Hungary steps out of Orbán’s shadow

Geopolitics did not rescue Viktor Orbán. The man who has spent the last sixteen years crafting an image of himself as a statesman with global influence has not managed to escape the banal fate of a government in a representative democracy: that of being punished by his own voters for his poor domestic record. His opponent Péter Magyar and his winning party Tisza will be able to form a constitutional majority with 136 deputies (52.4% of the vote), the largest ever seen in the parliament. This two-thirds majority should provide enough room for manoeuvre for his promised restoration of the rule of law to the country that introduced the concept of ‘democratic backsliding’ in the European Union.

This crushing defeat comes for Orbán after he desperately tried to frame these parliamentary elections as a major geopolitical issue. Domestically, he focused his entire campaign on the alleged threat posed by Ukraine and its main ally, Brussels. For months, Fidesz-sponsored state propaganda hammered home the same message: Péter Magyar and his people are all puppets of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, whose sole goal is to install a ‘pro-war’ government in Budapest to drag Hungarians into the war. Even a setup by the Hungarian secret service targeting two IT specialists from the Tisza party – intended to prove they were Ukrainian spies – failed, exposing both Orbán’s extremism and his inability to change the course of the campaign.

Internationally, he has done everything in his power to rally his supporters, starting with US President Donald Trump. Trump’s long-awaited visit to Budapest, however, never materialized and Fidesz had to settle instead for Vice President JD Vance. Neither Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó’s sixteen trips to Moscow since the beginning of the war, nor the alleged presence of Russian operatives in Budapest during the campaign, helped the EU’s longest serving prime minister remain in power.

To all that bluster, EU capitals responded with an audacious silence that spoke louder than words. In Brussels especially, everyone has been wary of explicitly expressing their hopes of Orbán’s defeat – except for Polish PM Donald Tusk – for fear of their words being instrumentalized by Fidesz’s gigantic propaganda machine. Concern that Viktor Orbán might reject the election results, just as Donald Trump did in 2020, was also on everyone’s minds. In the end, the incumbent prime minister conceded defeat before half the ballots had been counted and even called his opponent to congratulate him. After a quick speech in which he acknowledged a ‘clear’ result, he left the scene, setting the stage for a night of celebration in the capital that marked the end of an era.

The Fall of the Regime

How could a regime that seemed untouchable just two years ago have collapsed so spectacularly? The stability of Viktor Orbán’s regime has always been based on four pillars that toppled one after the other.

Economic performance together with the benefits of EU membership were the first part of the edifice to crash down. Between 2010 and 2022, the average annual growth rate was about 2.8%. Since 2022, the economy has flatlined – another consequence of the German economic downturn. On top of economic stagnation came inflation, which peaked at 25.7% in early 2023, the highest in the EU, with food inflation rising above 40%. Since the April 2022 elections, consumer prices have risen by 36%, or double the EU average. The impact of the pandemic should not be forgotten, as Hungary ranks fourth worldwide for the number of deaths per million people.

It is precisely in such cases that the EU can act as a powerful insurance mechanism, most especially for its small member states. But after a decade of openly anti-Brussels policies and discourse, Viktor Orbán had sidelined his own country in Brussels. Suspended by the ‘rule of law’ mechanism since 2019, more than €17 billion of EU subsidies were never paid out. Expulsion from the European People’s Party (EPP) in 2021 further aggravated Orbán’s isolation, losing him his privileged connection with German conservatives.

However, economic contraction is rarely sufficient to precipitate the end of an illiberal regime. In 2022, Fidesz won its largest victory ever, crushing the opposition, which had united in the election for the first time in twelve years. Fidesz was so triumphant that it was as though its popularity had become positively correlated to the inflation rate: as prices went through the roof, so did Fidesz’s popularity. The second most popular party then became Mi Hazánk Mozgalom, the Our Homeland Movement, a proto-fascist party that took everyone by surprise when it entered parliament in 2022.¹

Everything was going well, until Fidesz in an unexpected act of self-harm obliterated the second pillar of its own rule: its uncontested moral supremacy. In early January 2024, independent journalists revealed that the president, Katalin Novák, had granted a presidential pardon to the accomplice of a convicted child molester. This turned into a grim Epstein-esque fiasco, except that the pressure even among his own ranks was so great that Orbán forced his president to resign, along with the former justice minister who countersigned the document at the time, Judit Varga.

