Ferenc Gyurcsány was preparing to make a major announcement at the Democratic Coalition party’s (DK) presidium meeting on May 8, to which several other senior politicians from the party had also been invited.

As his announcement would fundamentally determine the future of the DK, it had been carefully prepared. Klára Dobrev, the wife of Gyurcsány and a Member of the European Parliament, who has increasingly become the face of the party in recent years, had shared with influential DK politicians a few days earlier that her husband would not only announce their divorce, but also his complete retirement from politics.

They even planned the schedule for the meeting. According to this, Gyurcsány himself would make the most important announcements, leaving the details to be explained by executive vice president Csaba Molnár.

In the end, they couldn’t stick to the schedule. In the sparsely furnished large conference room at the DK headquarters on Teréz körút in Budapest—where the only things on the white walls are a magnetic board and a large TV screen—Gyurcsány became emotional when faced with the two dozen participants. His voice faltered, and all he could say was, “Csaba Molnár will inform you,” after which he left the meeting room and exited the headquarters through the building’s glass elevator.

Molnár announced that Gyurcsány would resign from all his posts—party leadership, parliamentary group leadership, and parliamentary mandate. Many of the politicians sitting around the oval-shaped tables listened with emotion.

“It was dramatic, several people cried,”

said one source familiar with the details of the meeting.

However, the emotional mood did not last long, as the participants quickly started an argument over one of the positions. Molnár not only read from his prepared papers that Gyurcsány would resign from all his posts—party chairmanship, faction leadership, parliamentary mandate—but also made suggestions as to who should fill the vacant positions.

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Everyone accepted Molnár’s recommendation of Dobrev as party president and that Gyurcsány’s parliamentary seat would go to Sándor Rónai, a former MEP. However, not everyone agreed that party director László Sebián-Petrovszki should take over the leadership of the parliamentary faction. Several of those present favored Ágnes Vadai, who had more parliamentary experience. After a long debate, Sebián-Petrovszki was unanimously elected faction leader, after Dobrev also spoke out in his favor.

After the meeting, Dobrev announced their divorce and her husband’s resignation in a Facebook post that same day. Since neither this nor subsequent statements by DK leaders revealed any details, Direkt36 wanted to know what led Ferenc Gyurcsány, who had been a dominant figure in Hungarian public life for more than 20 years, to decide to retire completely.

Interviews with more than thirty sources familiar with the party’s internal affairs revealed that after the 2024 European Parliament and local elections ended in failure for DK, Gyurcsány’s strategy of tightening his grip on the party’s leadership did not succeed. Not only did DK’s support plummet even further, putting the party’s chances of winning seats in the 2026 parliamentary elections in jeopardy, but some DK mayors in Budapest’s districts also turned against him.

At the same time, by the fall of 2024, Gyurcsány’s marriage had also irretrievably broken down. Gyurcsány’s long-standing affair with one of the party’s staff members also played a role in this, which several leading DK politicians believed posed a political risk to the organization. The affair, which was no secret to the inner circle of the DK, also put Dobrev in a humiliating position.

With his personal and political problems mounting, Gyurcsány’s options were narrowing. Shortly before the May 8 presidium meeting, he therefore offered his resignation at a closed-door meeting of party leaders. By this time, his allies had dwindled so much that no one asked him to stay.

Ferenc Gyurcsány served as Prime Minister of Hungary between 2004 and 2009 as a member of the Socialist Party (MSZP). In 2006 he won the parliamentary election against Viktor Orbán. Later that year a speech he had delivered to party members in Balatonőszöd, in which he admitted that the government has been lying during the campaign, was leaked to the public. The so-called “Őszöd speech” triggered protests and riots across the country and severely damaged his credibility. After leaving the Socialist Party, he founded the Democratic Coalition in 2011, which he led until his resignation in May this year.

Although Gyurcsány has remained a prominent figure in Hungarian politics, the ruling Fidesz party has continuously used the memory of the leaked speech in its campaigns to discredit him and the Hungarian opposition in general. In 2024, with the rise of a new opposition force, the Tisza Party, the Democratic Coalition was forced to scale back its earlier ambitions.

