Budapest is the Test

The general narrative about European politics since 2022 has been a resurgent right-wing.  From the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to Reform’s rise in the UK - populism and xenophobia have been on the rise, and incumbent parties along the center have been punished, especially if they’re in government.  Macron is battered and is largely a lame duck as he limps through the last year of his second term, and Germany’s short experiment with a traffic light coalition across the political center was a short, unhappy one.  And on both sides of the Atlantic, parties in power get the blame for not being able to correct economic shocks from Ukraine, and likely Iran, in the coming months.  

But is that still holding with an increasingly unshackled Trump harassing seemingly every move made by Europe?  Recently, several European states have gone to the polls, and each has an interesting nugget of political science to digest.  Across France, Denmark, and Italy, right-wing and far-right forces ran hard and largely fell short. Hungary, where the definitive test comes on April 12, may be the most consequential data point of all.

Start with France. The headlines from the March 22 runoffs tell of the resilience of the mainstream center-left and center-right, whose candidates held on to every major city hall in the country. (The Conversation) Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National tripled its mayoral and council positions since 2020, with Jordan Bardella claiming nearly 70 municipalities and 3,000 newly elected RN officials across municipal councils. (RT) By his own metrics, that constitutes a historic breakthrough. By the metrics that actually matter for the 2027 presidential race, it does not.

RN invested heavily in Toulon, but lost despite a 13-point first-round lead, as the anti-far-right vote held across large urban centers. (France 24) In Marseille, the center-right refused to ally with the far right, and the center-left refused to merge with the radical left—a double refusal that encapsulates the resilience of the political mainstream in France's major cities. (The Conversation)

The one genuinely alarming result for the mainstream right came in Nice, where Éric Ciotti — who broke with the center-right LR in 2024 to ally with the RN — defeated his former mentor, the outgoing mayor Christian Estrosi. (The Conversation) That result raises an uncomfortable question: if crossing the cordon sanitaire is electorally rewarding at the local level, how long before ambition encourages others to follow?

The French presidential campaign will answer that next year. Current polling places the RN in a commanding first-round position: Bardella polls at roughly 35 to 37 percent in first-round surveys, while Le Pen — if her appeal clears the embezzlement conviction that currently bars her from office — sits at approximately 34 percent. (Hungarian Conservative / Elabe) However, RN has been there before, leading in the first round in 2017 and 2022, before opposition coalescing around Macron’s center/center-right agenda in the second round.  On the center-right, Édouard Philippe, who retained Le Havre in the municipal elections, has announced his candidacy and polls around 21 percent; on the left, Raphaël Glucksmann is positioned as a frontrunner, though projections a year out remain preliminary. (France 24) These local elections confirm that the RN's road to the Élysée runs through a France not yet willing to hand over the keys. (The Conversation) The question is whether that holds with Le Pen on the ballot, Bardella leading the first round, and a left still too fractured to present a unified alternative.

Heading north, Denmark's snap election on March 24 produced a result that neither bloc could claim as a victory. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen's Social Democrats lost 12 seats compared with 2022, posting their worst result since 1903. As a result, the left-leaning red bloc fell six seats short of the 90 needed for a majority. Meanwhile, the right-leaning blue bloc fared no better, finishing with 77 seats. In addition, far-right immigration-skeptic parties combined for roughly 15% of the vote—consistent with their polling over the past several decades, indicating consolidation rather than a surge (The Local Denmark).

The election was called early partly because Frederiksen's handling of the Trump-Greenland confrontation had given her a temporary rally-round-the-flag boost. By election day, voters had set Greenland aside, and domestic issues took center stage. (CNBC) The only clear winner was Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen's Moderate party, which, with 14 seats, holds the kingmaker position neither bloc can govern without. (The Local Denmark) The outcome is coalition negotiations of uncertain duration, with a parliament too fragmented to be easily read as a mandate for anything.

