The Global Stakes of Hungary’s Pivotal Election

To be present in Hungary on the eve of its upcoming elections is to feel the tremors of a regime confronting the prospect of collapse. For the first time in nearly a generation, Viktor Orbán, who has governed the country continuously since 2src1src, appears genuinely vincible. The formidable apparatus that he constructed to fortify his reign—comprising servile media, an acquiescent judiciary, supportive think tanks, and other obedient institutions—suddenly looks precarious. To a visitor from Narendra Modi’s “New India,” Hungary announces itself as a mecca of twenty-first-century strongman rule. Donald Trump, too, is scaling up a model whose original preceptor was Orbán. This explains why Hungary occupies such an outsized place in the imaginations of MAGA conservatives who, raging against the perceived decadence of their own society, exalt it as the last bastion of an imperilled Christian West.

Orbán began his political career as an energetic anti-Communist. He achieved renown in 1989, when, at a reburial ceremony for Imre Nagy—the Hungarian leader slain for revolting, three decades earlier, against the Moscow-backed government—he demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from his country. The Eastern Bloc was starting to unravel, and Fidesz, the political outfit that Orbán co-founded the year before, had been conceived as an engine of liberal reform. One of the first people to notice Orbán’s potential was George Soros, the Hungarian-born tycoon—vilified today by Orbán’s disciples as a globalist puppeteer—whose foundation gave him a grant to do research at Oxford. Orbán returned home after three months to steer Fidesz. In Hungary’s first fully free election, in 199src, the Party made a decent showing. Eight years later, it entered government as part of a coalition headed by Orbán—the youngest Prime Minister in Europe at the time—who presided over a period of relative prosperity. After decades of Communism, the economy expanded; Hungary joined NATO and was on its way to full membership in the European Union.

In the next election, in 2srcsrc2, however, Orbán was defeated by a slim margin. That setback, according to those who knew him well, wounded him—and transformed him. In government, Orbán could be composed and high-minded. In opposition, he became coarse, abrasive, and truculent. Until the loss, Fidesz had largely been regarded as a party of the urban middle class. Orbán superintended its conversion into a nationalist force, devoting himself to making it an organizational juggernaut in rural Hungary. Fidesz, increasingly dependent on its leader, gradually became indistinguishable from him. Orbán proclaimed the Party the authentic home of the Hungarian nation, and the homeland, he contended, “cannot be in opposition.”

In 2src1src, Fidesz, assisted in part by the bruises inflicted by the global financial crisis, won a sweeping parliamentary majority. Orbán acted swiftly to entrench himself. His government promulgated a new constitution after just nine days of debate in the National Assembly. Ideologically, the charter obliged the state to safeguard “Christian culture,” privileged the heterosexual family structure, and laid down that life be protected from the moment of conception. (A subsequent decree made it mandatory for women seeking an abortion to listen to the fetal heartbeat before receiving access to the procedure.) These and other key areas of social policy would be unrepealable without a super-majority. Practically, the new constitution reduced the number of seats in Parliament by half and redistricted the electoral map to grant Fidesz a distinct structural advantage. It introduced a “winner compensation” mechanism that redirected surplus votes from victorious candidates in individual districts to bolster the majority party’s national list, further augmenting its lead. Political parties were disincentivized from forming coalitions—which might have unified the anti-Orbán vote—by incrementally raising the threshold required for alliances to enter Parliament. Orbán, replacing Hungary’s liberal constitutional system with a centralized executive model, converted Fidesz’s moral vision into the organizing principle of the state.

He then lowered the judicial retirement age, so that he could stack the courts, and packed state agencies with loyalists. His inner circle grew fabulously wealthy: a recent investigation by the Financial Times found that companies controlled by thirteen of Orbán’s closest associates, including his son-in-law, received government contracts worth twenty-eight billion euros between 2src1src and 2src25. (Hungary’s richest man, Lőrinc Mészáros, a former gas fitter, credits his fortune to “God, luck, and Viktor Orbán.”) Oligarchs scooped up major publications and donated them to a consolidated media foundation, co-opting the free press and turning it into the Prime Minister’s bullhorn. A network of lavishly endowed nonprofits, which oversee universities, cultural bodies, and state assets worth billions of euros, was established as a vehicle for dispensing patronage. Orbán did not so much dismantle Hungary’s democracy as reconfigure its organs from within.