Economically damaged, politically isolated and morally bankrupt, the regime was weakened, but stayed standing on its remaining pillar: the lack of a credible opposition. ‘Our only good fortune is that we have the opposition we have,’ declared a far-sighted Orbán in 2022. Indeed, during the presidential pardon scandal, none of the opposition parties managed to distinguish themselves. None, that is, until a certain Péter Magyar arrived.

The Rise of Péter Magyar

For most of his life, Péter Magyar was simply the husband of former justice minister Judit Varga. In the days following Varga’s withdrawal from politics, her now ex-husband, who was then unknown to the public, stepped into the political limelight through an interview with the most popular independent YouTube channel. Having become a media sensation overnight, this former staunch Fidesz loyalist from Budapest, a lawyer by training and a former diplomat, embarked on a tour across the country, traveling through rural areas that were said to be eternal, impregnable Fidesz strongholds.

And yet, crowds came out to listen to this rebel in a white shirt and his violent diatribe against the regime. Magyar not only condemns the corruption and moral bankruptcy of the regime’s leaders – deploying a typical populist style – but also repeatedly highlights the regime’s failure to improve citizens’ standards of living. He exerted so much pressure that for the first time, Fidesz’s propaganda machine began to falter in the face of this new opponent, forcing Viktor Orbán to behave like a genuine incumbent and take responsibility for his record in office.

In many respects, Magyar’s message was nothing new. The great novelty was the man himself. Magyar does not come from the traditional opposition, which he never failed from day one to vehemently attack and condemn. He is a former Fidesz insider, who still talks a lot like one. On immigration, he promised to enforce a ‘real’ zero immigration policy, attacking the government for bringing in foreign workers. On the economy and on cultural matters such as the family, he proudly claims to be a conservative, or even a ‘puritan’. Fidesz had been used to dismissing past opponents as coming from the morally corrupt left and for being backed by international financiers such as George Soros. Péter Magyar was from their own stable and so this tactic was not an option.

Hungary’s New Place in the EU

Ultimately, reflecting his obsession with portraying Magyar as an agent of Kyiv, Viktor Orbán’s downfall came about because of the single conundrum of his political career: his pro-Russian stance. Despite being an ideologue, Orbán has always been pragmatic, and it was never particularly difficult to infer the motivations behind his policies. His Russian obsession has always been different. The anti-Ukrainian discourse that Orbán’s government progressively adopted, until it became a campaign slogan – ‘we won’t be a Ukrainian colony’ – can hardly be understood without taking into account the time and effort Viktor Orbán invested in his personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. As many suspected early on in the campaign, this approach proved to be a drastic failure. Viktor Orbán was trapped by his own geopolitics.

A very practical implication of this is that Péter Magyar’s government will have few incentives to play the anti-Ukrainian card again. Domestically, it is not an issue with enough salience among voters for him to capitalize on. Internationally, it would put him at odds with all the EU partners with whom he is committed to patching things up. If Magyar joins the European mainstream, it is not only because of his ideals, but also simply a matter of material interests. Antagonizing ‘Brussels’ – or at least pretending to do so – might indeed please Fidesz’s core constituency, but an overwhelming majority of Hungarians are pro-EU. A Hungarian government member of the majority in the European Parliament who benefits from the full economic force of the Union’s redistributive power has much more to gain than an isolated and disenfranchised one.