Meanwhile, Italy's referendum last week delivered the sharpest rebuke of the three. The Meloni government's "Nordio Reform" — a constitutional overhaul of the judiciary that would have separated prosecutorial and judicial career paths, split the High Council of the Magistracy into two bodies, and introduced appointment by lottery — was rejected 53.2% to 46.8% in a higher-than-expected turnout, a significant blow to the government. (Wikipedia) The most significant precedent for this kind of referendum outcome is December 2016, when Prime Minister Matteo Renzi personalized a referendum campaign, lost the vote, and resigned shortly after, triggering immediate government shock and wider political realignment. (Institute of New Europe )

While Meloni has no obligation to resign, the result is her first large defeat for her government and serves as a reality check that constrains the government's constitutional ambitions and emboldens a judicial establishment that has resisted the reform from the start. The reform's opponents framed the issue as one of judicial independence; its supporters framed it as accountability overdue for 40 years. Critics raised the concern that if approved, the reform could have been the first step in a constitutional transformation well beyond its immediate scope, strengthening the executive in Italy's constitutional balance. (Verfassungsblog) Voters, on a technically complex question without a turnout quorum, chose to reject it anyway. That takes political will, or at a minimum, a motivated opposition coalition. Both exist in Italy, even under a government with a solid parliamentary majority.

Germany offers a partial exception to the pattern, and a useful caveat. Two state elections in March produced right-wing gains that the firewall contained but were hard to ignore. In Baden-Württemberg on March 8, the right-wing AfD secured 19% — nearly doubling its 2021 result — while the center-left SPD collapsed to 5.5 percent, its worst state result on record. (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies) Two weeks later, in Rhineland-Palatinate, the AfD achieved its best-ever result in a western German state, rising by more than 11 points to roughly 20 percent, ending 35 years of SPD governance in a state the center-left had treated as its structural home territory. (Euronews) In both cases, the firewall is holding, as no other party agreed to govern with the AfD, leaving it as a growing opposition force rather than a governing one. (Wikipedia) Eastern state elections in September, where AfD polling sits near 40 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, will test whether that containment strategy remains viable at those numbers.  If the CDU/SPD coalition holds, they should be able to contain the threat from the AfD.  In other countries, that would only delay the inevitable, as voters would eventually lend their votes to AfD to address any perceived issues.  However, in Germany, there is still a vivid recent memory of the letting the far-right govern without any checks.

This brings the story to Budapest, and the election that could redraw the European right's path. Viktor Orbán is facing the most serious challenge to his grip on power in decades, with Fidesz trailing the opposition Tisza party by double digits ahead of the April 12 vote. (Bloomberg) Péter Magyar’s center-right, yet pro-European Tisza party has focused on economic stagnation, crumbling public services, and the corruption Magyar describes as systemic. After contracting in 2023, Hungary's economy grew at an average of only 0.5 percent in 2024 and 2025, well below the EU average, with a budget deficit projected at 5 percent for both years. (CSIS)  Therefore, Orban doesn’t have an economic record to run on.

Orbán's response has followed the playbook that's worked time and time again over his decade-and-a-half in office.  He frames the opposition as a foreign-controlled threat, invokes the specter of Hungary being dragged into the Ukraine war, and uses the government to his advantage. In other words, they’re not “free and fair” elections.  On March 23, leaders of over a dozen European far-right parties gathered in Budapest to deliver a show of solidarity, each taking the stage to urge Hungarians to vote for Fidesz. (AP / US News) Obran, feeling as if he needed to enlist outside help, tells a story in and of itself. When a leader brings in foreign politicians to validate his record, he’s not running from a position of strength.

Hungary's electoral system systematically favors the winning party in both single-member constituencies and party lists, meaning a Tisza victory in the popular vote does not guarantee a parliamentary majority. (IDM) So, even a narrow Fidesz win in diaspora-heavy constituencies could complicate everything. Dismantling the institutional structures Fidesz has built over 16 years would require a two-thirds parliamentary majority which is a threshold Magyar is unlikely to reach even in an optimistic scenario, meaning Orbán retains tools to constrain any successor government. (IDM)

Taken together, these five elections sketch a European political landscape in which right-wing parties are finding real limits on their advance, urban seats they cannot hold, referenda they cannot win, incumbencies they cannot sustain on fear alone. The Trumpian template that energized these movements has not transferred cleanly to European soil. In France, the republican cordon is held in every major city, while in Denmark, the far right's immigration-skeptic bloc stayed within its historic range. In Italy, voters rejected a government-sponsored constitutional reform in the middle of a term, and in Germany, record AfD gains in the west produced zero governing power. The question Hungary answers in two weeks is whether an illiberal government that pioneered the model can survive the moment the model stops working, or if Trump’s hostility to Europe is beginning to weigh down right-wing movements across the continent.