The “Putinization of global politics” lost a trump card after a “very stupid move” by Trump

It wasn’t just Hungary’s strongman who was defeated in the legislature. The North American president was investing a lot and for a long time in the re-election of the biggest “illiberal” ally on this side of the Atlantic and his colossal defeat does not bode well for the USA. Still, analysts say, it is too early to call the beginning of the end of MAGA and its similar movements within the EU

It was not just Viktor Orbán who was defeated in the April 12 legislative elections in Hungary. After 16 consecutive years in power, the prime minister waited less than an hour after the polls closed to accept defeat at the hands of his . And in a sign that this defeat extends beyond borders, Donald Trump, the US president who had Orbán as one of his greatest assets on this side of the Atlantic, remained silent.

In another context, it would be unlikely that a US president would pay so much attention to the elections of a country with less than 10 million citizens in the heart of Europe. But this was not just any election – not for Orbán nor for Trump. After, in 2016, the Hungarian prime minister was the first European Union (EU) head of government to support the businessman’s candidacy for the White House, the relationship between them has strengthened over the last decade – culminating in Trump sending his vice president, JD Vance, to Budapest to formally support Orbán’s re-election.

While Trump promised to “kill an entire civilization” in Iran, and before Vance went to Islamabad to try to end the war that the American president started at the end of February, the number two in the administration arrived in Budapest to, alongside Orbán, demand in a farcical way the elections (read, from the EU), practicing exactly this type of interference.

Days later, 48 hours before the elections, Trump claimed “all the economic power of the United States” if the Fidesz leader was re-elected. Already on election night – with the partial count of votes pointing to a supermajority for the Tisza de Magyar party – and when asked about the defeat of his Hungarian ally, Trump turned his back to journalists without a word on the matter.

As the magazine states, “Trump has abdicated US global leadership, except in the aspect that manifests itself by force of arms – but he still considers himself the head of an international far-right bloc and has enjoyed the expanded vision of his own power reflected in the mirror that Orbán held up to him, using the last decade and a half to transform Hungary into a “testing ground for practices that Trump is now implementing in the United States, including the expansion of executive power and the attack on universities and other elements of civil society”.

In a way, Trump’s international efforts were also undermined by this defeat. “Orbán’s fall is certainly a major setback for imperial projects [dos EUA] in Europe”, argues Nathalie Tucci, director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Italy and researcher at Johns Hopkins SAIS Europe. But “although this is certainly a defeat in an important battle, this does not mean that this is the end of the war”.

Since 2010, Orbán has cultivated a network of think tanks and other government-backed institutions that, as The Atlantic notes in the same article, “both court prominent figures from the MAGA movement and cultivate new ones” — putting “a Vance ally, and a champion of so-called post-liberalism, on his Budapest payroll,” while the second Trump administration “brought young aides with experience at pro-government institutes based in Budapest to Washington.”

This explains why several analysts are seeing the Hungarian leader’s defeat as a major defeat for Trump and his political aspirations, at home and abroad. “With Orbán out of power, the financial channels that served to help him will diminish and this will impact his influence”, highlights Zsuzsanna Vegh, a Hungarian analyst at the European Council on Foreign Affairs (ECFR) and the German Marshall Fund for the United States.

This structure, says Vegh, “has also been important for the Make America Great Again movement as a partner and as a sounding board” for European illiberal movements, in Hungary and in several other countries – and “by weakening, this is in a way a loss for MAGA too”.

(Poorly) calculated risks

A few days before the elections, Zsuzsanna Vegh said that Vance’s visit to Budapest should not swing the pendulum in favor of or against Orbán and Fidesz – “for people who have already made up their minds”, the analyst told CNN Portugal, “JD Vance’s visit does not influence anything and, in any case, people see this issue of external support through their partisan lenses”.

More than a week after the elections, however, there are those who view the Trump administration’s support for Orbán’s party as “probably counterproductive”, , professor of political science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), something that “certainly did not help Fidesz” in an election whose result “shows that far-right leaders must be careful with too close ties with figures like Trump”.

