BUDAPEST: Hungarian opposition leader Peter Magyar walked across the border to Romania on Saturday after a week-long journey, in a attempt to win support of the ethnic Hungarians in Romania and appeal to conservative voters in the run-up to the 2026 elections.
Magyar’s center-right Tisza party emerged last year to mount the most serious challenge to nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban since he rose to power in 2010.
Most opinion polls now put Tisza ahead of Orban’s Fidesz party with the next parliamentary elections due in early 2026. No date has been set yet.
Carrying Hungary’s national flag, Magyar walked across the border on Saturday morning with a group of supporters.
“We are not going (to Romania) to escalate tensions or to cause any harm to our Hungarian brothers and sisters living there. We are going there to express our solidarity,” Magyar said on May 14 when he set out on foot in hiking gear.
On his way to the border, Magyar stopped in small towns to talk to rural voters, who have traditionally supported conservative Orban.
Orban’s government provides financial support to ethnic Hungarian communities in Romania and in 2014 granted the right to vote to Hungarians living abroad. In the last election in 2022 94 percent of these voters supported Fidesz.
The latest poll by the Publicus think tank, published on Friday, showed Tisza with 43 percent support among decided voters in Hungary while Fidesz had 36 percent.
Magyar announced his march on May 12 after Orban flagged he could cooperate with Romanian hard-right presidential candidate George Simion ahead of the May 18 election there.
The RMDSZ party representing ethnic Hungarians in Romania, said Simion’s win would pose a threat to minorities’ rights and urged its voters to support centrist Nicusor Dan who ended up winning the vote.