In response to our inquiry, DK’s press office wrote that our questions contained “such a number of distortions, misrepresentations, and false statements that it was impossible to provide meaningful answers.” They added that “DK’s culture, mode of operation, and community differ in every respect from what your questions suggest.” Ferenc Gyurcsány did not respond to our interview request and did not answer our written questions, either.

Chapter I: THE END OF DREAMS

Ágnes Vadai was excitedly awaiting the European Parliament elections last June. The DK politician, who holds advanced language certificates in English and Spanish, had long wanted to continue her career as an MEP. She believed she had a chance, as she was placed third on the joint list of the DK-MSZP-Párbeszéd alliance.  She was so confident of winning a seat that she even looked for a property in Brussels before the election.

Vadai was not alone in her expectations. Although Péter Magyar’s party, which had burst onto the public scene not long before, was growing stronger by the month, even in the days before the election, the DK calculated that the third and fourth places on their list would also make it to Brussels. They were convinced that the Tisza Party would primarily draw voters away from smaller opposition parties, but not from them.

Therefore the election results on June 9 last year came as a shock not only to Vadai, but to the entire DK organization. The joint left-wing list trailed far behind Fidesz and Tisza, receiving only 8 percent of the vote, meaning that only two DK politicians, Klára Dobrev and Csaba Molnár won seats, while Vadai failed. This was a brutal result for a party that had won 16 percent of the vote in the 2019 European Parliament elections, running alone.

However, DK’s difficulties did not begin at this point; the party was already struggling with serious problems even before Péter Magyar appeared on the scene. By the summer and fall of 2023, they were faced with the collapse of their idea that they would rise from the ruins of the left to become the only serious opposition alternative.

Gyurcsány promised that by the fall of 2023, DK would have 1.5 million voters, meaning that the party’s support would reach 20 percent. In contrast, independent pollster Medián surveyed in 2023 that the party’s support among the entire population hovered around 7-9 percent. Moreover, the shadow government set up in the fall of 2022, which DK tried to sell as a political innovation, did not live up to expectations: news about it did not reach the voters’ threshold of interest.

“This caused some panic and confusion,”

said a DK politician in Budapest about the mood that had developed within the party by the fall of 2023.

The pardon scandal exploded into this lethargic atmosphere in February 2024. Like the other opposition parties, DK tried to take advantage of the fact that President Katalin Novák had pardoned a convicted person who covered up pedophile crimes in a child care facility in Bicske. This made the party more optimistic, and they eagerly watched the February 11 interview whith Péter Magyar on the Partizán Youtube channel, in which the ex-husband of former Minister of Justice Judit Varga, harshly criticized the Orbán government, from which he himself had long benefited.

“They thought that Péter Magyar would strengthen the opposition,” said a party insider source, referring to the DK leadership. Although Péter Magyar became increasingly active in the following weeks, the DK campaign team continued to believe that they should not deal with him publicly. According to the source, they believed that Magyar would not be able to build a community and that his party would be just one of the many new opposition organizations that pop up from time to time but are unable to gain significant support.

The DK’s attitude changed after Magyar’s event on March 15 last year. The turnout was so large that the DK realized that Magyar could pose a threat to them. From then on, according to a source with insight into the inner workings of the DK, they began to order polls that also measured Tisza’s support.

One of DK’s reactions to this new situation was to consider joining forces with the two opposition parties closest to them, the MSZP and Párbeszéd. The question of cooperation caused controversy within the party leadership, as it ran counter to their strategy in recent years, which was that DK would run independently in the EP elections to show that they were the strongest opposition force.

According to sources familiar with the DK’s inner workings, the party’s EP list leader, Klára Dobrev, was more open to forming a joint list with the two other left-wing parties than party president Ferenc Gyurcsány. Dobrev believed that the tense relationship between DK and MSZP, and between DK and Párbeszéd, could be mitigated through such cooperation. Gyurcsány, however, was reluctant to do so, and when the leading politicians of the three parties finally announced their alliance in front of a bush on March 28 last year, the former prime minister was not present.

