coercive electoral practices as peripheral. Yet in Hungary, these practices were widespread and electorally consequential. Prior to 2026, academic work, election workers, and investigative journalists documented vote buying and voter intimidation in Hungary, but it was often assumed to matter only at the margins.

Yet evidence that emerged before the 2026 election in Hungary showed that vote buying and voter intimidation were key, coordinated electoral tactics of Fidesz. The Price of a Vote, published less than three weeks before the election, demonstrated the practice and its scale. Investigative journalists reported plans to mobilize up to 600,000 votes through Fidesz’s coordinated vote-buying and coercion networks in 2026—almost 10 percent of the 6.4 million people who ultimately voted. Hungarian elections are often decided by much narrower margins, including the margins that allowed Fidesz to secure the two-thirds parliamentary majority it used to entrench its rule.

Coercive electoral practices in Hungary operate through locally embedded systems of dependency. Low-income voters, disproportionately of the Romani ethnic minority, received cash, food, firewood, or even alcohol and drugs in return for a vote. These payoffs were embedded in broader relationships of control. Mayors, employers and managers, state employees, and informal brokers acting on behalf of Fidesz determined access to jobs, welfare, medical care, and other state services. In The Price of a Vote, residents of low-income villages and segregated Roma settlements describe not only payments but also threats: loss of public employment, withdrawal of benefits, or pressure from local authorities, including child protective services, if they failed to support Fidesz. The secret ballot did little to counter these practices. As studies have shown, vote buying can persist despite secret votes through social pressure, norms of reciprocity, and enforcement and monitoring mechanisms. In Hungary, these mechanisms were widespread, including chain voting, photographing ballots, and accompanying voters into booths under the pretext of accommodating illiteracy.

Investigative journalists reported plans to mobilize up to 600,000 votes through Fidesz’s coordinated vote-buying and coercion networks in 2026—almost 10 percent of the 6.4 million people who ultimately voted.

These practices appeared exceedingly difficult to counter. First, Fidesz’s infrastructure of vote buying and voter intimidation in low-income communities was highly organized and deeply embedded in local networks of dependency. The documentary alleged coordinated preparation by Fidesz across fifty-three of Hungary’s 106 electoral districts, with local intermediaries collecting voter information and distributing resources well before Election Day. Second, Fidesz had drastically weakened independent civil society—the actors best positioned to counter such practices. As is typical of contexts of democratic backsliding, civil society organizations faced immense resource constraints and legal harassment, compounding pre-existing capacity constraints rooted in the historical weakness of civil society in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. Third, the extent of autocratization and repeated opposition failures generated apathy, normalization, and fear of retaliation for dissent in the population. These fostered the perception that Fidesz could not be defeated in elections among voters, opposition politicians, and civil society alike.

A Grassroots Response

Hungary’s 2026 election shows that, despite all these challenges, civic actors can effectively organize to protect election integrity through a coordinated grassroots initiative that actively disrupts coercive electoral practices by drastically increasing transparency. In Hungary, DE brought together local activists, data experts, legal organizations, and thousands of volunteers. Its innovative, coordinated, and locally embedded civic mobilization increased the likelihood that vote buying and intimidation would be recorded and potentially sanctioned, raising the expected costs for those involved and helping mobilize voters against Fidesz’s abuses of power.

This innovative civic initiative combined pre-election investigation, public exposure, local intelligence, legal support, and large-scale election-day monitoring through several steps.

First, as part of an extensive pre-election investigation, activists spent months mapping how vote buying operated in practice, which communities were most vulnerable, who the local intermediaries were, and what tactics they employed. This combined election forensics with local knowledge from informants who knew the brokers, the targeted households, and the forms of pressure typically used.

Second, it directed public attention to these illicit practices. Less than three weeks before the election, DE released The Price of a Vote, which made visible a system often assumed to be of marginal importance outside affected communities and generated widespread public outrage. By placing these practices at the center of public attention, the initiative created what organizers described as “radical transparency”: the expectation that electoral abuse would, for the first time, be documented and prosecuted. This increased the costs of brokers’ participation in vote-buying by raising the perceived likelihood of legal action and reputational risks. At the same time, it reduced expected benefits by disrupting coordination among intermediaries and making compliance harder to guarantee.

Innovative, coordinated, and locally embedded civic mobilization increased the likelihood that vote buying and intimidation would be recorded and potentially sanctioned.