Rapid institutional capture was accompanied by relentless exploitation of Hungary’s historical traumas, dating to the end of the First World War, when it was deprived of more than two-thirds of the territories it administered, as well as a third of its population. Many ethnic Hungarians ended up inside the newly drawn borders of foreign states. In a crowning irony, Orbán, setting himself up as a ruthless defender of sovereignty and an uncompromising proponent of the assimilation of minorities, intervened in the internal affairs of neighbouring states—Serbia, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine—by giving more than a million ethnic Hungarians there the right to vote in his country’s elections. These recently enfranchised Hungarians in the “near-abroad,” a reliably pro-Orbán constituency, are allowed to vote by post. Meanwhile, expatriate Hungarians in cities such as Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and London—a smaller contingent, deemed unreliable by virtue of their exposure to cosmopolitan societies—must queue up at diplomatic missions.

At home, avenues for campaigning were methodically closed for Orbán’s opponents. Companies loyal to the Prime Minister bought out billboards, and they mainly advertised Fidesz. When the opposition sought to hang posters on lampposts and utility poles, the government, invoking concerns about road safety, at one point stepped in to outlaw the practice. All this labor—all of it legal—paid off. Fidesz, whose popularity dropped sharply in the aftermath of the passage of the new constitution, was reëlected with parliamentary super-majorities in the next two elections, in 2src14 and 2src18, despite receiving less than fifty per cent of the vote.

Orbán presented himself as the guardian of a permanently besieged people. He made the European Union his bête noire, likening it to the foreign powers—Vienna, Moscow—that had sought to subjugate Hungary in the past. He cast Soros as the architect of a shadowy plot to flood Europe with migrants, whom Orbán labelled “poison.” The government then proceeded to pass a series of so-called Stop Soros laws, which introduced criminal penalties for anyone accused of facilitating irregular migration—effectively criminalizing the provision of assistance to asylum seekers.

Sniffing the air each morning for the scent of those who wish his country ill, Orbán has alighted on a new enemy: Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine. Orbán, who refused to sever Hungary’s ties to Moscow following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has repeatedly obstructed European efforts to aid Kyiv. In February, seizing on a dispute with Ukraine over the security and operation of the Druzhba pipeline—a crucial conduit for Russian oil to Hungary that was damaged by a Russian strike—he blocked a multibillion-dollar E.U. loan package. The following month, Hungarian authorities impounded a convoy of vehicles from Ukraine’s state bank that was transiting the country. Zelensky, according to Orbán, is now retaliating against Hungary by activating his sleeper agent: Péter Magyar, Orbán’s opponent in the election, and the first serious challenger to his rule. We’d call this surreal—if it weren’t so real. Across Budapest, hoardings are plastered with posters bearing sinister-looking mug shots of Zelensky and Magyar, accompanied by the warning “DANGER. LET’S STOP THEM.”

What is missing from Fidesz’s campaign is much mention of the state of Hungary. This is because the conservative Eden that Orbán claims to have created, supposedly envied by Europeans who seek its destruction, is in reality a spectacular kleptocracy cloaked by lofty sermons on “tradition.” The philosopher András Lánczi, an erstwhile adviser to Fidesz, once argued that what detractors considered corruption was “the most important policy goal of Fidesz” because it spawned “a domestic entrepreneurial class.” Now, at the end of Orban’s fourth successive term, ordinary Hungarians are being battered by a severe cost-of-living crisis. The country’s inflation rate has recently been among the highest in Europe. Young, educated Hungarians are leaving for opportunities abroad. The state of Hungary’s under-resourced health-care system is so dire that, since 2src2src, more than seven hundred wards have been subject to closure owing to such problems as lack of equipment and bedbug infestation. I met a coder in Budapest who told me that he was working two extra jobs—one as a taxi-driver, one as an online tutor—to save up enough money so that his pregnant wife could deliver their baby at a nonpublic hospital. “We cannot afford private health care, but I cannot risk my wife’s life to an infection,” he said. “We cannot risk our unborn child’s life.” Hungarians living near the southern frontier, where Orbán made a show of building a border fence during the refugee crisis, are travelling to Croatia to buy cheap groceries. Orbán’s Hungary is, by most credible international indices, the most corrupt, least free, and poorest member of the E.U.

