On April 12, Hungary voted to elect its next Prime Minister. The central European country with a Soviet past was earlier hailed as a textbook example of transition and integration into the European Union. Nevertheless, the last three consecutive governments headed by the Prime Minister Viktor Orbán have become a test case for the EU and its rule of law.

What happened on April 12, was not merely a change of government—it was a democratic rupture of a kind that many political scientists had begun to doubt was possible within the institutional architecture Orbán had spent 16 years constructing. With 97.35 per cent of precincts counted, Magyar’s centre-right Tisza party secured 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament on 53.6 per cent of the vote, while Orbán’s Fidesz took just 55 seats with 37.8 per cent. That is not a narrow win squeezed out of a gerrymandered system—it is a supermajority, the same constitutional weapon Orbán had wielded for 16 years, now placed in the hands of the man who came to dismantle everything he built.

The result is stunning, given that Orbán had led his party to four successive election victories before April 12, securing a supermajority in each. Speaking to supporters, Orbán said the result was “clear” and “painful” for his party, adding “the responsibility and possibility of governing was not given to us”. A lot was at stake for Viktor Orbán, Peter Magyar, and the EU. For Orbán, the defeat marked the end of his populist era of “illiberal” democracy, a term he coined in 2014 in opposition to the EU’s “liberal” democracy. He had also emerged as a leading figure in the European conservative movement, working in tandem with populist far-right leaders from other EU countries and promoting ideas like his own.

His loss is thus a blow to the populist far-right movement in the EU, and a sigh of relief for the 27-member bloc trying to develop a united front against Russia, for which a friendly regime in Budapest will obviously help.

For Peter Magyar, now equipped with a supermajority, it will be an easy task to reverse “illiberal” democracy, but the issue he is now going to face is that he has been an insider in Orbán’s government for the last 16 years and, with both parties being nationalist, there are many issues that they have converged on. Both parties, for the duration of this election campaign and in their voting records in the European Parliament, have opposed sending Hungarian weapons or troops to Ukraine, opposed Ukraine’s accelerated EU accession, and exhibited deep caution about any Hungarian financial exposure to Kyiv. So, in effect there is no clear win between the two binaries where an illiberal regime has been replaced by a liberal one.

Voting Pattern

Three forces converged simultaneously, and their convergence is what made the margin so crushing. First, turnout was the decisive variable. About 7.52 million Hungarians cast their ballot out of around 8.1 million eligible voters, marking a record-high turnout of approximately 77.8 per cent—the highest in post-communist Hungarian history. This matters enormously in the context of Orbán’s electoral architecture, which was calibrated for a low-to-medium turnout environment. The gerrymandered single-member districts, the diaspora vote advantage, the rural media saturation—all of these structural advantages were designed to multiply the value of a stable, mobilised Fidesz base.

In such a case, when turnout surges to historically unprecedented levels, the mathematics of the system collapse, because the marginal voters flooding the polls are overwhelmingly not existing Fidesz supporters. They are the previously apathetic, the quietly furious, the young people in provincial cities who spent years watching their peers emigrate while Orbán’s oligarchs purchased yachts. Magyar activated them with a retail politics campaign of extraordinary stamina—he toured Hungary relentlessly, holding rallies in settlements big and small, recently visiting up to six towns a day.

Second, Magyar’s strategic positioning as a conservative rather than a liberal challenger proved decisive in dismantling Fidesz’s rural fortress. Magyar campaigned against corruption and on everyday issues like healthcare and public transport, pledging to rebuild Hungary’s relationships with the EU and NATO. By refusing to give Orbán the liberal enemy he needed, Magyar forced Fidesz to fight on terrain it had never prepared for—defending its own record of governance, its own corruption, its own economic failures—rather than fighting the civilisational culture war it had won four times before.

The child protection pardon scandal, which first cracked the door open in 2024, resonated especially powerfully with older rural voters who have been the bedrock of the Fidesz coalition, precisely because it violated the regime’s most sanctified self-image.

Finally, the late intervention of J.D. Vance—far from rescuing Orbán—appears to have backfired precisely because it activated Hungarian nationalism in favour of Magyar. An American Vice President physically campaigning in Budapest five days before a Hungarian election triggered a deep cultural reflex of great-power imposition. It was a stunning blow for Orbán, a close ally of both Trump and Putin, who quickly conceded what he called a “painful” election result. The man who had built his entire political career on the narrative of small Hungary defying great-power dictates was seen to require rescue from Washington and Moscow simultaneously—and Hungarian voters, steeped in that very narrative, judged the contradiction accordingly.