In addition to the joint list, DK’s other reaction to the new situation was to launch an attack against Péter Magyar. For example, in mid-April last year, Csaba Molnár, the party’s campaign manager, compared Magyar to former mafia members who had left the Italian mafia and were cooperating with the authorities. According to one of the party’s politicians in the capital, since they feared that the Tisza Party could also draw away DK voters, it was a logical step on their part to attack the new opposition player.

“It was about not letting Péter Magyar, this black hole, suck us in,”

said the politician, referring to the widespread belief among opposition voters that only Tisza could defeat Fidesz.

However, in the following weeks, DK attacked Magyar with such vehemence that it not only provoked hostility among the party’s voters, but also divided the DK leadership. According to sources with insight into the party’s internal affairs, some members of the leadership, who generally took a more moderate stance in internal debates, considered the confrontation excessive. They felt that “DK had almost turned itself inside out” and that “Péter Magyar had become a greater enemy to DK than Fidesz.”

Nevertheless, there was no change of direction, as key DK leaders such as Gyurcsány and Molnár insisted on confrontation. In retrospect, however, it became clear that even this combative strategy could not stop the exodus of left-wing voters, and DK performed even worse than expected in the election.

Chapter II: GYURCSÁNY RETURNS

After June 9 last year, several leaders of left-wing opposition parties resigned due to the election defeat. Ferenc Gyurcsány, however, was not among them.

A few days after the election, at a meeting of the DK’s presidium, he did ask whether the leadership wanted him to resign as party president, but this was not a serious proposal on his part. According to sources with information about what was said at the meeting, the presidium did not expect him to resign, and it was clear from Gyurcsány’s statements that he did not want to leave either. In fact, in recent weeks, he told an opposition politician that he would not step down even if it jeopardized DK’s chances of entering parliament in 2026.

Gyurcsány’s determination was reinforced by the fact that, according to sources familiar with the inner workings of DK, he blamed EP list leader Dobrev and party campaign manager Csaba Molnár for the election results. He believed that DK should have gone after Péter Magyar sooner, because by the time it did, it was already too late.

Dobrev and Molnár disappeared from the public eye in the following months and were also pushed into the background in DK’s decision-making processes. Part of this was the dissolution of the shadow government led by Dobrev.

In sharp contrast to them, Gyurcsány, who was increasingly coming to the spotlight, wanted to prove that he could manage everything better on his own. While in recent years he had been dealing with more comprehensive, strategic issues, after the 2024 election he began to play an active role in the day-to-day operations of the DK.

For example, he took over from Csaba Molnár the leadership of the party’s morning meetings, which are considered crucial within the party. According to the division of roles within the DK, the presidium was responsible for setting long-term political goals. However, it was decided at the morning meetings what press conferences would be held, what statements would be issued, and what kind of political communication would be pursued. “The fuck wants to do it, but if I have to, I will” – according to one source from DK, Gyurcsány explained to his staff why he had taken over the leadership of these morning meetings with statements like this.

At the same time, Gyurcsány set about implementing his preferred, much more confrontational communication strategy. This meant that they had enough of the Fidesz’s years of attacks on Gyurcsány, wanted to counter government propaganda, and were prepared to fight every communication battle on a daily basis. Gyurcsány summed this up succinctly in an interview at the end of June last year, saying, “Let’s play it out.”

In practice, this meant that a group chat was created on the WhatsApp messaging app. Its members included members of parliament, members of the party leadership, and the party’s communications staff. The latter were tasked with monitoring social media, including Facebook, and sending posts and articles to the chat that politicians should comment on. In these comments, DK members fiercely attacked their political opponents and even the press independent of the government in order to protect their community.

According to one member of the WhatsApp group, their aim was to take on Péter Magyar, who usually comments on Facebook posts about him within minutes of their publication. Gyurcsány believed that Magyar performed well in the 2024 election because, unlike the DK members, he commented much more quickly and much more frequently.

After a while, the comment war caused an increasingly bad atmosphere within the DK. The professional staff resented the fact that Gyurcsány involved not only communication staff but also event organizers and speechwriters in the constant monitoring of social media.

