Péter Magyar’s landslide victory in the Hungarian elections last month has been hailed in the Western media as a decisive rejection of ‘illiberal democracy’, with ramifications for populist-nationalist movements and would-be autocrats worldwide. The scale of the electorate’s rejection of Viktor Orbán, who was seeking a fifth consecutive term after sixteen years in power, was certainly emphatic. Turnout rose to an unprecedented 80 per cent, while support for Orbán’s Fidesz shrank from 3.1 to 2.5 million. Magyar’s centre-right Tisza party increased its total in virtually every constituency in the country. The mood in Budapest was jubilant, with Orbán losing in both the upscale districts of the Buda hills and among less-credentialled voters on the outskirts of Pest. Magyar also overtook Orbán in the medium-sized cities where conservative, Catholic middle-class families once formed a crucial support base for Fidesz. Even in villages with populations under 5,000, where Orbán’s propaganda, vote-buying and voter-intimidation strategies have historically been most effective, the opposition tally rose considerably. Fidesz’s share of the 199-seat parliament has been more than halved, from 135 down to 52, with Orbán himself announcing that he would not take up the seat he won. Tisza’s 53 per cent of the vote, meanwhile, has translated into a super-majority of 141 MPs.
What accounts for the dramatic unseating of Hungary’s longest-serving head of state? Magyar was a well-positioned challenger. The son of a well-connected family of judges and politicians, he is a former Fidesz insider who left the party in 2024 in the wake of a major abuse scandal at a state-run children’s home; the controversial pardoning of some of those involved implicated his ex-wife, Orbán’s justice minister, who resigned. A shrewd user of social media – where he deflects attacks with memes and shares his fitness routines – the telegenic 45-year-old campaigned as an honest Christian Democrat and conservative. Magyar made the issue of ‘democracy’ a material one through his focus on the neglect of the health and education systems, arguing that culture war obsessions with ‘gender ideology’ and liberal NGOs have distracted Orbán from good governance. He also campaigned relentlessly on the corruption and cronyism of Orbán and his associates, which, aside from the direct misappropriation and misallocation of public money, gave the European Commission grounds to deny Hungary access to billions of euros of much-needed EU funds.
Orbán, by contrast, promised to restore imports of Russian fossil fuel and campaigned as the ‘peace’ candidate fighting for Hungary’s national interest against the warmongers in Brussels. He touted his consistent opposition to EU funding and arms transfers for Ukraine, and his endorsement of a swift conclusion to the war with territorial concessions from Kyiv (he vetoed an EU aid package to Ukraine worth €90 billion in March – now lifted by Magyar). Campaign ads about young Hungarian men dying in the Donbass appeared to fall flat, however. Orbán’s ‘peace’ candidacy was also undermined by his dutiful support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza and, most recently, for the US-Israeli war on Iran. While he pledged to lower the cost of living, his record in power counted against him.
The withholding of EU funding certainly gave Orbán less fiscal room and became key to Magyar’s campaign. But Western commentators have tended to overemphasize the issue at the expense of more profound economic shifts. As David Broder has pointed out, while ‘many accounts focus on Orbán’s authoritarian hold on power’ – his reforms of the constitution, stacking the judiciary and influence over the media and other institutions – ‘the fact that Orbán has now been ousted at the ballot box tells us that he had relied on a more organic kind of support that has been exhausted’. Coming to power in the wake of the global financial crisis, Orbán promised ‘sovereignty’, a mantra he has continued to wield. Yet in political-economic terms, what he in practice developed was a regime of export-led development fuelled by attracting foreign investment – in effect playing the role of concierge for firms from Germany’s VW to South Korea’s Samsung to China’s BYD. Magyar ultimately won because Orbán lost control of the domestic coalition required to support this.
Orbán’s first decade in power was defined by an industrialization drive led by integration into German supply chains, while recent years have been characterized by a policy of what the sociologists Agnes Gagyi and Tamás Gerocs call ‘polyalignment’ – consolidating Hungary’s role in automakers’ supply chains while establishing a foothold in the EV economy, all while seeking to maintain access to cheap Russian energy. Orbán can boast of Hungary’s becoming a hub in European battery making; both Chinese and South Korean manufacturers have made historic investments in the country. Between 2014 and 2024 Hungary received $18 billion in EV-related investment from Chinese firms, outpaced only by Indonesia. Assuming that commitments by Westinghouse and Boeing aren’t reneged on under pressure from the Trump administration, Orbán’s final term may also be remembered for a reignition of American investment in Hungary.
