What happened in the past five months? Here is a situation overview.

Hungary was in international news in the past week over the latest modifications of the constitution to eliminate further checks & balances. This begun already with the new constitution as adopted by ruling party Fidesz's two-thirds parliamentary majority in 2011 (inciting the biggest anti-government protests), so what were the latest about? The original strategy was to secure power beyond the current election cycle by taking over all levers of state power. This has now been achieved 100%, with the change at the helm of the central bank two weeks ago as the closing act. But for prime minister Viktor Orbán, the problem arose that some sidelined party members whom he put in these positions suddenly grew a spine (in particular over the issue of voter registration which was to be introduced as a voter suppression measure). So now the Constitutional Court can no longer stop laws, and the President of the (officially no more existing) Republic was sufficiently 'impressed' to sign the constitutional modification in spite of his publicly declared(!) belief that it contradicts the rest of the constitution.

The Orbán government also attracted international attention with its 'unorthodox' economic policies, including nationalisation, move towards active monetary policy, begging for credits in East Europe and Asia, and public works. Unfortunately, each of these is a twisted version of the original idea with a very different motivation (like 'public works' = forcing long-term unemployed to do the meanest and most pointless jobs), and the main theme is still brutal austerity with social cutbacks (producing poverty which led to unprecedented lines of hundreds of metres when the Hare Krishna movement began its charity winter warm food distribution in Budapest). The entirety of economic policy is a horrible mix of left- and right-wing ideas that cancel each other out (like the combination of Latin American-style extra taxes on multinationals and the ultra-neo-liberal flat tax), so it's unsurprising that last year recession kicked in and then accelerated (seasonally adjusted quarterly GDPs compared to the same period a year earlier, up to Q4/2012: -1.1%, -1.5%, -1.8%, -2.8%).

The sad thing is that the Orbán government's mess is a welcome occasion for neo-liberal economists, politicians and journalists to diss 'unorthodox' economic policy in general (for example, it was much reported recently that a university professor termed Orbán's system "the return of state socialism", heh). There is the (as yet unlikely) possibility of the Polish scenario, that is, a force advocating neo-liberalism openly winning low-turnout elections against a thoroughly discredited populist Right (the way Donald Tusk's PO defeated Jarosław Kaczyński's PiS in 2011).

GDP numbers don't determine poll numbers, however. While Fidesz is taking over formal institutions, what they view as the key tool to rule over people is communication, that is, pervasive and aggressive propaganda. This propaganda is becoming absurd on a Stalinist level: for example, throughout the now two years of austerity measures, the spin doctors and media sycopants looked for ways to call every new measure something other than "austerity" and explicitly claim that there is no austerity. Some other recent campaigns of note:

• After the protests last October, the government started its 2014 election campaign early – with posters proclaiming that they "won't yield to the IMF!" Never mind that at the same time, they were negotiating with the IMF, and implemented social cutbacks and labour market 'reforms' familiar from the worst IMF 'cures'.
  
• The austerity measures are also counter-balanced with measures meant to appear social, like a law that reduces energy costs by forcing utilities to cut prices. But what they did makes neither economic sense (utilities cut back on investment & maintenance) nor environmental sense (what about support for house insulation instead), and certainly isn't social: everyone gets a uniform small reduction (the same idea as flat tax), thus big consumers benefit most in absolute terms. Most people aren't stupid enough to buy this: a poll shows that two-thirds of the population realises that the costs will just hit them in other ways; however, for Fidesz, it's enough if the minority of remaining own voters buy it.
  But all of this was only intro; the actual piece of hair-raising propaganda I want to showcase is the signature collection Fidesz launched last week: it's for a petition calling on parliament (which they already control) to keep to this measure against foreign attacks. A petition to themselves!
  I think this particular operation can be explained in the terms of a recently leaked internal motivational video for Fidesz's campaign staff, which documented the (in theory illegal) get-out-the-vote drive prior to Fidesz's takeover of a former Socialist stronghold in local elections. In the video, a campaign manager explained that the real goal of door-to-door campaigning is to gather political orientation and commitment level data on all voters for the GOTV drive, and added that a failed referendum campaign a few years earlier had the same primary goal.
  
• The cold spell on 14-15 March was predicted a week ahead and we could see on TV news what it did in Germany or Poland before arriving here. Yet, there were no active warnings by the government in the media and no advance preparation of men and machinery. But when total chaos arrived (thousands of cars stuck on the roads, 160 villages without electricity etc.), the government switched into top gear – in its proclamations that "we will rescue everyone". This peaked in a text message from the interior ministry to every single cell phone which read: "We help! Don't leave your motor vehicle! If your fuel ran out, sit into another motor vehicle!" This made no practical sense because in the end, for many people whose car got stuck, help took so long to arrive that they were better off walking away. Of course, the real aim was to tell the majority who was not stuck on the roads that Something Is Being Done, but it was a bit too transparent (leading to jokes on-line about people waiting for the arrival of that promised help in their garages).

For its part, the Socialist Party also began campaigning with posters contrasting Fidesz's 2010 election slogans with their actual policies. But the loudest opposition to government policies in the past few months came from students protesting plans for radical cutbacks in education, especially tertiary education, where the government broke Fidesz's election promise by introducing a tuition fee (voided only if the student signs a declaration that s/he won't seek a job abroad), and wants to reduce the number of publicly funded fellowships to a fraction. The government first tried to ignore the student protesters, then to demonise them, then to divide them.

It was also a group of mostly young people who staged the occupation of Fidesz's party headquarters on 7 March, in protest of the modification of the constitution. This ended in a tussle with pro-Fidesz "civilians" who later turned out to be members of a radical football fan club called upon by Fidesz's human resources man (the guy from the leaked video mentioned above). A week later, two dozen highschool students staged a flash protest on the steps of Parliament. Police slapped fines of about €200 on each of them.