How nationalism still defined the mandate

The cursory sense that this is a win of liberalism over illiberalism may not be true. The Tisza party carries the name of the river that runs through the heart of historic Hungary, through territories lost at Trianon, through the landscapes of a nation that has always understood itself as larger than its borders. And its leader bears the surname Magyar, which in the Hungarian language means simply “Hungarian”—not a political label but an identity, a people, a civilisational claim.

It is these names under which Orbán’s system was dismantled, not a mere coincidence but a kind of historical grammar, as if the electorate itself were insisting that the nation it was reclaiming was the real Hungary. For 16 years, Orbán deployed the Trianon wound—the memory of great power betrayal, of external forces redrawing Hungarian life without Hungarian consent—as the emotional engine of his political project, positioning Brussels as the latest in a long line of distant powers contemptuous of small nations with deep histories. What the 2026 vote has revealed is that Hungarians have finally turned that very grammar against him. The man who invited the American Vice President to campaign in Budapest and maintained a Russian president as his most reliable patron had become the figure representing the great power dependency that Trianon’s memory triggers most deeply in Hungary.

It is in this context that this election needs to be studied, where national identity and its different levels of assertion became the key factor in the political rhetoric. Where Orbán has maintained that all great powers that matter to Hungary, be it the US, Russia, or China all support him, Peter Magyar presented a contrasting picture where he showed in his campaign rhetoric that Hungary under Orbán was turning its back from the power that matters the most—the European Union. This, clubbed with poor economic performance, slow reforms, and 16 years of anti-incumbency helped Hungarians chose Magyar over Orbán. Nevertheless, nationalism continues to lie at the heart of modern Hungarian politics. To understand how Orbán sustained his rule, it is essential to grasp how Hungarian nationalism operates.

Trianon and the great betrayal

The First World War is generally considered the end of empires. On the losing side, the Austro-Hungarian Empire suffered massive losses imposed by the Allied powers. The Austro-Hungarian empire’s Hungarian side contained Slovak, Romanian, and Serbian populations but with Hungarians forming a slim majority. The Hungarian Prime Minister at the time, Istvan Tisza, was reluctant to go to war and believed it would yield no benefit to Hungary. We know how history turned out: Hungary, with Austria, joined the war and was ultimately defeated. The result was the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, which stripped Hungary of two-third of its territory and most of its population. It was also the time of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and one of its more important provisions was national self-determination, which paved the way for the Romanian and Slovak parts of the Czechoslovakian state to assert themselves as it did the Serbian part of Yugoslavia.

During the Second World War, Hungary again sided with the Axis powers, with a strong desire to regain its lost territories. However, as part of its small-state strategy, it also kept one channel open for negotiations with Western powers. It also did not want to commit much of its military but had to do so when the Soviet Union attacked the country. Its second army was annihilated, and Hungary was again on the losing side, this time with more to lose. Hungary had been secretly negotiating with the UK and the US about a form of safe passage and was willing to flip sides if given assurances that it would be protected against the Soviet Union. It did not happen.

After the War, at the Paris Peace Conference, stricter conditions were imposed, including high war reparations, the loss of claims and territories, and, most importantly, being placed exclusively in the Soviet sphere of influence for the next 40 years.

Past as Prologue

To this day, these historical decisions create fertile ground for burning debate, which are time and again exploited by Hungary’s political entrepreneurs. When Hungary held its first election free from Soviet clutches in the early 1990s, its Prime Minister József Antall said: “In the legal sense, under Hungarian common law, I wish to be Prime Minister of all Hungarian citizens, of this country of ten million people—and in spirit and feeling of 15 million Hungarians”.

At the same time, young Oxford graduate Viktor Orbán, with his youth-led Fidesz Party, wanted to make a mark on the budding Hungarian political scene. The young Orbán was brash, intellectually sharp, and unambiguously liberal in the classical European sense: pro-market, pro-civil liberties, pro-West. His 1989 speech at the reburial of Imre Nagy—the martyred leader of the 1956 uprising—was electric; he stood before hundreds of thousands and demanded Soviet troops leave Hungary, a provocation of breathtaking boldness at a moment when the USSR still technically existed.