Some politicians in the party felt that with the confrontations they went too far, including Gyurcsány’s attack on 444. This was preceded by the news portal mocking one of Gyurcsány’s interviews in an opinion piece. The DK president called the article “bloodthirsty” and wrote in a Facebook post that “the paper is our political opponent.” However, this provoked a backlash even within the DK.

“How can a party that supposedly stands for freedom of the press say such a thing?”

said one of DK’s leading politicians about the reactions Gyurcsány’s statement provoked within the party.

The bad mood was also exacerbated by the fact that after the 2024 elections, it became clear that in 2026, DK would not have a parliamentary faction of 15 members similar to the current one, if it even made it into the National Assembly at all. This has caused existential fear among DK representatives and party staff who fear for their positions.

Gyurcsány, playing on this, told the representatives who made it onto the list that instead of developing theoretical policy proposals, they should find issues they can champion. Those who perform better in this regard will move up the 2026 election list. This is when their politicians, like Ágnes Vadai and László Varju, members of the Hungarian parliament began to address the issue of water quality, while an other MP Gergely Arató took on the collapsing railway services. “They made videos and learned how to use selfie sticks,” said one leading DK politician about the representatives.

However, this was not without conflict either. According to a source familiar with the inner workings of DK, there were several instances where representatives argued with members of the communication team about why a statement about one politician was released before another. “The battle for visibility and publicity had begun,” said the source.

This situation was indicative of the growing tensions within the party.

Chapter III: GYURCSÁNY GETS TIRED OF TRYING

On March 26 this year, something happened that Ferenc Gyurcsány was not used to: DK politicians did not obey him.

This took place in the Budapest City Council, which was debating two controversial proposals by Krisztina Baranyi, mayor of Ferencváros, on that day. In response to government measures to ban the Pride parade, Baranyi proposed that rainbow flags be displayed at City Hall and that signs and symbols promoting Pride be placed on public transportation and at stops. (Baranyi submitted the second proposal jointly with Zsuzsanna Döme, deputy mayor of Ferencváros.)

Gyurcsány liked the proposals coming from the Two-Tailed Dog Party faction. The DK was looking for easily communicable, controversial issues that would allow them to present themselves to the public. The Pride issue was just such a topic.

Mayor Gergely Karácsony, however, opposed the proposals. He believed that they would not receive a majority in the extremely divided general assembly, and that such a failure would only harm the Hungarian LGBTQ community.

Surprisingly, three DK members of the general assembly—Sándor Szaniszló, mayor of the 18th district, Tibor Déri, deputy mayor of Újpest, and Dorottya Keszthelyi—sided with Karácsony, against Gyurcsány’s demands. The DK representatives were not deterred even by the fact that, according to a source familiar with the events, Csaba Molnár had strongly ordered them before the vote to support Baranyi’s proposals.

On the day the proposals were put on the agenda, Tibor Déri missed the vote, and Szaniszló, according to a DK source, took a day-off. Dorottya Keszthelyi voted in line with Gyurcsány’s demands, but a few days earlier she had expressed her disagreement in a Facebook post. The two proposals were ultimately rejected. (Keszthelyi told Direkt36 that she eventually voted yes because she knew the proposals would not pass anyway. Szaniszló and Déri did not respond to our request for comment.)

This conflict was the culmination of tensions that had been simmering between the DK party headquarters and its faction in the City Council since the municipal elections in June 2024. In the newly formed Capital City Council, the DK faction had developed a much closer relationship with Karácsony than Gyurcsány would have liked.

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The reason for this was that the faction members hoped to gain more political advantage from a good relationship with Karácsony than from the increasingly unpopular DK. Szaniszló, for example, believed that in order to be re-elected mayor in 2029, it was in his best interest to be on good terms with Karácsony. Keszthelyi’s husband is Tamás Handl, head of the Budapest Municipal Police Department, which also oversees public spaces. (Keszthelyi told Direkt36 that her work as a DK politician and her husband’s position never came into conflict.)

The attitude of the representatives was rational in light of DK’s poor popularity ratings. The party’s internal polls showed that by the end of 2024, they had even fewer voters than they did in the summer of 2024. For example, Medián’s polls showed that in July 2024, the party still had 6 percent support among the entire population, but by September 2024, that figure had fallen to just 3 percent.

