“HUNGARY needs to overcome its economic and financial crisis so that we can consolidate all the changes of the last years,” says Janos Martonyi, Hungary’s foreign minister. He does not sound like a man whose government is about to lose power. In his view Viktor Orban, the prime minister, needs more time to complete reforms that include a new constitution and unorthodox economic policies.

On January 18th Janos Ader, the president, announced that the next election will be held on April 6th. Mr Orban may well get another four years to fulfil his mission of expunging the communist past and shaping the country according to the nationalist credo of Fidesz, his right-wing party. Fidesz’s popularity has recovered recently, partly thanks to utility-price cuts and other populist policies. Opposition parties are weak and have spent too much time bickering with each other in recent months. And Mr Orban has tinkered with the system to his advantage. “Using its supermajority, Fidesz has gerrymandered a number of electoral districts and rewritten the election laws in a way that favours big, unified parties rather than the fractured opposition,” says Tsveta Petrova at Eurasia Group, a research firm.

The leaders of the alliance of the Socialist Party (MSZP) and Together 2014 (E14), a centrist party, have just added two other parties to their club, the Democratic Coalition (DK), a small centre-left party, and the Liberal Party led by Gabor Fodor. The four-party coalition would prefer the general election to be on the same day as European elections in late May, because that would save money and lengthen the campaign. “But they had months to form their alliance,” retorts Mr Martonyi, who thinks it would be confusing to have national and European elections on the same day.

So the united left has just ten weeks to get its message across. That is tough, they say, because Fidesz controls the state media and gets help from oligarchs with deep pockets. According to Viktor Szigetvari of E14, the alliance will focus on economic policy (advocating pro-growth policies and abolition of the flat tax), state capture (fighting organised corruption) and the constitution (restoring checks and balances done away with by Mr Orban).