When Fidesz won the 1998 elections, and Orbán became Prime Minister for the first time, he governed as a right-of-centre moderate—significantly nationalistic in tone, yes, but operating well within the bounds of parliamentary democracy. He lost the 2002 election narrowly and again in 2006, and it is here, in the wilderness of opposition, that the transformation truly began to be brewed. The humiliations of electoral defeat, the scandal-ridden socialist governments, and the catastrophic 2006 Őszöd speech—when the socialist PM Ferenc Gyurcsány was secretly recorded admitting that his government had “lied morning, noon and night”—convinced Orbán that liberal democratic norms were a weapon his rivals used but never themselves honoured. He stopped playing by those rules.

When Orbán returned to power in April 2010, the context could not have been more clarifying for his ambitions. Hungary had been gutted by the 2008 global financial crisis—it was the first EU member to seek an IMF bailout, its currency had collapsed, public debt was severe, and ordinary Hungarians bore a crushing burden of foreign-currency mortgages that had turned their homes into liabilities. The socialist government was not merely unpopular; it was associated with a decade of broken promises, corruption, and economic mismanagement. Orbán won not just a majority but a two-thirds supermajority—and he understood, with the instincts of a true politician, that his was not merely an electoral victory but a historical moment. He used it accordingly and with extraordinary speed.

Within two years, Fidesz had replaced the 1949 Constitution with an entirely new Fundamental Law (2011), packed the Constitutional Court by expanding its membership and filling it with loyalists, lowered the mandatory retirement age for judges to force out hundreds of independent magistrates, gerrymandered the electoral map to entrench Fidesz’s structural advantage, and brought the Central Bank under government control.

Crucially, 2010 was also the year of Hungary’s EU Council Presidency and the beginning of the Eurozone debt crisis—Brussels was consumed by Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, leaving Orbán operating in a distracted European neighbourhood. The ideological framing of illiberal democracy he offered was not cynical nihilism but a coherent, if deeply problematic, worldview: he argued that liberal democracy had failed to protect national culture, sovereignty, and economic security, and that Hungary needed a state strong enough to defend these things against global finance, Brussels bureaucracy, and cultural liberalism. This was not just rhetoric; it resonated with a large slice of Hungarian society that genuinely felt liberalism had delivered austerity, inequality, and cultural dislocation without delivering dignity.

What sustained Orbán’s politics

Orbán’s durability over 15-plus years in power rested on a scaffolding of mutually reinforcing structural advantages, genuine ideological resonance, and a strategic opportunism that is worth disaggregating carefully. First, the institutional capture was comprehensive and largely irreversible within normal democratic mechanisms—the electoral system was redrawn so that Fidesz could win majorities with a minority of votes, the media landscape was colonised through the KESMA conglomerate (a 2018 merger of nearly 500 pro-government outlets “donated” to a foundation by oligarchs close to Orbán), and the judiciary was neutered gradually but systematically. The EU, for all its Article 7 proceedings and rule-of-law conditionality battles, found itself structurally unable to act decisively because of unanimity requirements, which meant Hungary and Poland could block each other’s sanctions.

Second, Orbán has been a masterful reader of fear and grievance. The 2015 refugee crisis was his transformative geopolitical gift: he constructed a physical fence on the Serbian border, saturated Hungarian public discourse with the image of civilisational threat, and ran a national “consultation” that framed migration as a George Soros-backed cultural war—turning a genuine European policy failure into the founding myth of his “Christian democracy against Brussels and Soros” narrative.

Third, he delivered economic results that his supporters could feel: the early 2010s restructuring—taxing banks and multinationals, nationalising pension funds, an unorthodox heterodox economics that enraged the IMF but reduced the deficit—was followed by genuine GDP growth, falling unemployment, and targeted welfare programmes like the generous family subsidy system (CSOK) that created a class of economic stakeholders with tangible reasons to support the regime.

Fourth, his foreign policy positioning Hungary’s “peacenik” voice on Ukraine after 2022—maintaining energy contracts with Russia, blocking EU military aid packages, visiting Putin and Xi while NATO allies fumed—gave him a distinctive nationalist credential domestically while keeping Hungary’s energy bills manageable at a moment of Europe-wide price shocks.

Finally, and this is what the democratic-backsliding literature sometimes underweights, Orbán, and now Magyar, are also helped by a genuine reservoir of post-communist cultural conservatism—a society where, for significant portions of the population, the 1990s liberal transition delivered not liberation but chaos, inequality, and demographic haemorrhage through emigration, and where the idea of a strong national state protecting Hungarian identity feels not like authoritarianism but stability. Orbán exploited that feeling with enormous skill. Until his opponents develop a credible counter-narrative that speaks to the same anxieties without his methods, the structural conditions for the illiberal democracy remain firmly in place.

