BUDAPEST: Hungary's strongman Prime Minister Viktor Orban needs to strike a less confrontational stance after his ruling party Fidesz lost its parliamentary super-majority in a key by-election, analysts said.
"There is a need for a correction. Fidesz might decide to be less confrontational, but it is difficult since it is in the character of the party to fight, a strategy that has worked for a long time," Akos Balogh of Mandiner.hu, a conservative blog told AFP.
Since coming to power in 2010, the Orban-led government has had numerous run-ins with the European Union, banks, multinational companies and civil society groups over controversial laws.
His government also has an increasingly cosy relationship with Moscow, sending jitters through Washington and Warsaw.
Orban hosted Vladimir Putin last week, despite the Russian president being shunned in most European capitals over the Ukraine conflict.
In a by-election Sunday in the town of Veszprem, southwest of Budapest, independent candidate Zoltan Kesz won 43 percent of the vote with support from opposition parties while Fidesz candidate Lajos Nemedi garnered just 33 percent.
Fidesz and their coalition partners, the Christian Democrats now have 131 of the 199 seats in parliament.
After three election wins in 2014, Orban looked invincible just a few months ago. But support for Fidesz tumbled last October in the wake of mass protests over a proposed Internet tax that was later dropped.
Numbers also suggest that Fidesz voters in Veszprem did not turn out to vote in large numbers.
With the defeat went Orban's two-thirds supermajority, which had enabled his government to make sweeping constitutional changes that critics say eroded democratic principles and curbed basic freedoms.
"The result has a huge symbolic significance, although Fidesz retains full control," Kornelia Magyar of the Hungarian Progressive Institute told AFP.
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