In the days after Donald Trump won his second term, I called a handful of Hungarian political analysts to ask what America's political future might look like. My impulse was hardly original — the analysts had been fielding calls like mine constantly. Hungary had long seemed like a bellwether for the illiberal direction Trump said he intended to take the United States. Over his decade and a half in power, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had systematically rigged the electoral and legislative systems in his party's favor, consolidated control — directly or indirectly — over 80 percent of the country's media, and systematically weakened most independent institutions. But when I asked these analysts to give it to me straight, they kept steering the conversation toward something else: what was happening on "the islands."
The political earthquake Hungary experienced on Monday — when the party opposing Orbán won two-thirds of Parliament — was unimaginable just eighteen months ago. Yet there had been smaller, almost imperceptible tremors of the kind that typically precede profound political upheaval. Across rural Hungary, the very bedrock of Orbán's support, small civic groups had been quietly taking root in places where civil society had all but ceased to exist. They were called Tisza Islands, sharing a name with the center-right opposition party whose profile surged when the renegade politician Péter Magyar broke from Orbán's Fidesz party and joined Tisza in 2024. Though inspired by this new focal point of opposition, the groups operated independently and maintained no formal connection to the party. Dozens emerged in unlikely places — at least 200 by the time of the election (Magyar himself claimed as many as 1,200) — eventually enrolling tens of thousands of members.
When I reached the same analysts again on Monday, all of them described, through their celebratory haze, a very specific and essential role these metaphorical islands had played — particularly in rural areas, where a third of Hungary's roughly 10 million people live. Orbán had polarized the country in ways Americans might find painfully familiar: political identity had hardened into tribal affiliation, becoming less a reflection of policy preferences or ideology and more a marker of which side you belonged to. These local groups offered a way to crack through that concrete — first, by giving people permission to imagine a Hungary without Orbán; and second, more critically, by reminding longtime Fidesz voters that above all else, they were citizens with a choice.
In those areas, "people genuinely believed that Fidesz was always going to be in the majority, and they were afraid to speak out, afraid to show that they belong to the opposition," said Gergő Papp, a political consultant writing a book about the Tisza movement. "And that created this kind of spiral of silence. The smaller the town is, the less likely someone is to signal that they are with the opposition." The islands, Papp told me, "made it possible for this spiral of silence and fear to end, and in the final weeks, that's what mattered the most."
What, exactly, did people do on these islands? The answer was surprisingly mundane. These were partly debate societies, where members gathered to discuss local concerns — a factory polluting the countryside, or whether the village medical center was properly supplied. Groups also organized litter pickups and painted bus benches. There was talk of movie nights. Under one subreddit thread from nine months ago asking "What are the Tisza islands doing?", most responses depicted people simply being neighborly. "Things we've done," one post began: "Water distribution in the heat, we collected school supplies and clothes for the family support center." And: "we organized a cooking competition." It was a near-perfect illustration of Robert Putnam's argument in Bowling Alone — his landmark study of deepening atomization in American life — that civil society ultimately depends on people simply doing things together.
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As 2025 progressed, some islands grew more overtly political — distributing leaflets, recruiting candidates for upcoming elections, functioning increasingly like field offices in a conventional grassroots campaign. When Magyar began touring the country more openly and expansively than opposition candidates had dared in years, these islands, embedded deep in Orbán territory, were often his destination.
David Koranyi, who served as Hungary's national-security adviser in the late 2010s before Orbán consolidated power, described two distinct types of people who joined these groups. The first were people like his own parents — Budapest residents, politically left-leaning — who would not necessarily affiliate with Magyar's Tisza party, which was more ideologically inclusive than Fidesz but still held conservative positions on immigration and traditional values. For this group, the islands offered a nonpolitical entry point into connecting with others interested in change.
The second group were Fidesz voters themselves, for whom the islands provided something subtler but arguably more powerful: permission to reconsider. They could bond over shared frustrations — corruption, for instance, and its connection to the rising cost of living — without necessarily abandoning their conservative worldview. It helped that Magyar was himself a former Orbán insider. But for people living in villages and small towns, what they needed above all was the assurance that enough people like them existed to make it safe to signal opposition without fear of "political repercussions," as Koranyi put it. For this group, he added, the "sheer existence" of the islands was what mattered. Their political diversity "went a really long way in sending the message that this is happening all over the place, that it's okay to join the movement."
The islands also served as a conduit for information that could bypass Orbán's pervasive propaganda machine. Throughout the campaign, Orbán-controlled media — effectively every television channel and mass-market newspaper — portrayed Magyar as dangerous, warning that electing him would drag Hungary into war with Russia. Orbán's vulnerability, though, was that Hungarians really love Facebook. Roughly 7 million of them — 70 percent of the population — have an account. (That's comparable to the U.S., but under Orbán, Hungarians had far fewer alternative sources of reliable news.) Most young Hungarians also have TikTok. Social media was central to forming the islands — especially among older citizens who found each other on Facebook — and became a crucial channel for Tisza party messaging about Orbán's corruption that might not otherwise have reached them. Magyar in particular has shown a Zohran Mamdani–like facility for short-form viral video, which made him a breakout figure among Gen Z voters.
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Earlier attempts to penetrate Orbán's propaganda grip had largely failed to reach rural communities, Kornel Klopfstein-Laszlo told me. In 2017, he launched an initiative called Print It Yourself, which offered downloadable PDFs of independent journalism for people to print and share locally — an echo of the samizdat tradition from the Soviet era. But these efforts were routinely dismissed as the work of Budapest liberals trying to impose their worldview on the countryside, which made it easy for Orbán's base to disregard them. Most villagers never did print it themselves. "We were not locals," Klopfstein-Laszlo said simply.
Last year, many Print It Yourself volunteers joined the islands, which began producing their own local newspapers or collaborating directly with Tisza. Because the media was now being created independently and from within communities, Klopfstein-Laszlo said, it was far more effective at countering Orbán's narrative.
One point I heard repeatedly from analysts was that the concept of islands wasn't actually new. Orbán himself used a similar playbook when building Fidesz's power base in the 2010s. His version was called "citizens' circles" — loose networks of Fidesz sympathizers opposed to the Socialist government then in power — and they functioned in much the same way, rebuilding civic muscle that had grown slack. Once Orbán took power, the circles withered. But the underlying hunger for community and collective action never disappeared; it simply went unfed, with no opposition party willing or able to fill the void — until the islands formed.
Orbán's defeat has been attributed to many things: his mismanagement of the economy, his alignment with Russia and his antagonism toward the European Union, his corruption, and perhaps simply the accumulated weight of his whole political persona wearing thin. All of that is probably true. But I don't believe it adds up to the removal of an authoritarian leader without one additional ingredient: people need to feel sufficiently emboldened to break with a habit of mind — to recognize that no one in power occupies that position permanently.
After my conversations with elated Hungarians, though, I kept returning to a question: Where are our American islands? Where might a MAGA voter who has started to worry about the direction of the country find others like themselves — particularly in regions where criticizing the president risks social ostracism? Maybe it means gathering with neighbors, registering voters, organizing a yard sale, hosting a movie night. Maybe it means finding a small, quiet, even banal path away from loyalty and back toward citizenship.