This strategy, however, has not translated into broad-based prosperity. Fortunes have been made, particularly in the construction and service sectors. But the Hungary of today looks nothing like the storied Mittelstand of Switzerland or Bavaria, whose images Fidesz ideologues once dangled in front of voters. The effort to attract foreign investment meant government legislation that favours employers: weakening trade union rights, cutting back unemployment support, increasing overtime and helping to create the low-waged, exploitable workforce that appeals to multi-national corporations. The internal contradictions of this model – starving the public health and education systems despite investors’ demand for a healthy educated workforce – have produced a situation where Hungarian children suffer in abusive care homes and crumbling schools while international companies arrange restrictive work visas for workers from Ukraine and Vietnam. The past four years of high inflation have seen Hungary’s living standards fall to among the lowest in the EU, with sharply rising prices hitting the rural poor – once Orbán’s base – hardest. While in 2022, fears over the war in Ukraine and Orbán’s kulturkampf were sufficient to hold the coalition together, it has now unravelled.
Releasing EU funding to alleviate the strain on Hungary’s economy and social services will be the top priority of the incoming government; Magyar has already headed to Brussels to meet with Ursula von der Leyen (‘You have chosen Europe’, she crowed on X the day after the election). Reversing the ‘democratic backsliding’ will likely entail renationalizing Hungary’s universities, whose ownership and governance Orbán transferred to an array of foundations headed by private sector and Fidesz notables. The Tisza party programme also features commitments to increase trade union representation, combat corrupt works’ councils and uphold labour law against Hungary’s domineering foreign investors. But Magyar did not campaign loudly on these points, preferring to focus on cutting costs through stamping out graft and favouritism.
While Orbán has been roundly defeated electorally, he retains bastions of power in civil society and the commercial sphere. The extensive network of think-tanks on which he lavished state funds will continue to aid Fidesz in its role as opposition. By all indications, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Danube Institute and Századvég Institute will be well-resourced thorns in the side of the Magyar government. The fate of businesses that flourished under Orbán is less certain. The petrochemical company MOL and the bank OTP established themselves as regionally powerful corporations under Fidez, to such an extent that they are now largely independent of the party’s mafia. The day after the election the companies traded up on the Budapest stock exchange, presumably buoyed by relief among investors that the election went off peacefully, and perhaps at the prospect of the restoration of EU funds. Sándor Csányi, the billionaire owner of OTP, has expressed confidence in Magyar, despite his good relations with Orbán over the years. Other Fidesz-aligned capitalists have yet to declare their political intentions. Gábor Széles, owner of the major electronics assembly contractor in the country and a defender of past Orbán policies on labour rights, won’t be coming over to the Tisza side any time soon, and will likely wait to see how Fidesz reorganizes as an opposition party.
The organized left has been challenged by the current juncture. Nearly all lined up to support Magyar’s candidacy as the best opportunity to break with the Orbán system and return the country to a more law-abiding state in which the rights of workers, tenants and minorities might be defended. They will have to pivot to holding Magyar to account on the promises he made to invest in social housing, enforce labour laws against some of Hungary’s largest sources of foreign investment and empower unions and works’ councils – against his coalition’s conservative instincts and the precedent of his own former party. Magyar and Tisza benefited from years of progressive and worker-led agitation against Fidesz policies, from the mobilizations against the 2018 ‘slave law’ to more recent teacher-student strikes and protests. But rarely has Magyar acknowledged, let alone embraced, these forces. That he snubbed the Hungarian Trade Union Confederation when it requested an opportunity to express the demands of its membership during the election campaign does not bode well. Nevertheless, to maintain his new coalition, Magyar will have to balance the desires of foreign capital to develop the Hungarian maquiladora and the pliancy they’ve come to expect from Budapest, with the hopes of a younger generation inspired by his promise to deliver a more ‘humane’ Hungary. Even if he restores some constitutional order, Magyar will still face the challenge of governing Europe’s third-poorest country in a turbulent global environment.
Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘The Fractured Right’, NLR 126.