The 2026 parliamentary election has been widely described as a political turning point in Hungary. After 16 years of Viktor Orbán’s rule and a political culture in which women were largely absent from positions of power, the victory of the Tisza Party raises important questions about the future of women's political representation and women's issues more broadly. The early evidence is promising: descriptive and symbolic representation have already improved significantly. Whether these gains will translate into substantive representation and lasting policy outcomes, however, remains an open question.
The 2026 parliamentary election has been widely described as a political turning point in Hungary. After 16 years of Viktor Orbán’s rule and a political culture in which women were largely absent from positions of power, the victory of the Tisza Party raises important questions about the future of women's political representation and women's issues more broadly. The early evidence is promising: descriptive and symbolic representation have already improved significantly. Whether these gains will translate into substantive representation and lasting policy outcomes, however, remains an open question.
Drawing on Hanna Pitkin's classic framework, women's representation can be assessed along three dimensions: descriptive representation (the number of women in political office), symbolic representation (the messages conveyed by who holds power), and substantive representation (the extent to which women's interests are reflected in policy). Examining the new political landscape through these lenses reveals both significant progress and important limitations.
Women's descriptive and symbolic representation: an historic shift
From the democratic transition in 1990 until recently, Hungary consistently ranked among the lowest-performing countries in Europe in terms of women's political representation. The share of women in Parliament remained close to 10% for decades, and women's presence in leadership positions was equally limited. In the previous government, not a single cabinet minister was a woman.
Against this backdrop, the post-election composition of Parliament and the Government represents a significant break with past patterns.
Women hold approximately one quarter of parliamentary seats, a figure that remains below the European Union average, but is unprecedented in contemporary Hungarian politics.
This result did not come about by chance. Unlike previous parties, Tisza actively placed women candidates in winnable constituencies and high positions on party lists – a deliberate departure from the practice of nominating women in unwinnable seats that has long characterised Hungarian party politics. Voters, in turn, supported these female candidates despite the common assumption that the electorate is biased against women in politics.
This suggests that such bias may lie not with voters themselves, but with those responsible for candidate selection – gatekeepers whose decisions have long limited women's chances of winning parliamentary seats.
Women have also been appointed to several highly-visible, significant leadership positions, including Ágnes Forsthoffer, who became the Speaker of the Parliament, Andrea Bujdosó, who is leading the Tisza Party’s group in Parliament, and Anita Orbán, who serves as Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. In total, four women hold ministerial portfolios, and a third of state secretaries are women. While gender parity remains distant, women are no longer confined to being a marginal presence in Hungary's political institutions. In descriptive terms, this marks the most substantial improvement in women's political representation since the democratic transition.
The significance of symbolic representation
For much of the post-1990 period, political power in Hungary has been overwhelmingly male. Women have been largely absent from the highest levels of decision-making, reinforcing the perception that politics is fundamentally a male domain.
The appointment of women to several of the most visible positions in the executive and legislative branches sends a different message. Particularly striking is the contrast with the previous political era, in which women occupied few senior leadership positions.
What makes this symbolic shift particularly significant is the lack of any sustained tradition on which to build. Hungary saw women in prominent positions under earlier governments – most notably as Speaker of Parliament – and even under Fidesz, women occasionally held high-profile roles, such as the Presidency and the Justice Ministry. Yet these appointments remained exceptions rather than evidence of the wider opening of political power to women.
The resignations of President Katalin Novák and former Justice Minister Judit Varga further underscored the fragility of women's presence at the highest levels of government under Fidesz. Both stepped down in February 2024, after it became public that Novák had pardoned the former deputy director of a children's home – a man who had blackmailed several children into withdrawing their testimonies against the institution's paedophile director – during the Pope's visit to Budapest in April 2023. Varga, as Justice Minister, countersigned the pardon. Against this backdrop, the current appointments feel qualitatively different – not isolated exceptions, but part of a more deliberate, wide-ranging shift in who is allowed to hold power and on what terms.
Symbolic representation matters because it shapes public expectations about who can legitimately exercise political authority.
The visibility of women in positions of power can challenge long-standing assumptions about leadership and create new political opportunities for future generations of women – even if it remains to be seen whether these gains will translate into lasting institutional change.
Beyond symbolic representation: substance and political culture
Whether a larger number of women in politics will translate into policies which improve women's lives – and whether it will change the political culture – remains a more complex question. There is certainly the expectation and the hope in society that the new Government will take a different approach to women and women's issues.