What made Orbán’s rhetorical system so durable—and so difficult to counter—was also that he never needed a human face to hang his grievances on. Occasionally, Soros served that function, but even Soros was always instrumental, a symbol rather than the substance of the threat. The real villain in Orbán’s universe is a system—and this is analytically crucial. Systems cannot be voted out, arrested, shamed, or humanised. You cannot negotiate with a system, you cannot extend sympathy to it, and you cannot be accused of personal hatred for opposing it. “Brussels” in Orbán’s vocabulary is not a city or even an institution—it is shorthand for an entire mode of governance: technocratic, rootless, culturally relativist, demographically reckless, financially extractive, and fundamentally contemptuous of small nations with deep histories.

By constructing the villain this way, he achieved something operationally brilliant: he immunised his political project against the normal mechanisms of democratic accountability. When the EU withheld cohesion funds over rule-of-law violations, this was not Brussels protecting Hungarian taxpayers—it was the system punishing Hungary for daring to be Hungarian. When the European Parliament passed censure motions, these were not democratic oversight—they were the system’s attempt to instal compliant governors in Budapest. Every act of external pressure became, in this grammar, self-confirming evidence of the threat Orbán had always described.

2022 and after: What changed

When Orbán won his fourth consecutive supermajority in April 2022—achieving it even as Russian tanks were rolling into Ukraine just across the border—his victory looked total and the opposition looked finished. A unified opposition coalition, the broadest in Hungarian democratic history, had thrown everything at him and still lost by double digits. But 2022, paradoxically, planted the seeds of his most serious crisis.

The war in Ukraine fundamentally disrupted the economic model that had underpinned his domestic legitimacy since 2013. Hungary’s deep energy dependence on Russian gas—cemented by the long-term Gazprom contracts Orbán had signed and the Paks II nuclear plant expansion deal with Rosatom—meant that when European energy prices exploded after the invasion, Hungary’s exposure was severe. Inflation surged above 25 per cent in late 2022 and early 2023, among the highest in the entire EU. The forint collapsed. Real wages fell sharply. And crucially, the EU’s rule-of-law conditionality— activated through years of accumulated judicial and media capture—froze approximately €30 billion in cohesion and recovery funds, depriving the Hungarian economy of investment it had come to depend on structurally.

The economic compact Orbán had struck with his voters—I will protect your cultural identity and sovereignty and in return deliver growth—began visibly straining. There was now bruised national pride because neighbouring economies in Central Europe had overtaken Hungary’s stagnant economy, and the unexplained wealth of Orbán’s inner circle became a source of anger. According to Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, Hungary remains the most corrupt member state of the EU for the fourth consecutive year. The narrative of Orbán as competent national manager who delivered prosperity while defending Hungarian sovereignty was colliding with material reality in ways that his rhetorical architecture—however sophisticated—could not fully absorb.

Péter Magyar

Into this widening crack stepped a figure that Orbán’s system was structurally unprepared to handle. Péter Magyar is not a liberal intellectual from Budapest, not a career opposition politician, not an NGO-backed civic activist—in short, none of the things that Orbán’s “Brussels agent” framing could easily accommodate. He is a 45-year-old former high-ranking Fidesz insider, a lawyer who was embedded within the system, married into its inner circle, and who emerged in early 2024 with a devastating combination: personal knowledge of how the regime operated, a credible claim to national-conservative values rather than liberal ones, and an outsider’s fury at an apparatus he had seen from inside.

His break with Fidesz came publicly in February 2024 when he released audio recordings implicating his then-estranged wife—Judit Varga, Orbán’s Justice Minister—and others in a presidential pardon scandal involving a convicted child abuser, which had forced the resignation of President Katalin Novák. The scandal was not merely salacious; it punctured the regime’s most sacred rhetorical commitment, its claim to be the guardian of children and Christian family values against a predatory liberal world. Magyar used it ruthlessly and effectively. According to polling conducted that month, around 15 per cent of voters claimed they were “certain or highly likely” to vote for Magyar if he ran for office, and when he announced his bid in the European and Budapest Assembly elections with the then-unknown Tisza Party, it finished in second place with nearly 30 per cent of votes—the highest by any non-Fidesz party since 2006.

