Lake Balaton was beloved as a vacation spot. Now, luxury real estate projects serve many friends of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and the locals are fed up
By Andrew Higgins and Lili Rutai
The Hungarian businessman bit his tongue for more than a decade, eager to expand his cement company and keenly aware that opposition to Prime Minister Viktor Orban could make it difficult to win construction contracts, many of which are tied to the government’s favored tycoons.
“I was a collaborator,” the businessman, Jozsef Szindekovics, a 48-year-old father of three, said of his long silence as he watched the shore of his once cozy lakeside town give way to luxury developments controlled by Orban allies.
“I have a family and I needed work,” he explained, recalling with regret how he once voted for Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party.
It is a regret he intends not to repeat. Today, Mr. Szindekovics drives a van plastered with messages of support for Peter Magyar, a conservative former Fidesz insider who is threatening to unseat Mr. Orban in a general election on Sunday.
Most independent polls give Mr. Magyar’s upstart party, Tisza, a serious shot at ending Mr. Orban’s 16 years of uninterrupted and largely unchallenged control of the Hungarian Parliament.
Whether Tisza can succeed depends on voters like Mr. Szindekovics, who are experiencing late-onset buyer’s remorse after fortifying Mr. Orban with four landslide election victories but, polling indicates, now want a change.
Those wins allowed Mr. Orban to turn Hungary into a bastion of what he proudly calls “illiberal democracy,” a friend of Russia — and of President Trump — and an antagonist of Ukraine and the European Union.
The potential for a shift in the political winds can be seen in Mr. Szindekovics’s hometown, Keszthely, on the edge of Lake Balaton in western Hungary.
Lake Balaton is beloved by generations of Hungarians as a vacation spot offering free public beaches, camp sites and basic but cheap lakeside accommodation.
In recent years, however, its shore has been steadily sealed off to make way for high-end hotels and luxury apartment blocks. Many of those are owned by shadowy companies linked to friends, family and allies of Mr. Orban.
Residents in Keszthely grew fed up with the corruption and mismanagement that many associate with Mr. Orban’s long tenure, and they voted in 2024 for an opposition mayor, breaking Fidesz’s 18-year hold on City Hall.
That same year, Mr. Magyar, a onetime Orban loyalist, broke with the governing party. He is now mounting the broadest challenge yet against the government. He has done so by reaching beyond die-hard Orban foes — like liberals in Budapest, Hungary’s cosmopolitan capital — to rally voters across the country.
Last week, Mr. Magyar ended a hectic day of campaigning in five provincial towns with a rally in Keszthely. Despite bitter cold and rain, thousands turned out in the central square to hear him rail against the wealth amassed by Mr. Orban’s friends and relatives as Hungary’s economy has spluttered.
Runaway inflation in the country has slowed, but unemployment is now at its highest level in 10 years. Economic growth last year — just 0.4 percent — lagged far behind that of Poland — 3.6 percent — and other countries in the region, like Bulgaria and Romania.
Transparency International recently put Hungary at the bottom of its annual corruption ranking in the European Union for a fourth year.
Addressing Mr. Orban’s wavering supporters at his rally in Keszthely, Mr. Magyar said: “Dear Fidesz voters, you have been deceived, we have all been deceived. These people stole our money.”
Most independent polls, though not those conducted by organizations that support Mr. Orban, show Fidesz trailing, Mr. Magyar’s Tisza by 10 or more points.
While Mr. Orban has worked to close the gap by fulminating against Ukraine and the European Union, Mr. Magyar has focused on corruption and living standards.
It is the same message that got Gergely Toth, a mild-mannered economics professor at the local university, elected as mayor of Keszthely. A conservative father of five, he defeated an entrenched candidate from Mr. Orban’s party by tapping into fury over shady business deals and the misuse of European Union funding.
Half a million dollars had gone missing in an aborted E.U.-funded project to renovate a crumbling 18th-century brewery, while a public camp site on Lake Balaton was turned into a luxury housing complex. A big plot of beachside land next to it has been closed off in preparation for more construction.
The 11 buildings already put up cater to wealthy Hungarians and foreigners, mainly Russians, able to pay a million dollars for a penthouse apartment.
A company partly controlled by Mr. Orban’s son-in-law, Istvan Tiborcz, took over the town’s yacht marina, previously owned by the municipal authorities.
Mr. Tiborcz, amassing properties elsewhere, later sold his marina stake and also pulled out of a company that had received contracts from the government to install street lighting as part of another E.U.-funded project.
The European Union’s anti-graft agency investigated the Hungarian lighting project and in 2018 reported “serious irregularities” and “conflict of interest” in the awarding of contracts. Mr. Tiborcz has consistently denied benefiting from his family ties to the prime minister. Fidesz-appointed prosecutors declined to take up the case.
Ferenc Deak, 75, a former supporter of Jobbik, a far-right party, who is now campaigning for Mr. Magyar, said, “They have stolen everything.”
Fidesz is mostly lying low in Keszthely. Its candidate for Parliament there, Balint Nagy, is ensconced in the party’s by-invitation-only office in the center of town.
Mr. Nagy, a former Fidesz mayor accused of corruption by the opposition, declined to be interviewed, saying he was too busy.
According to Jozsef Peter Martin, Transparency International’s executive director for Hungary and a senior lecturer at Budapest’s Corvinus University, “Systemic corruption has become the main cause of the Hungarian economy’s downturn.”
In some other countries, it was politically connected tycoons who deformed national politics, Mr. Martin said. “In Hungary, it is not that the oligarchs bought themselves into power; instead, politics captured the state and then found oligarchs to carry out its will.”
Mr. Toth, the new mayor, says his administration has taken complaints of corruption by previous Fidesz officials to the public prosecutor. But the prosecutor is a Fidesz appointee and has stalled on investigating, Mr. Toth says.
The Fidesz-appointed director of the local hospital has refused even to meet the new mayor. Mr. Magyar has put Hungary’s dilapidated health care system at the center of his campaign.
Tamas Weller-Jakus, 54, a lawyer in Keszthely, said that he had avoided getting involved in politics for many years because he wanted to avoid any trouble from Fidesz. “Yes, we are living in a democracy, but there is retaliation if you talk against them,” he said.
Rage eventually overcame his caution, he said, when his mother received a cancer diagnosis in 2016 and he was told by the hospital that national insurance would not cover the cost of swift surgery unless “you know someone in Fidesz.” After months of delays, his mother received treatment, but she died a few weeks later.
“This was when I decided I would start doing politics,” he recalled. Today he is part of Keve, an association of local activists opposed to what they see as crooked business deals involving Fidesz.
“Mr. Orban,” he said, “is a very smart person, but he has used his talents for the dark side.”
For Mr. Toth, the mayor, Hungary is not a “cruel dictatorship like Putin’s Russia” in which critics are jailed or killed in mysterious falls from high windows, but a “spin dictatorship” that destroys opponents with smears.
In the case of businesspeople, it means being excluded from lucrative contracts in favor of Fidesz-friendly rivals.
“We are optimistic, but we are also a bit afraid” of what might happen before and on Election Day, Mr. Toth said. Fidesz, he added, still has many advantages, including an electoral system it skewed in its favor and overwhelming control of the media.
And, he noted, “It is willing to do anything to keep power.”
