Peter Magyar topples illiberal hero Viktor Orban in Hungary

CSABA WAS sitting outside the polling station at the library in Szentendre, 20km north of Budapest, weighing his choice. Since the end of communism in 1989 he had voted for Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in every election, but this time he couldn’t decide. “The corruption has become unbearable,” Csaba said. “It’s open and brazen,” added his son, Zoltan, who lives in Spain. There, he said, Hungarian companies lose contracts because of expectations of corruption. He had just voted for the opposition Tisza party, led by Peter Magyar (pictured above). In 2022 Szentendre’s district went for Fidesz, but on April 12th Tisza won it by a solid margin.

As in Szentendre, so in the rest of Hungary. By late evening, with the great majority of the vote counted, Tisza led Fidesz nationwide by 54% to 38%. Mr Orban, the conservative populist who had served as prime minister for 16 years, conceded defeat: “The election result is painful but clear, I congratulated the winning party.” Under Hungary’s complicated electoral system, current projections give Mr Magyar’s party well over two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, enough to change the constitution—as Mr Orban has done systematically since he won a two-thirds majority in 2010.

Over four consecutive terms, Mr Orban transformed his country from a democracy into a form of electoral autocracy. The top courts and most of the media fell under the control of Fidesz. Independent institutions were packed with party loyalists. They could frustrate Tisza’s agenda. “The constitution is packed with poison pills,” says Gergely Polner of Forefront Advisers, a risk consultancy. “For a new government to operate effectively, it needs a two-thirds majority.”

Mr Orban’s brand of illiberal democracy made him a hero to populist conservatives across Europe and in America’s MAGA movement. His defeat serves as a warning to other populist parties, from France’s National Rally to the Alternative for Germany, that they are not destined for endlessly rising popularity. It is also a blow to Donald Trump, who had proclaimed his support the day before the election, vowing to use America’s “full economic might” to help Hungary so long as Fidesz won. J.D. Vance, America’s vice-president, visited Budapest to stump for Mr Orban (pictured below) earlier this month.

Mr Magyar, a charismatic 45-year-old, won with a campaign that made the fight against corruption its central theme. He managed to tie anger at graft to dissatisfaction with the poor economy and declining social services, and to Mr Orban’s turn towards Russia and away from the European Union. A former Fidesz insider whose ex-wife had served as Mr Orban’s minister of justice, Mr Magyar went viral in early 2024 by quitting the party and posting videos denouncing its corruption on Facebook. Since then he has toured the country relentlessly and turned Tisza from a tiny local outfit into the dominant party of the opposition. Almost all other opposition parties, which had failed to beat Fidesz in election after election, dropped their campaigns to let Mr Magyar take the lead.

That move to end the opposition’s fragmentation reflects Hungary’s elaborate electoral system, which mixes proportional representation with single-member districts and thus gives a big advantage to large parties. Mr Orban had gradually increased the system’s tilt towards Fidesz over the years, packing opposition-leaning voters into fewer districts and granting votes to ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring countries. The only other outfit likely to make it into Parliament this time is the ultranationalist Our Homeland party, which looked to have won about 6% of the vote. Because of the system’s complexity and the late counting of votes from abroad, the full results may not be clear until April 18th.

Nonetheless, Mr Magyar’s win is a historic turning-point for Hungary, and perhaps for Europe as a whole. The EU has blocked most aid to Hungary over Mr Orban’s violations of the rule of law. Mr Orban, for his part, has used his veto to attempt to hamper the bloc’s sanctions on Russia and aid to Ukraine. Mr Magyar has vowed to immediately restore the rule of law, stop cosying up to Vladimir Putin and restore the flow of funds from Brussels.

For many Hungarians, that was the decisive issue: not so much declining prosperity as the place of their country in the world. In recent weeks there were mounting reports of Russian aid to Fidesz. Mr Orban campaigned on maintaining access to cheap Russian oil and gas, and whipped up antipathy to Ukraine. That played poorly among pro-European voters. Hungary is “a country that has been struggling and waiting for decades to join the western part of Europe”, says Gabor Vamosi, a financial manager who was standing beside the Danube at Tisza’s election-night rally in Budapest.

Others phrase the point less delicately. When Mr Magyar addressed the rally late in the evening, he said Hungary “wants to be a European country again”. Many in the crowd responded by chanting Ruszkik haza, “Russians go home.”

That rally was at first subdued. Hungary’s capital is a liberal bastion that has put up with a populist-right government for a decade and a half. Mr Orban punished it by taking away public money because it refused to back Fidesz. Its voters have experienced disappointment many times. But as the results began to turn overwhelmingly towards Tisza, horns began honking all over the city. (Many honked in a rhythm suggesting the phrase Ruszkik haza.) After Mr Orban conceded, its residents poured into the city’s nightlife districts to celebrate. ■