‘They’re not going to send me out to get a coffee,’ warned Magyar, in reference to Orbán being politely kicked out of the European Council’s reunion so that the aid to Ukraine could be voted on. On the €90 billion loan to Kyiv, Magyar has said numerous times that since Hungary is not liable for this scheme, he sees no reasons to veto it. On Ukraine’s membership, while he opposes accelerated accession, he says that he has nothing against any country joining the EU, as long as they comply with the accession criteria. This amounts to a mainstream position in Brussels right now, from a government that promised to carry out sweeping judicial reforms to unlock €18 billion in frozen EU funds, to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office and to increase defence expenditure to 5% of GDP by 2035.

Nevertheless, tensions with Brussels could emerge around Hungary’s dependence on Russian oil. Tisza has only pledged to abandon Russian crude oil by 2035, eight years later than the EU goal. A compromise might be struck if a Tisza government actually implements measures aimed at ending this dependency, something Orbán carefully abstained from ever doing in four years of war, leaving Hungary more than 90% dependent on Russian oil in 2025. Another question mark concerns the future of the country’s only nuclear power plant in Paks, whose renovation was entrusted to the Russian company Rosatom. The future of the power plant is simply absent from Tisza’s official program, but here again, Hungary is far from being the only EU member state reluctant to sanction the Russian nuclear sector.

Importantly, the extraordinary attention these elections have received stems less from Hungary’s actual significance as a geopolitical player than from the infamy Viktor Orbán has acquired over the years as a beacon to the far right. But Orbán’s fame does not quite match his actual power. His influence peaked in 2019, when the Hungarian PM had a say in the nomination of the EC President, vetoing Manfred Weber’s candidacy. Since then, it has been a story of his isolation. His defeat will be mourned by MAGA in the US, but they will get over it quickly. In Moscow, the blow is more painfully felt, especially in the light of the recent radicalization of Fidesz on this question. This should not, however, obscure the fact that under Orbán, Hungary has been a loyal NATO member, and has voted for every sanction package against Russia.

Regime Change in Hungary

These elections represent, above all, a historic turning point in Hungary’s history. But for Péter Magyar, there will be many obstacles, starting with his own party. As he freely admits, ‘leading the Tisza parliamentary group will be a very difficult task, one of the most difficult ones, because there will be so many interests’. Indeed, Magyar knows very well that he owes his victory to thousands of left-wing voters who agreed to support him in exchange for his promise to oust Fidesz and reestablish the institutions of a well-functioning liberal democracy. Whether he fulfils this promise or not, he also knows that they will sooner or later seek to support left-wing parties again, who for the first time are absent from the new parliament.

How the left might reemerge is still an open question. Its main representative in these elections, the Democratic Coalition (DK), has never been weaker, especially since its historical leader and former Hungarian prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, withdrew from politics a year ago – another symbol of the change of era. The Green mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony, has proven to be a remarkably resistant politician who is now in an ideal position to restructure and take up the leadership of the left in the future.

The other obstacle will of course be the remains of Fidesz and its 2.2 million voters. While incredibly weakened with only 57 deputies (39% of the vote), they have loyalists in every key institutional position in the country, from the judges in the Supreme Court to the President of the Republic Tamás Sulyok. Their loyalty is nevertheless uncertain, just like Viktor Orbán’s political future. At 62 years old, the comparison with his younger opponent did not help, and his final meetings felt like a farewell tour. Péter Magyar emphasized that it will be up to an independent judiciary to assess whether the former prime minister, who is suspected of having personally benefited from corruption schemes according to numerous investigations, should be prosecuted or not. Whether it is Orbán who stays on as leader or his seemingly designated heir János Lázár who takes up the mantle, it will be hard for Fidesz to escape its newly acquired image – that of a relic from another era.

From the EU’s perspective, with Viktor Orbán and Fidesz defeated in elections that were assessed as unfair and unequal, the election demonstrated that democratic backsliding by a member state is reversible. Hungary has found a government whose main promise is to normalize the country – an ‘efficient and human Hungary’ per the party’s motto. For that, Péter Magyar has every interest in steering the country away from the big geopolitical games into which Orbán had dragged it by following his own personal ambitions rather than the country’s genuine national interests. In other words, Péter Magyar should, and probably will, make Hungary small again.