Because of this, more and more members of DK began to believe that Gyurcsány’s “let’s play it out” strategy was not working. In addition to DK representatives in the capital, this included the party’s mayors, who also came into conflict with the party president after a while.

According to one DK politician in the capital, Gyurcsány “did not understand why the mayors were not advertising themselves more with the DK on Facebook.” The source was referring to the fact that while Gyurcsány expected city leaders to engage in daily conflicts for the sake of the party, the mayors felt that this would cause them to lose some of their voters, who had since become Tisza voters.

Several mayors indicated to Gyurcsány that in order to maximize votes, they would be forced to distance themselves from the DK. According to sources familiar with the party’s operations, some mayors even considered leaving the DK and founding a local association to run in the next election.

Gyurcsány tried to prevent the desertions. At one of this year’s meetings with DK deputy mayors, he asked local politicians to stick it out.

“Just hold out until 26,”

Gyurcsány said, referring to next year’s election, according to several participants. The party president asked those present who were considering not running under the party banner in the 2029 municipal elections to at least not announce their intention before the 2026 parliamentary elections.

Conflicts within the party and the failure of his strategy have eroded Gyurcsány’s power. According to DK insiders close to him, Gyurcsány had clearly lost his motivation by the beginning of this year and was becoming less and less interested in party work.

Previously, he was known for getting up very early, around 5 or 6 in the morning, calling several of his colleagues before 7 a.m., and generally insisting on face-to-face meetings. In stark contrast to this, since the beginning of the year, he has repeatedly canceled meetings scheduled for a given day, citing illness, not going to work and not responding to emails.

Since he had taken over the management of daily matters last summer, his absence became increasingly noticeable within the party. Several members of the party apparatus felt that Gyurcsány was no longer interested in getting his party into the National Assembly in 2026 and was no longer promoting the DK’s cause.

In recent weeks, Gyurcsány has reached such a low point that he has begun to doubt his political future. The party president told one influential DK politician with disappointment that “it is more than likely that I will only do this until next year’s elections.” This statement surprised the DK politician because Gyurcsány does not usually speak this way and had not previously set any deadlines for how long he wanted to remain in politics.

Gyurcsány’s problems were compounded by the fact that his marriage was in crisis too.

Chapter IV: THE DIVORCE

A few years after DK was founded in 2011, two of the party’s leading politicians, Csaba Molnár and László Sebián-Petrovszki, faced an unusual political problem. They learned that Gyurcsány was having an affair with one of the party’s employees.

Molnár and Sebián-Petrovszki believed that the relationship carried political risks. On the one hand, it could disrupt the dynamics within the organization if one of the employees was the boss’s lover. On the other hand, if the affair were to become public, it would not only be embarrassing for the newly formed party, but it would also destroy Gyurcsány’s image as a man happily married to his wife, Klára Dobrev, with whom he shared a close intellectual bond.

For this reason, Molnár and Sebián-Petrovszki wanted to fire the colleague who was having an affair with Gyurcsány, with whom they were also professionally dissatisfied. They communicated their decision to the party president, who initially did not object, but later changed his mind. As a result, the colleague was reinstated to his former position. (Neither Gyurcsány nor the colleague in question responded to our questions on this matter.)

Subsequently, the romantic relationship gradually became an open secret within the party. According to DK sources, Gyurcsány and his close colleague were often seen staying in the same room at rural events, and they would leave team-building sessions together. More and more DK politicians became aware of the relationship, which also put Dobrev in an awkward position, but they tried to ignore it.

“Our attitude was that this was a given, and we had to work with it,”

said one DK politician familiar with the events.

In addition to episodes such as this, political disagreements also poisoned the marriage between Gyurcsány and Dobrev. In 2009, Dobrev took over the management of Altus Zrt., a consulting firm owned by her husband, and remained busy with this in the following years. However, after Altus won an EU contract as part of a consortium in 2015, the Orbán government launched increasingly fierce attacks against Dobrev. During disputes with the government, Dobrev increasingly appeared as a political figure and eventually officially assumed this role: in 2019, she became the DK’s lead candidate for the European Parliament.