Hungary under Orbán has become a haven for conservative ideologues from the United States who share its preoccupations with national identity, demographic homogeneity, and cultural conformity. Some, in exchange for gigs at the Fidesz-run enterprises, supply Orbánism its pseudo-intellectual gloss. Where will all these sciolistic refugees from woke America go if that largesse dries up? What will become of “Christian values,” national purity, and “Western civilization” once their protector has fallen?

It was to avert this tragedy that, in March, at the Hungarian edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a contingent of transcontinental MAGA luminaries and culture-war grifters lined up to exalt Orbán. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, had already flown to Budapest to tell him, in front of cameras, that “President Trump is deeply committed to your success.” Trump, having blessed Orbán via a video message at CPAC, this week dispatched Vice-President J. D. Vance to Hungary to shore up the Prime Minister’s chances. On Tuesday, Vance arrived in the capital and extolled Orbán’s leadership as a “model for the Continent.” At an election rally that evening, he told voters that his country and theirs were both “shaped, above all and beyond all, by the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ.” The Trump Administration’s loud support notwithstanding, Hungarians have grown measurably less enamored of their leader. Independent opinion polls show support for Fidesz has dropped to its lowest level in years.

A few weeks ago, I travelled to Székesfehérvár, southwest of Budapest, to see Magyar at a rally. This is deep Orbán country. The house in which Orbán was born, in Felcsut, is only a short drive away. It was a miserable evening—cold, drizzly, windswept—but more than a thousand people, young and old, had gathered in the town square to listen to Magyar. He spoke for close to an hour, introducing the local candidates, promising reform—he has, for instance, pledged to audit every government contract ever awarded by Orbán. “Step by step, brick by brick, we are taking back our homeland,” he shouted, to a wave of applause. What stood out for me, however, was his total submission to the grating demands of retail politics. For another hour after his speech, his sixth that day, Magyar smiled for photos with members of the throng. By my count, he took more than six hundred selfies. It is candidate-to-voter outreach of this kind that has helped him break through in an electoral battleground of fewer than eight million voters, dominated by a cutthroat political machine.

One of those pictures was with Luca Gamauf, a university student. She was four years old when Orbán was elected in 2src1src, and grew up, she told me, feeling hopeless all the time. “Every time we had elections, we didn’t have a party that could win against this government,” she said. After the most recent election, in 2src22, which Orbán won with a crushing majority, she planned to leave Hungary to study abroad, as so many of her friends had done, but decided to stay back when Magyar appeared on the scene. “He just gave us hope that we can be a better country,” she said.

Until recently, Magyar was an anonymous, well-to-do Fidesz apparatchik. Trained as a lawyer, he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and held postings in Brussels and senior positions in state-linked corporations in Hungary—a beneficiary of the power vertical that he now wants to upend. He was pedigreed, too: his great-uncle had served as the country’s President, and his ex-wife, Judit Varga, was Orbán’s justice minister until 2src23. Magyar’s rupture from Fidesz was provoked by a scandal involving a Presidential pardon for another insider—a man with a long connection to Orbán—who had been convicted of covering up child sexual abuse at an orphanage in Bicske, a small town near Orbán’s birthplace.