The previous Hungarian Government's attitude towards gender equality was perhaps most clearly reflected in Viktor Orbán's well-known remark: “I do not deal with women's issues.” Under Fidesz, gender equality was rarely treated as a policy objective in its own right. The Government's approach to women was largely framed through family policy and demographic concerns. While generous family support measures benefited some groups of women, particularly middle-class mothers, in other cases they arguably increased women's vulnerability or failed to achieve their stated aims. The 2022 requirement for women seeking abortions to listen to their foetus’s heartbeat before undergoing the procedure, for instance, added an emotional burden to such procedures without leading to a measurable decline in abortion rates. Similarly, housing subsidies such as CSOK (Családok Otthonteremtési Kedvezménye, in english: Family Home Creation Allowance) are often tied to marriage and can make it financially costly for women to leave marriages, regardless of their quality. Despite substantial public spending on these pro-natalist policies, Hungary's birth rate fell to a historic low in 2025, with just 72,000 births, suggesting that the Government's demographic strategy did not achieve its central aim. Meanwhile, issues such as gender-based violence, unequal care burdens, workplace discrimination, and reproductive rights remained largely absent from political debate altogether.
The Tisza Party's programme suggests somewhat of a departure from this approach. Importantly, women are not addressed exclusively as mothers or caregivers. The programme explicitly acknowledges several issues which have traditionally received little political attention in Hungary, including menstrual poverty, maternity care, unequal care responsibilities, barriers facing women in the labour market, and domestic violence. The programme acknowledges that certain groups of women face multiple, overlapping forms of disadvantage. These include women with disabilities, single mothers, older women, women caring for elderly relatives or children with disabilities, homeless women, and survivors of human trafficking. Notably, the programme also discusses strengthening the role of men in families, implicitly recognising the importance of sharing care responsibilities more equally between men and women.
This shift should not be underestimated. In a political environment where gender equality has often been dismissed as a marginal or ideological issue, and at times actively attacked, the mere recognition of these problems represents a notable change.
While many of these proposals would likely improve the lives of women in practical terms, the programme stops short of adopting a feminist or rights-based framework. Structural gender inequalities are rarely discussed explicitly, and domestic violence, for example, is generally approached as a broader family or social problem rather than as a gendered phenomenon rooted in unequal power relations. The programme also remains silent on the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, long regarded by women's rights organisations as a key instrument for combating violence against women.
Beyond the programme itself, the Government's commitment to this area is further signalled by the appointment of a dedicated State Secretary for Children's Rights and Child Protection – a position filled by a recognised legal expert from civil society. This appointment is noteworthy for two reasons: it suggests that child protection will receive more focused institutional attention than before, and it reflects a broader willingness to draw on civil society expertise in policymaking. Whether a similar institutional commitment will extend to women's issues more broadly, however, remains unclear. For example, more than a dozen feminist and women's rights organisations presented the government with a ten-point list of core demands to advance and protect women's rights, including a call for the establishment of a dedicated government institution with professional and political authority to coordinate gender equality policy. They also called for the meaningful involvement of women's rights organisations in decision-making on issues affecting women. How the government will respond to these initiatives remains to be seen.
What do these changes mean for women in Hungary?
The exclusion of women from political power is no longer taken for granted,
but whether this new political landscape will produce deeper transformations in gender equality will depend not only on the number of women in office, but on the institutions, policies, and political priorities which emerge in the years ahead.
Several important issues remain unresolved, including how women's issues will be institutionally managed within the new Government and what budget will be allocated to this area. It is still unclear whether the Government will pursue a gender mainstreaming approach – integrating gender equality considerations across all policy areas – or whether a dedicated ministry or secretariat will be established to deal with gender equality specifically, as women’s rights organisations demand. The choice is significant: if gender equality is mainstreamed across Government, it signals that all ministries are expected to take responsibility for it; if it is assigned to a single ministry, there is a risk that it becomes a marginalised, niche concern. It is also possible, however, that neither option will materialise – and that women's issues will simply not receive dedicated institutional attention at all. So far, no clear signals have emerged on this front, and the decision the Government makes – or fails to make – will likely have significant implications for how seriously and systematically women's issues are addressed in practice.
Much will also depend on whether and to what extent the Government chooses to consult with women's rights and feminist organisations in the months and years ahead – a question that applies equally to civil society more broadly.