As for the party landscape, the big picture remained the same as five months ago: Fidesz lost half of its 2010 voters but can still lead the race (which virtually guarantees a wide majority in parliament) with the support of just 20-25% of the voting-age population, while 40-50% won't choose a party (which by pollster experience effectively means that they won't vote). In October, the two main organisers of anti-government protests, Facebook group Milla (formed to defend press freedom) and union umbrella group Solidarity, allied with the think-tank of Orbán's predecessor as PM, Gordon Bajnai (a yuppie from the financial industry who led an IMF-faithful "expert" government...) in a call for democratic opposition parties to form a common platform. But the end result was only more splintering:

• MSzP, the Hungarian Socialists (supported by 12-14% of the voting-age population and still the party with the best-organised foot soldiers) would rather aim for a 2018 victory than cede their primacy on the left, and thus let talks run nowhere. But, although they dared to make poverty a campaign theme and got rid of the pro-austerity former PM, the current leadership is uninspiring and unconvincing and indeed they picked up few voters since the 2010 election loss.
  
• LMP, the Hungarian greens, split over the issue of opposition alliance. Differences between the younger urbanite liberal greens and the older rural social-conservative conservationists festered for some time, then the charismatic leader of the latter (who just hates Socialists and long championed a totally unrealistic strategy of pulling away Fidesz's current voters) engineered a party leadership vote to exclude any alliance a priori. The defeated party wing left to form its own party.
  
• After the failure of the opposition alliance drive, in February, Gordon Bajnai announced the establishment of a new party using the name of his alliance with the civic groups. Milla then announced that they are organisationally no part of it and will continue as NGO. (It's still a question how much influence Solidarity, greens, Milla members and smaller groups will have on Bajnai's future line on the economy, but sadly my impression is that Solidarity leaders are naive suckers when it comes to macro-economics.) But the momentum was already lost; the alliance-to-be-party (which started at the Socialists' level and temporarily reduced inactivism) dropped towards the 5% margin.

Meanwhile, right behind the Socialists, far-right youth party Jobbik still gets around 10% of the voting-age population. This party won't hold back in criticising austerity, alongside causing further scandals with impunity by inciting hatred against Roma, Jews, gays, or just about anyone. A recent major scandal associated with the party concerned the leaked Excel lists of new students kept by the official student organisation at the main university for the humanities in Budapest. This student organisation was known to serve as incubator for Jobbik functionaries. As I reported, the confidential lists had a column characterising each student in terms of suspected political persuasion, race/religion and (in case of girls) sexual morals, in the ugliest racist–male chauvinist tone possible. The new development on this front is that stickers appeared on the doors of several professors, proclaiming: "Jews! The university belongs to us Hungarians, not to you!" Meanwhile, Fidesz is still in competition with Jobbik for its voters, and the latest episode in this was a government cultural award for a Fidesz-faithful anti-Semitic 'journalist'. The minister who handed over the award claimed that he regretted it when learning more about the guy afterwards, but supposedly he had no means to retract the award...

As mentioned above, some half of the electorate is a potential non-voter, and from personal experience I think almost all of them are disillusioned of politicians (or wary of ugly disputes with fanatic colleagues, friends & relatives) to the extent that they don't want to deal with politics at all (except cursing "all of them"). But even most of those who'd vote are inactive in all other ways, not even willing to go to a protest or sign a petition (in fact I think I'm the only one in my circle of acquaintances, ecepting some far-right colleagues...), much less join an NGO or launch a solidarity strike. I think much of it is down to a lower level of civic consciousness than in older democracies (and a surviving subject consciousness from dictatorships), an attitude that only bothers with issues directly affecting one and seeks to get by by avoiding conflicts with the powers-that-be.

Above I only spoke about voters in Hungary. However, the picture isn't complete without considering ethnic Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries, who have been offered double citizenship and thus the right to vote. Although most of these people were offended enough by the Orbán government's attitude to treat them as mere pawns and vote for their original autonomous parties rather than Orbán's faithful vassals and puppets (in particular in Romania), there are still hundreds of thousands of votes to win. Fidesz's campaign for that new electorate is in full swing.

The double citizenship led to mayor conflict with Slovakia over the past three years, but fortunately there have been no major tussles on that front in recent months.However, there is now conflict with Romania, where the situation is complicated by Romania's domestic politics: the stand-off between the centre-left–centre-right coalition government of PM Victor Ponta (which won the parliamentary elections in December) and right-populist President Traian Băsescu (back in office after the Ponta camp's failed attempt to remove him from office and up for re-election in 2014). Although Băsescu is no stranger to chauvinism himself, Orbán formed a strategic relationship with him, thus for Ponta's side, attacks on the Orbán government offer an opportunity to woo nationalist voters and undermine the President.

Things came to head over the issue of the flag of the Székely people (a Hungarian-speaking minority now almost universally considered a sub-group of ethnic Hungarians). A Romanian prefect defied court rulings by ordering local governments to not fly the flag. This conflict was ultimately resolved by the removal of the prefect, but that didn't keep a Fidesz leader from upping the campaign for the Transylvanian vote in early March by calling on local authorities in Hungary proper to fly the Székely flag in solidarity. This led to strong diplomatic protests from the Ponta government. Unlike some earlier conflicts with Slovakia, this conflict appears to me to be more smoke than fire (with both sides doing election campaign), but such situations can escalate beyond control.

All in all, the current situation with lots of inactives and a divided opposition would imply that Orbán could continue the construction of his democratorship/dictacy after 2014, save for the potential effects of continued economic misery. However, if recession does eventually change the political picture, there is no guarantee that it will be the democratic opposition parties who'll gain.