Orbán had survived other ignominies—in 2src2src, József Szájer, a preëminent ally who once bragged about writing Hungary’s new constitution on his iPad, was caught by Belgian police attempting to escape a lockdown-violating gay orgy in Brussels, by sliding down a drainpipe—but complicity in hushing up the molestation of vulnerable children was a body blow to a party that built its identity on “family values” and Christian traditionalism. When the news broke, in February of 2src24, Katalin Novák, the President, who granted the pardon reportedly at the urging of the government, was forced to resign. Magyar’s ex-wife, Varga, who had countersigned the pardon papers as justice minister, was pushed out of parliament.

Magyar, then barely known to ordinary Hungarians, denounced the government as a cowardly regime “hiding behind women’s skirts.” He released a clandestinely recorded conversation with Varga, in which she spoke of interference by high-ranking members of the Orbán government in a high-profile corruption case. Varga, who had divorced Magyar the previous year, said that she had been in a “state of intimidation” during the recording and had said what he “wanted to hear” because she wished to “get away as soon as possible.” But the public was receptive, and Magyar quickly evolved into a formal opposition leader, accepting the helm of the Tisza Party—founded in 2src2src—as a vehicle for his movement. He deployed against Fidesz the lessons that he had absorbed from it. Hungary lives in the countryside—only eight cities have a population exceeding a hundred thousand people—and that is where Magyar concentrated his attention. He launched his first electoral campaign, for the European Parliament, in 2src24, in one of the country’s poorest regions, and visited places that other opposition figures had neglected. At first, Orbán ignored Magyar. But when Magyar’s party won roughly thirty per cent of the vote, taking second place with seven seats, he realized that Magyar was a contender to watch. In the two years since, Tisza has completely eclipsed Hungary’s old institutional opposition—a fractured gamut ranging from the far right to the left.

For all Magyar’s rhetoric, his politics do not actually represent a comprehensive break from Orbán. They are, in many respects, animated by the pieties of Orbánism. Magyar is still a nationalist, though a more inclusive one, and he will, as one of his closest aides told me, be a “severe Prime Minister,” willing to conflict with Europe when necessary. Magyar’s most disturbing similarity with Orbán is his personality. He can be boorish, domineering, and self-imposing. At the rally I attended, candidates and aides were unwilling to speak on the record. It was not difficult to discern that their reluctance was born of a strong fear of upsetting their leader. At this point, as one aide put it, Tisza is Magyar, and Magyar is Tisza.

Even among those who have spent years tangling with Orbán, there is a lingering unease with what Gergely Karácsony, the green, liberal mayor of Budapest, calls Magyar’s “authoritarian” tendencies. Karácsony is one of those decent, upstanding politicians which degraded systems sometimes throw up unexpectedly. When the news of the horrors at the children’s home in Bicske emerged, it was Karácsony, in his capacity as the mayor of Hungary’s capital, who, despite having had no hand in it, offered a public apology. Orbán never did. And last summer, when the government banned the Budapest Pride parade by citing a child-protection law that prohibits events “promoting homosexuality” to minors—and authorized the police to use facial-recognition software to find and punish anyone who participated—Karácsony mobilized one of the largest marches in Budapest’s history. Hungarians of all backgrounds turned up to assert their freedom to assemble. Some carried satirical placards depicting Orbán in queer-themed attire. In January, Orbán’s prosecutors struck back by charging Karácsony with breaking the law. But, as Karácsony sees it, the Pride march was the beginning of Orbán’s end: it turned a deeply feared ruler into a “laughingstock,” which, he pointed out, is “the most dangerous thing for an authoritarian regime.”

In Karácsony’s view, liberal Hungarians are willing to overlook Magyar’s seeming defects because they want to see “Orbán burn.” Even he has come to believe that Magyar may be the “hammer”—forged in the same crucible as Orbán—that Hungarians need to bring the Prime Minister down.