The DK performed surprisingly well in this election, with four of its candidates, including Dobrev herself, winning seats in the European Parliament. This success was largely due to Dobrev, who was able to appeal to a wider audience than Gyurcsány, who was adored by the DK’s core voters but widely rejected at the national level.

Although Gyurcsány and Dobrev worked well together for a while, they did not always agree on various political issues. Their differences came to surface during the 2021 opposition primaries. The dispute between the two was about how to deal with Dobrev’s challenger for the prime ministerial nomination, Péter Márki-Zay. According to one DK politician in the capital, Gyurcsány would have been “much tougher” on Márki-Zay, but Dobrev opposed this. According to the source, Gyurcsány later explained Dobrev’s defeat in part by saying that they had not been tough enough.

The operation of the shadow government set up in the fall of 2022 also led to conflict. As the leader of the shadow government, Dobrev wanted to come up with several policy proposals, for which he wanted to receive more resources from the party. According to sources familiar with the inner issues of DK, Gyurcsány was less than cooperative in this regard. “Even as prime minister, he didn’t like to bother with such things,” said one source, referring to Gyurcsány’s lack of interest in strictly policy issues.

Their marriage thus eroded for both political and personal reasons. According to an opposition politician close to the couple, after a while Gyurcsány no longer referred to Dobrev, who lived in Brussels almost permanently, as his wife, but as his political partner.

According to several sources familiar with them, their relationship had deteriorated so much by the fall of 2024 that the couple moved apart. According to an acquaintance, they later made an attempt to save their marriage, but it was unsuccessful, so in February of this year, they decided to divorce.

At the same time, their joint project, the DK, also fell into crisis. According to a high-ranking DK politician, in January of this year, Csaba Molnár reported to the DK leadership that, according to their internal measurements, there were 700,000 voters—in addition to their 250,000 to 300,000 committed voters—who did not reject the DK. Therefore, they set their sights on reaching out to them. Three months later, by April of this year, that number had fallen dramatically, leaving them with only 400,000 potentially reachable voters.

The polls ordered by the party also revealed that Gyurcsány’s appeal had waned. According to the surveys, Dobrev was now as popular as Gyurcsány, not only among potential voters but also among the party’s most committed supporters.

The party president personally experienced that he no longer inspired the enthusiasm he used to among the DK community. His tour of the country in a mobile home in March this year was considered a failure even within the DK. At the first stop of the tour, about a dozen people were waiting for him, and no significant crowd gathered later either. This was particularly unpleasant compared to Péter Magyar’s tour, which ran parallel to Gyurcsány’s and regularly drew large crowds. The caravan tour thus became memorable for the fact that in Grábóc, Tolna County, Gyurcsány lectured a man living in extreme poverty for not cleaning his house.

In this situation, the DK was concerned with what options remained for the party. At a meeting in the middle of spring, the core leadership—including Gyurcsány, Dobrev, Molnár, and Lajos Oláh, one of the party’s influential politicians due to his extensive connections—came to the conclusion that they had only one winning card left: Klára Dobrev. In other words, their only chance of winning seats in parliament in 2026 was to build everything around Dobrev.

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By this point, Gyurcsány’s options had narrowed. Not only had his previous strategy proved unsuccessful, but his marriage was also in ruins. According to sources with knowledge of what was said at the meeting, the conversation reached a point where Gyurcsány himself offered to resign.

According to one source, he argued that he could not imagine working with Dobrev when they were already on different paths, both politically and personally. According to those privy to the conversation, Gyurcsány also said that “you can’t retire halfway.” By this he meant that, in addition to his position as party president, he would also resign from his position as faction leader and his parliamentary mandate. Those present did not try to discourage the party president and agreed with his intention to resign.

For Gyurcsány, this was a “perfect storm,” according to one DK source.  And there was no escape: shortly after the closed-door meeting, at the executive committee meeting on May 8, it was officially announced that Gyurcsány would step down from all his posts and retire from public life after more than 20 years.

Cover picture: Somogyi Péter (szarvas) / Telex