The Wrong Lesson from Budapest

The American press wants Hungary's election to be about us. It isn't.

Photo by Daniel Mirlea. Published on April 11, 2023. Licensed under the Unsplash+ License

The reception to Viktor Orbán’s loss in Hungary has been treated as a seismic shift, and in narrow terms, it is. He reigned for 16 consecutive years. He systematically restructured Hungary’s electoral maps, judicial appointments, and media landscape to entrench his party’s dominance, thus earning the EU’s designation of Hungary as a “hybrid regime” rather than a full democracy. The fall of a man that entrenched does count as a shift, and it deserves to be taken seriously on those terms.

But the American press is doing something else entirely. It is eagerly framing events abroad in an American context rather than one native to the nation the news is emanating from, and in doing so, it is producing a story that is emotionally satisfying and analytically hollow.

Viktor Orbán had become something of a patron saint for the nationalist populist right globally. The connections run through actual pilgrimages. Tucker Carlson traveled to Budapest multiple times to conduct fawning interviews, presenting Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” as a civilizational model worth studying. CPAC held its conference there. In the final days of the campaign, Vice President J.D. Vance flew to Budapest to personally stump for Orbán, while Trump called in by speakerphone to a campaign rally declaring “I’m a big fan of Viktor, I’m with him all the way.” The intervention drew sharp criticism from European allies and American foreign policy establishment figures alike, alarmed at an American administration openly backing a Putin-aligned leader inside the EU.

But here is what most of those headlines are not telling you about the man who actually won.

Péter Magyar is not a liberal. He is not a progressive and he is not a rebuke to the ideological content of Orbánism. He is, in the most literal sense, a product of the Orbán machine. Born into Hungary’s post-communist Christian-democratic elite, he attended the prestigious Pázmány Péter Catholic University, where he befriended Gergely Gulyás, who is currently the chief of staff in Orbán’s own prime minister’s office. Magyar joined Fidesz, Orbán’s party, and rose through its affiliated structures, eventually heading Hungary’s state student loan provider and sitting on the boards of multiple state companies. His ex-wife, Judit Varga, was Orbán’s minister of justice. Magyar did not emerge from some underground resistance. Instead, he emerged from the front row of Orbán’s own rallies.

He broke with Orbán in 2024 not over nationalism, not over immigration, not over the EU’s democratic standards, but over a child abuse pardon scandal that implicated the government in covering for one of its own. The catalyst was moral revulsion at corruption so brazen it had become impossible to rationalize. And his campaign message was essentially: we share the nationalist feelings, but the corruption has become indefensible.

Do not be fooled by the European People’s Party membership or the crowds waving EU flags. On the policy substance, Magyar’s Tisza party opposed sending weapons to Ukraine and voted against a loan to Kyiv. It is opposed to Ukraine’s accelerated EU accession. On immigration, Magyar ran explicitly to Orbán’s right by promising to end even the guest worker program that Orbán had permitted. Magyar's nationalism expressed itself not in the civilizational warfare language of Orbán and Vance, but in something more coded with rallies named after medieval Hungarian saints, symbolic marches on the anniversary of the 1956 revolution, and a ceremonial walk to ethnic Hungarian communities in Romania. The dog whistle was tuned to a different frequency, but the underlying nationalism was not.

Magyar won against extraordinary structural disadvantages. Over sixteen years, Orbán had transformed Hungary’s public broadcaster into a party mouthpiece and presided over the consolidation of nearly 80 percent of the country’s media under Fidesz-aligned ownership. That Magyar built a supermajority despite this (through relentless grassroots barnstorming that included the campaign visiting hundreds of towns, sometimes six in a single day) speaks to the depth of the corruption fatigue, not to a fundamental ideological realignment. Yes, Magyar’s Tisza party now holds a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority, which gives it the numbers to begin reversing some of Orbán’s constitutional changes. But the political soil in which it is governing, like the hostility to Ukraine, the restrictionist immigration consensus, and the vagueness on LGBTQ rights, remains largely intact.

This is why it is irresponsible to frame tonight as a loss for MAGA. To do so is to mistake a man for a movement, to treat one leader’s political mortality as evidence that the structural forces animating early 21st century ethnonationalism have been checked or reversed. Those forces of economic dislocation, demographic anxiety, and the collapse of faith in liberal institutional competence did not lose an election in Hungary last night.

What Orbán’s loss may genuinely signal is something more specific and more modest: that fatigue is real. That sixteen years of the same face, compounded by corruption so open that it became the texture of daily life, will eventually breach even the most carefully fortified political machine. Hungary’s turnout hit nearly 80 percent (the highest since the end of Communist rule) driven substantially by young voters, 60 percent of whom backed Tisza, and by former Fidesz supporters who had simply had enough of the graft. That is a story about the shelf life of a specific man’s grip on power, not about the retreat of the ideology he embodied.

Whether that lesson has American applications is a genuinely interesting question. But the answer requires a much slower and more structurally honest analysis than the one being offered tonight. Orbán’s loss does not slot neatly into an American context. It does not allow us to conclude that MAGA’s political authority is approaching its end. The emotional need for that conclusion is understandable. The analytical basis for it, examined carefully, is not there.

This is not an attempt to extinguish hope. It is a request for a smarter conversation that takes Hungary seriously as Hungary, rather than as a prop in a story we were already telling about ourselves.