U.S. Vice President JD Vance and then-Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban during the Day of Friendship event at MTK Sportpark in Budapest on April 7.Pool/Getty Images
Robert C. Austin teaches history at the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.
What a difference a day makes.
If you came to Budapest prior to the elections on April 12, you would have found Hungarians worried about what would happen if Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party won a fifth consecutive election. In rural parts of the country and among less educated voters, where the party dominated, fear of the unknown was Fidesz’s currency. Years of relentless propaganda had provincialized many Hungarians. And despite polls showing that Peter Magyar’s Tisza party was likely to win, nobody was certain that Mr. Orban would not play dirty to stay in power.
In the end, his loss was too decisive. In Budapest, it feels like a nightmare is over.
Hungarians had grown accustomed to big and absurd lies. During the campaign, the pliant state media spread fake news suggesting Ukraine was engaged in sabotage in Hungary, among other things. There were whispers about a Russian-inspired fake assassination attempt on Mr. Orban to drum up support. He was the master of the manufactured crisis – almost always about insidious enemies seeking to destroy Hungary with their cosmopolitanism, rainbow parades and migrants.
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Despite being a proponent of Hungarian independence, Mr. Orban cozied up to Vladimir Putin for reasons that were inexplicable beyond the country’s energy needs, to Xi Jinping for investment and out of a belief that the Chinese model was the future, and to Donald Trump because of his love of the President. Having to coax U.S. Vice-President JD Vance to visit twice during the campaign only made Mr. Orban look weak, servile and hypocritical, given that he was railing against foreign interference. When Mr. Vance called Mr. Trump on stage at a rally and said that he thought Hungarians loved the President “even more than they love Viktor Orban,” it was clear that the jig was up.
Leaked recordings of Peter Szijjarto, Mr. Orban’s long-time foreign minister, co-ordinating with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov were simply embarrassing, even to the most brainwashed. Touting an anti-globalist agenda and a vision of a Hungary that was for “true” Hungarians, it is particularly humiliating that he turned to foreign autocrats to save him instead of addressing an economy in decline.
Fidesz’s demon of choice for this election was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who Mr. Orban claimed would drag Hungary into a war. AI-generated campaign ads told of children weeping as their Hungarian fathers died on an imaginary battlefield in Ukraine. But even as he built up the idea of Hungary as a fortress, Mr. Orban never quite explained how that war-torn and weak country was going to be able to determine events so easily. People were unconvinced that Ukraine was more dangerous than Russia.
That was likely Fidesz’s biggest mistake: they assumed their campaign to make everyone ignorant had worked.
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Mr. Orban was a product of his era. He came of age in the shabby times of late-goulash communism in the 1980s, when Hungary was cynical, broke and broken. Crucially, this was a time where everyone faked everything, and forgetting was a tool of survival.
He later watched Hungary’s post-communist rulers plunder the country while it sunk into debt, despair and demographic decline. In power, he weaponized the past and harnessed nationalism (as well as fear) to mobilize Hungarians.
But in his permanent war against the “liberals” – merely communists in disguise, to him – he created a new elite, parceling out assets to loyal business people and family members, transforming the constitutional order, and engineering a takeover of the universities, media and courts. A relatively insignificant Central European country started to matter, at least as a bastion for the anti-liberal revolution, because of him.
So, what now? Mr. Magyar, who is nearly 20 years younger than Mr. Orban, snatched the youth vote from Fidesz; based on his age, the new Prime Minister is technically Hungary’s first truly post-communist leader. This means that in some ways, the election was actually a revolution with a whiff of 1989.
There are points of continuity between Mr. Magyar’s and Mr. Orban’s conservative views, and Mr. Magyar was once a Fidesz insider. But overemphasizing these facts misses the point. This goes beyond the narrative of liberals defeating the intolerant and nostalgic far-right – it’s a bigger story that doesn’t fit into easy ideological paradigms – and it still represents major change for Hungary.
Mr. Orban is down, but he’s not out. So Mr. Magyar has to dismantle his system entirely. His background suggests that he gets what the rule of law means – and if that’s true, this may be the break with the past so many Hungarians had been waiting for.