DE’s third strategy was direct communication with brokers involved in vote buying and intimidation, signaling that these activities were being monitored to discourage participation before Election Day. The approach was pragmatic: Even if money had already reached local brokers, organizers wanted to prevent it from reaching voters. They pursued this through direct conversations with brokers and even letters to mayors.

Finally, the targeted presence of thousands of volunteers on Election Day in the most affected areas was essential. DE strategically deployed thousands of trained volunteers to the previously identified roughly 500 highest-risk polling stations across around 150 localities. These “sentinels” (őrszemek) closely monitored proceedings, documented irregularities, and fed information into a centralized system that could respond in real time. A reporting app enabled rapid response: Volunteers on motorbikes were dispatched to locations where vote buying was reported. The main tool was extensive video documentation, with volunteers systematically recording irregularities while deliberately avoiding direct confrontation.

This multi-step strategy was facilitated by an unusually broad civic coordination. DE worked with local informants, often local members of civil society, especially Romani rights advocates. It collaborated with election data analyst Mátyás Bódi, who identified polling stations with signs of vote buying in previous elections. It worked together with the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, which organized legal action in cases of vote buying and other illicit activities that volunteers documented. It also coordinated with Tisza’s parallel Election Day monitoring program, which deployed another 2,000 volunteers to polling stations that DE identified as high-risk. In a context often characterized by weak or demobilized civil society, this rapid, large-scale coordination around a concrete electoral task was itself notable.

Evidence indicates that DE’s civic effort to counter vote buying and voter intimidation was highly effective. On-the-ground reports of hampered vote-buying efforts and analyses of electoral returns in the most affected areas support this. In targeted areas, Fidesz performed significantly worse than expected, overall turnout was lower, and the characteristic patterns associated with vote buying—such as sharp spikes in turnout at specific times of day as voters are bused en masse to polling stations—largely disappeared. In several electoral districts where vote buying had previously been prevalent, races were decided by margins of a few hundred to a few thousand votes. In such contexts, even relatively small disruptions to these practices were likely decisive. Countering vote buying in these areas likely contributed to securing Tisza’s two-thirds constitutional majority, the parliamentary threshold needed for more ambitious rule-of-law restoration.

Beyond these localized effects, public exposure likely further mobilized Hungarians to turn out and vote against Fidesz. The Price of a Vote was viewed 2.2 million times before the election, approximately one-third the number of total votes cast. It intensified public outrage and reinforced perceptions of Fidesz’s systemic abuse and corruption, which survey evidence suggests was the central driver of anti-Fidesz voting.

Lessons

Hungary’s experience points to two broader lessons about the role of civic mobilization in opposition electoral victory under conditions of democratic backsliding.

First, electoral integrity can be defended from below. Even where coercive electoral practices are widespread, organized, and embedded in local power structures, civic actors can effectively counter vote buying and voter intimidation by making them visible. Radical transparency can act as an effective deterrent by raising the expected costs of participation for intermediaries. To achieve this, vote buying and voter intimidation should be understood as an organized infrastructure rather than isolated Election Day violations, and they require a similarly comprehensive response focused on deterrence. This means combining local intelligence, public exposure, legal capacity to prosecute violations, and a visible, strategically deployed presence in the places where vote buying and voter intimidation are most likely to occur. Civic initiatives are particularly well placed to do this. The Hungarian example shows that civic efforts can go beyond parallel vote tabulation and conventional election monitoring to defend electoral integrity by directly disrupting coercive practices before and during Election Day. It does not imply, of course, that such strategies are easily transferable. In higher-violence contexts, for example, direct monitoring may carry significant risks and require adaptation. Nevertheless, making vote buying and intimidation visible can effectively disrupt the equilibrium that sustains them and facilitate cleaner elections.

Even where coercive electoral practices are widespread, organized, and embedded in local power structures, civic actors can effectively counter vote buying and voter intimidation by making them visible.

Second, grassroots civic activism is a key tool of democratic resistance to autocratization, with greater capacity and effectiveness than is often assumed. Much of the public discussion on countering democratic backsliding focuses on parties, leaders, and formal institutions. The recent Hungarian election highlights the importance of an additional question: whether civic actors can organize at scale, coordinate across localities, and directly undermine the strategies by which undemocratic incumbents maintain power. The DE initiative showed that this is a potent tool and fundamentally altered the conditions under which the recent Hungarian election took place. As research on past opposition electoral successes against authoritarians has shown, successful opposition often depends on innovative electoral strategies and cross-national learning to adopt these. As authoritarian leaders learn from one another, so too must those seeking to counter them. Hungary’s example shows that harnessing the latent capacity of civil society is critical for achieving democratic reversal.