It is the same idea that the Belgian Minister of Defense and Trade had already shared on social media the day before the Hungarian elections. “I think Vance’s endorsement was a very stupid campaign move [que] It doesn’t help anyone in Hungary.” “I’m a right-wing politician and I think the far right is acting very foolishly. MAGA supporters should really stop campaigning on an international level, because everything and everyone they support ends up losing elections. Lead instead of gold. The best propaganda for the left. It’s crazy.”

In the Hungarian elections, it was not the left that gained most from Orbán’s defeat – after all, Péter Magyar, the next prime minister, was a bit more pro-European than his rival. But the left was not the big loser either. With the end of the Orbán reign, the broader movements that represent the “Putinization of global politics” lost their biggest standard-bearer within the EU – from MAGA in the USA to the AfD in Germany, including the cases of Poland and Italy.

In Poland, the influence of the movement that was behind Trump’s re-election was evident a year ago, when a majority of voters gave victory to conservative nationalist Karol Nawrocki in the presidential election, days after Trump sent his Secretary of National Security to Krakow to support him. And in the Italian case, the current prime minister already shows a certain tiredness with the political risks of publicly accepting the support of Trump and MAGA.

As Nathalie Tocci explains, Giorgia Meloni’s recent defeat in the bid to limit the powers of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the courts “is explained, in part, by Trump’s unpopularity and her association with him – which justifies her condemnation of Trump’s attacks on the Pope.”

Success = success, defeat = defeat?

The US president is openly on the side of the losers, a position that he does not like and that will not be forgotten due to his silence, especially given the amount of chips he had bet on Viktor Orbán’s re-election.

Months before sending Vance to Budapest, Trump was already investing a lot of political capital in the Hungarian elections, treating them as an internal political dispute, with all the implications that entails. “We love Viktor,” Trump said last year, before European counterparts at a Middle East peace summit. “You’re fantastic”, he added, addressing the Hungarian leader. “I know a lot of people don’t agree with me, but I’m the only one who matters.”

As the elections approached, Trump’s support for Orbán came to mix with campaigns for the re-election of Republican legislators supported by the president, who in Truth Social praised Orbán as the protector of “LAW AND ORDER”. His eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., even spoke directly to Hungarians – “we hope they will vote for my father’s friend and ally, a leader in Europe [que] There’s a direct line to the White House, I hope they support Viktor Orbán!” But the riskiest statement of all came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who on a visit to Budapest in February declared bluntly: “Your success is our success.”

However, given that the symbolic weight of this defeat for Trump is immense, this does not mean that the end of illiberalism in Hungary is the beginning of the end for its similar movements, even if, within the USA, there are those in an intercalary year, at a time when Trump’s popularity is rising. “Orbán’s fall can be interpreted as the beginning of a trend, but unfortunately trends can change in one direction or another”, highlights Nathalie Tocci. Days after the interview, last Sunday, Bulgaria, another EU member state, .

In the aftermath of Magyar’s victory in Hungary, , a Dutch political scientist who has studied the far right for several years, conceded that the results disprove the fatalistic discourse that “blatantly exaggerates” the weakness of democracy in the face of proto-autocrats – and highlighted the fact that, for now, there are no far right leaders within Europe with the weight and relevance of Orbán.

Still, Mudde left a warning against hasty conclusions that the defeat of Hungary’s strongman could be a harbinger of similar defeats for the populist and Eurosceptic far right in other countries, for example, in the French presidential elections a year from now. And anyone who thinks that the sphere of influence of Trump and his MAGA movement in Europe has finally been dethroned is mistaken.

“So, I don’t expect a total disappearance, the question will be who will survive, who won’t and how financing will change,” says Hungarian analyst Zsuzsanna Vegh, invoking the network of institutes created by Orbán. “It will be an interesting test to see if the US wants to put it into practice – and if it can continue to finance far-right and sovereigntist forces in Europe.”