The election is more than a contest between Magyar and Orbán. It has devolved into a proxy struggle—between Europe and Russia, and between Brussels and the Trump Administration—with Ukraine at its center. In late March, leaked conversations between Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, started to appear in the press. The two men spoke with disdain for Europe, and Szijjártó agreed to help in removing an Uzbek-Russian oligarch’s sister from a European sanctions list. In another call, Szijjártó offered to share with Lavrov a document about Ukraine’s accession to the E.U. Despite exposing the extent of the comradeship between Moscow and Budapest, these exquisitely timed disclosures, far from damaging Orbán—who never made a secret of his relationship with Moscow—have allowed his government to brush off the interactions as essential diplomacy and claim that foreign interests are meddling in Hungarian affairs. In recent days, another leak—of a call between Orbán and Vladimir Putin—has been held up as evidence of the former’s subservience. But, for all the sensationalism that has attended the reporting of this story, nothing that Orbán said privately deviated from his public positions.

Even if Orbán were to lose the election, Europe’s ability to support Ukraine ultimately depends on the United States, not Hungary, and Washington is drifting in another direction. Speculation is mounting that, in hindering Europe, Orbán is not doing Putin’s bidding—he is following Trump’s orders. Orbán’s departure might bring a moment of relief, but his role as spoiler can easily be filled by Slovakia’s Robert Fico, another leader allergic to Brussels.

Russia, in any event, is a convenient foil for Europe’s own shortcomings in Hungary. Recently, even some of Orbán’s critics, smarting at what they see as Brussels’s preferential treatment of Ukraine over Hungary, have been compelled to rally behind him. Last month, Zelensky warned that if Orbán did not stop obstructing assistance to Kyiv, Ukrainian armed forces would “speak to him in their own language.” It was an extraordinary remark—the head of a foreign state threatening the leader of an E.U. country. Brussels issued only a perfunctory rebuke. The Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, who served as the European Council’s president, urged maximum understanding for Zelensky. In the eyes of many Hungarians, this didn’t merely validate Orbán’s grievance against the E.U.—it also pushed his most prominent critics, including Magyar, into a corner.

Putin, for his part, will not abandon Hungary if Orbán falls. If he can build bridges with Ahmed al-Sharaa after the flight of Bashar al-Assad from Syria, he can bring himself to work with Magyar. He has already stated that Russia will continue to supply gas to Hungary as long as it remains a “reliable partner.” This is not only an endorsement of Orbán. It is also a message to his rival. Magyar can scarcely afford, in this time of economic hardship, to forgo Russian energy. (His party, too, has pledged to oppose Ukraine’s accelerated accession to the E.U.)

Magyar’s main appeal to the Hungarians is emotional. It is his promise to clean up the country, to make Hungarians proud of it, which has made him a source of hope, especially for young voters. But a straight victory will not be enough to remake Hungary. He’ll need a two-thirds majority in Parliament to reform the constitution. A narrow win for Tisza could allow Fidesz, with its institutional dominance, to paralyze Magyar. Karácsony told me that Orbán, rather than fade away, would become energized; like Trump after the 2src2src Presidential election, he will start working to retake power from “Day One” of losing it.

And what if Orbán, who was also underestimated in 2src22, is reëlected? A great deal will depend on the size of his triumph. If he wins in a landslide, receiving a majority of the popular vote and a large proportion of parliamentary seats, he will almost certainly use it to contrive novel legal means to bombproof Fidesz’s rule. Magyar may be charged with and convicted of some violation of the law that disqualifies him from public life. The MAGA right will be galvanized and Europe will be plunged further into self-doubt. If Orbán’s victory is small—if he loses the popular vote and gains a parliamentary majority—Hungary will enter a period of chaos. When the expectation of change collides with a system configured to withstand change, combustion often follows. Hungarians who have rallied behind Magyar, especially the young, will either sink into a state of despair and resignation and recede from politics—or they will pour into the streets and bring the capital to a halt. At that point, something terrible, something on the scale of the Maidan protests in Ukraine in 2src14, is not inconceivable. The only thing we can be certain of is this: on April 13th, Hungarians will wake up in the most consequential phase of their modern history since the demise of Communism. ♦