What Magyar grasped—and what makes him analytically interesting beyond ordinary opposition politics—is that Orbán’s system could not be beaten by opposing its values. A liberal, pro-immigration, pro-Brussels candidate would simply activate the civilisational threat narrative and consolidate Fidesz voters. Magyar, therefore, refused that terrain almost entirely.

Instead, Magyar promises to bring Hungary back in line with the EU but also supports “pragmatic relations” with Russia. His Tisza party does not align with the EU’s migration quota rules, and its platform supports preserving the border fence Orbán erected in 2015. The party has avoided taking clear ideological positions to appeal to the widest possible electoral coalition, with Magyar often speaking of creating a “third political force” in Hungary to abolish the System of National Cooperation (NER) that Fidesz uses to control society at large.

This is a campaign built not on ideological counter-programming but on a single devastating proposition: the system is corrupt, it has failed you economically, and I actually know it from inside. Tisza has struck a chord with Hungarians frustrated by a stagnating economy, a cost-of-living crisis and corruption. Magyar has also deployed a style of retail politics—walking the country, visiting villages, holding town halls—that directly contrasts with Orbán’s increasingly distant, stage-managed public appearances. This has made the physical contrast between an ageing authoritarian and an energetic insurgent part of the political message itself.

Verdict beyond Budapest

The verdict that most political scientists had declared structurally improbable—a supermajority against a supermajority-entrenched incumbent—arrived with a clarity that left no room for institutional manipulation or legal challenge. Orbán’s era ended in a crushing defeat, with Fidesz securing 55 seats, a massive fall from the 135 it now holds.

For Hungary, this is simultaneously a liberation and a reckoning. The democratic institutions that Orbán hollowed out will not be refill themselves. Magyar inherits a judiciary colonised by loyalists, a media landscape still dominated by Fidesz-aligned outlets, an economy structurally dependent on Russian energy and frozen EU funds, and a constitutional architecture booby-trapped for exactly this scenario.

Magyar declared to his supporters: “Hungary is again going to be a very strong ally of the EU and NATO,” pledging to reintegrate Hungary into the EU’s judicial system. He announced his first foreign visits as Prime Minister to Poland, then Vienna, then Brussels. The symbolism is deliberate and telling—it reverses every axis of Orbán’s foreign policy in a single itinerary.

For the EU, the relief is genuine and geopolitically substantial. Orbán’s defeat will likely spell the end of Hungary’s adversarial role in the EU, possibly opening the way for a €90 billion loan to war-battered Ukraine that Orbán had blocked. The “wall of no” that had turned EU decision-making into an exercise in Hungarian hostage-taking—on Ukraine aid, on rule-of-law enforcement, on migration solidarity—loses its architect overnight. Whether Magyar’s Hungary becomes a constructive partner or merely a quieter obstructionist will depend on how Brussels handles the transition— with magnanimity and the swift release of frozen funds, or with punitive vindictiveness that would hand Fidesz an opposing narrative.

For the global populist conservative movement, the damage is symbolic but not fatal. Far-right parties are left with a crucial takeaway: the realisation that even Viktor Orbán’s regime is not foolproof and that it is possible to fall out of power in a hybrid regime.

Orbán was the model, the proof of concept that illiberal democracy could entrench itself permanently within a democratic framework. His defeat does not refute the model everywhere, but demonstrates that the model has a ceiling, which is reached when economic failure, internal defection, and an opposition smart enough to fight on conservative rather than liberal terrain all arrive simultaneously. Trump, Le Pen, Meloni, and Fico—all are studying the autopsy.

The deepest lesson, however, is one that resonates far beyond Hungary’s borders and cuts to the heart of what democratic resilience actually means. Orbán was not defeated by liberal internationalism, not by Brussels conditionality, not by NGO activism, not by the European Parliament’s censure motions—all tools the democratic establishment deployed and exhausted over 16 years. He was defeated by a conservative insider who walked to villages, spoke to people in their own political language, and who made the corruption visible to those who had chosen not to see it. Magyar told tens of thousands gathered along the Danube: “Tonight, truth prevailed over lies. Today, we won because Hungarians didn’t ask what their homeland could do for them; they asked what they could do for their homeland.” That, in the end, is not a liberal victory. It is a democratic one. And the distinction matters enormously for every country where the same battle is being fought.

Harsh Pandey is a PhD candidate at the Centre for European Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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