Illiberalism is not Inevitable

Orbán lost, and his American admirers can lose too

I admit: I doubted the Hungarian polls. For several weeks before the election they consistently showed Tisza, the opposition party, well ahead. Still, I worried about “shy” regime supporters, about biased pollsters and about the impact of the surreal anti-Ukrainian campaign that Viktor Orbán and his propagandists have been running for weeks. Surely they were talking about Ukraine because their own polls told them to do so. Surely the sinister posters of Zelensky in Budapest had some traction.

But my doubts were unjustified. Tisza won in a landslide, and will have more than two-thirds of the seats in the Hungarian parliament. That will give the new prime minister, Péter Magyar, the ability to change the constitution and reverse some of the damage done by sixteen years of a regime that Orbán himself described as illiberal. The city of Budapest burst into a spontaneous street party. A friend of mine was there and made a video (and yes, that’s the probable future health minister dancing onstage):

To the surprise of many, including, perhaps, his own supporters, Orbán conceded immediately. Some on his team had made ominous warning of supposed “violence” and “foreign interference,” and they seemed to be preparing to challenge the result. But in the end, the result was too decisive to challenge. If Orbán still wants a political future, he may now calculate that the best road to victory is to wait, use his influence inside the many institutions his party still controls, and seek to undermine the new government from within.

Before that happens, there are happier themes to explore. Most importantly: how did Tisza do it? I offered an early explanation in the Atlantic. In the end, I wrote, the defeat of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, against enormous odds, required not just an ordinary election campaign or new messaging but rather the construction of a broad, diverse, and patriotic grassroots social movement:

Magyar had very little access to Hungarian media, the overwhelming majority of which is owned either by the state or by Fidesz oligarchs. He and his party had limited access even to billboard space, both because they had less money than the ruling party and because many advertising spaces are controlled by the government. Tisza leaders and supporters faced personal obstacles as well. A year ago, I met a Tisza politician who told me that his wife had lost her job and his friends began to stay away after he announced his support for Magyar. Tisza’s database was at one point hacked and posted online, apparently to encourage harassment of party members. Even three weeks ago, many Tisza leaders in Budapest would speak only off the record.

Magyar and his team fought back on the ground. Knowing he could not win if he stuck to Budapest and other large cities, Magyar has been traveling the country since 2024, visiting small towns and villages, many more than once. In the last few days of the campaign, he was holding five or six election meetings every day. He avoided the themes that Orbán chose to promote—global politics, the war in Ukraine, the conspiracy that Ukraine was somehow colluding against or might even invade Hungary—and focused his campaign speeches and social media on the economy, health care, and schools. As a former member of Fidesz himself, he was able to speak with extra conviction about Fidesz’s corruption. He portrayed himself as a part of the European, democratic, law-abiding center-right. He waved a lot of Hungarian flags, as did his supporters.

Tisza was also helped by a small and genuinely brave group of Hungarian journalists, who kept on exposing the corruption of the regime and its foreign contacts even under immense pressure:

In the past few weeks, the investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi, along with his colleagues at the website Direkt26, one of the few independent outlets in the country, patiently debunked Orbán’s anti-Ukrainian propaganda, producing leaked transcripts and audio that revealed Orbán and his foreign minister colluding with Putin and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. These tapes exposed what Panyi described to me as the “big lie that Orbán was a sovereigntist prime minister.” Indeed: Orbán boasted and talked a big game about Hungarian traditions and Hungarian nationalism, but when he spoke on the phone with the Russian leader, he described himself as a mouse and Putin as a lion. For years Orbán has claimed to be fighting shadowy foreign forces—George Soros, the European Union, migrants—but in fact he was himself dependent on foreigners all along.

Those stories resonated, especially with younger Hungarians. At a rock concert in Heroes’ Square in central Budapest on Friday, tens of thousands of them started chanting “Russians, go home”—the same chant that their grandparents used when Soviet soldiers invaded their country in 1956.

The election has enormous significance for Europe, and for Ukraine. Magyar has already said that Hungary will no longer act as a Russian puppet, blocking EU aid to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia. In his victory speech, he called for the resignation of the president, the prosecutor general, the president of the constitutional court, and other institutions. He said he would rejoin the European legal system. In response, Hungarians at his rally chanted, “Europe, Europe, Europe.”

But the election also has an echo inside the United States, as well as in the broader, international illiberal movement. As I also wrote, Orbán used his control of the state to build an extraordinary web of international illiberal and far-right supporters, and funding mechanisms to support some of them. In the last weeks of the campaign, these friends and beneficiaries rallied round. Orbán received visits or verbal support from Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Benjamin Netanyahu, Marine Le Pen (the leader of the French far right), Alice Weidel (the leader of the German far right), and other illiberal leaders from Argentina, Poland, Slovakia, Brazil, and more.

Now his defeat matters to all of them too:

Orbán’s loss brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement, as well as the belief—also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric—that illiberal parties are somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the “real” people. As it turns out, history doesn’t work like that. “Real” people grow tired of their rulers. Old ideas become stale. Younger people question orthodoxy. Illiberalism leads to corruption. And if Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.

There is surely more to come. Perhaps we will now learn how much Hungarian taxpayers’ money the Orbán government spent paying foreign acolytes, think-tankers and journalists, from the Danube Institute to the Heritage Foundation. Maybe we will find out how much Russian money made it into the pockets of Fidesz backers. Someday we might also come to understand what really motivated JD Vance to spend two full days in Budapest, right before the vote, in the middle of another American war. What did he expect to gain from doing so? How does he feel, knowing that he might actually have contributed to Magyar’s victory?

I’ll do a special edition of the Kleptocracy Tracker soon, focused on Hungarian themes. In the meantime, a final thought (though I was at Dulles, not Dallas):