BUDAPEST, Hungary — For years, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was the great “wizard” of European politics, a leader seen as having an almost infallible instinct for his people’s fears and desires and capable of steering the political tides.
He won four consecutive elections by a wide margin — more than any other current leader of the European Union — and declared the “bankruptcy” of liberal democracy long before President Vladimir Putin of Russia declared it overcome in 2019, or Donald Trump won the White House for the first time in 2016.
On Sunday, it became clear that Orbán had lost his magic.
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Péter Magyar, the opposition leader whose Tisza party won a landslide victory in Hungary’s general election, told a celebrating crowd that they had ushered in “regime change.”
“You performed a miracle,” he said. “Hungary wrote history.”
What actually happened, however, was that Orbán failed to rewrite a basic rule of politics — especially for populists: you have to be popular to win elections.
Sunday’s result did not represent an ideological earthquake or a sudden shift of Hungarians from right to left, but something much more personal. Voters overthrew a strong leader who, increasingly isolated in the sycophancy of allies and the praise of a broad propaganda machine, had lost his “tact.”
“The fall of the Orbán regime seems as sudden and cataclysmic as the collapse of communism in 1989,” said Imre Karacs, a veteran journalist who covered the overthrow of communist governments at the time.
“But both events seemed inevitable to anyone who dared to believe,” he added.
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Orbán’s spell was broken by Magyar, a conservative and former loyal ally of the prime minister who shares many of his positions on issues such as immigration. Magyar, however, offered a less aggressive and less divisive style, promising a “human” Hungary, at peace with itself and the European Union.
Tisza won 138 seats in Parliament — more than two-thirds of the total — and left Fidesz, Orbán’s party, reduced to an astonished group of just 55 seats. The victory was a slap in the face to Trump, Vice President JD Vance and figures on the European right such as Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, all enthusiastic supporters of Orbán and who even joined the Hungarian campaign on his behalf.
In the end, the pioneer of right-wing populism in Hungary was no longer popular. Something similar had already happened with Janez Janša, three times prime minister of Slovenia and ardent admirer of Orbán, who lost the parliamentary elections in 2022.
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Orbán and other right-wing populists who got caught up in the exercise of power ignored an old Russian saying that politics is always divided between “the television” — propaganda — and “the refrigerator” — people’s lived reality.
It was a message reinforced this Monday by Magyar, who declared: “For years, Viktor Orbán has not paid attention to the problems affecting Hungarians.”
“We never heard him talk about health, education or the cost of living,” he said. “He played a kind of five-dimensional chess. And that, among other things, was probably one of the reasons for his defeat.”
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Orbán bet all his chips on television, using a vast apparatus of Fidesz-aligned outlets to attack his opponents. Magyar was portrayed in different ways: as corrupt, as a puppet of Ukraine, as a sex maniac with a taste for teenagers and as a violent husband. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was demonized as an existential threat who would bring war to Hungary if Magyar won.
Following Orbán’s landslide victory in 2022, he promised a “golden age” for the Hungarian economy. But, distorted by corruption, the country fell into recession. Although the situation today is a little less serious, Hungary still has the weakest growth in the region. Unemployment is at the highest level in ten years.
“The distance between the television and the refrigerator becomes insurmountable,” said David Pressman, former US ambassador to Hungary during the Biden administration and a frequent target of Orbán’s propaganda machine.
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Even among supporters, there was already discomfort before the election with the fact that the prime minister paid so little attention to the economic difficulties of ordinary Hungarians, such as dilapidated schools and hospitals without toilet paper. In a debate held last week by the Danube Institute, one of several think tanks funded by the government and created to praise Orbán, the atmosphere of foreboding of defeat took over the room.
John Fund, magazine writer National Reviewcomplained that Orbán was “fighting the last war”, in reference to the 2022 campaign, when Fidesz won by exploiting fears that Hungary would be drawn into the war in Ukraine if he did not remain in power.
“That’s not what most people are going to think about when they vote. They’re going to vote on whether their lives are going to get better,” Fund said. “The average Hungarian is stuck in the same place.”
Orbán has blamed Ukraine and the European Union for the country’s economic problems, as has Vance, who visited Budapest last week in a last-minute attempt to boost the Hungarian leader’s campaign. “Brussels bureaucrats,” said Vance, alongside Orbán, “tried to destroy the Hungarian economy” to influence Sunday’s election “because they hate this guy.”
Most officials in Brussels and several European leaders really didn’t like Orbán, but the bigger problem became that many Hungarian voters also didn’t like him anymore — including former supporters, tired of the fearmongering about Ukraine, frustrated with the rampant corruption — considered the worst in the European Union, according to Transparency International — and with the prime minister’s insistence on saying that life was getting better and better.
For many voters, Magyar’s main asset was not his proposals for education, health or the European Union — topics he never detailed in so much detail — but the simple fact that he was not Orbán.
Orbán even experienced what some called a “Ceaușescu moment”, a reference to December 1989, when Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu realized, in disbelief, that the crowd gathered to applaud him was actually booing him. Press outlets sympathetic to the opposition published photos and videos of Orbán with an expression of shock — and then much irritation — when he began to be booed during a rally in the city of Győr, in the west of the country.
Orbán was never a dictator — he conceded defeat on Sunday with grace and dignity — but he undermined democratic norms.
Over the course of his 16 years in power, he reshaped Hungary in his image, weakening checks and balances by packing the judiciary and theoretically independent bodies with Fidesz loyalists, as well as taking control of most media outlets. In 2014, he gave this arrangement a name: “an illiberal State, a non-liberal State”.
It was a model that he tried to export, but, according to pre-election analysis by the Cato Institute, an American research center, “Far from being a model, Orbán’s Hungary is a warning about what happens when an unbridled Executive strongly concentrates power, practices crony capitalism and systematically dismantles the rule of law.”
Until 2024, Magyar was part of this system and, according to Karacs, the journalist, his positions “were not that far from those of Fidesz cadres — which is what he was until two years ago”.
The left and liberals, Karacs added, “swallowed their reservations in the name of one objective: removing Orbán from power.”
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