Hungary's New Era

Let's clear something up. No matter what, yesterday was another signal that Europe is turning away from the United States and charting its own path. Trump and company went all in on Hungary's long-serving Prime Minister, Victor Orban, even sending JD Vance to stump for him - and they came up short.

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, center, flanked by his team reacts after a parliamentary election in Budapest, Hungary, Sunday, April 12, 2026. Petr David Josek—Associated Press

Hungary held national elections yesterday, and it was a massive rejection of incumbent Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's past 16 years of increasingly illiberal rule and ever-closer ties with Russia. Former Orban protege Peter Magyar has been swept into office on a landside big enough to pretty much give him a blank check to do whatever he wants.

Let's look at the two players. The incumbent, Viktor Orbán, was born in 1963 in a small Hungarian village. Orbán got his political start as an anti-communist student activist — actually receiving a scholarship funded by George Soros to study at Oxford, which makes his later crusade against Soros one of history's more pointed ironies. He founded Fidesz as a liberal youth movement, then pivoted hard right as the political winds shifted in the 1990s. He served a first term as Prime Minister from 1998 to 2002, lost, spent eight years in opposition, and came back in 2010 with a parliamentary supermajority and a very different agenda.

Meanwhile, Péter Magyar was born in 1980, so he'll become the third millennial head of government in Europe and only the fifth in the entire world (skipping over my own Gen-X, which is fitting because no one remembers us). He trained as a lawyer and built his career largely within the Fidesz orbit, including a senior role at a state-owned company. His ex-wife, Judit Varga, served as Orbán's Justice Minister. The marriage's very public collapse in early 2024 became something bigger when Magyar began speaking openly about what he'd witnessed from the inside, including corruption, abuse of power, and a system designed to enrich a small circle at everyone else's expense. He then launched his Tisza Party and went from political unknown to leading the opposition in under twelve months.

You probably hear "free and fair elections" all the time. But what does that mean? Reuters reported that the 2022 election, in which Orban was reelected in a landslide, was "free" but not "fair." Pretty much every country in the world, except for the few lingering literal absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, holds elections. "Free and Fair" means you're free to vote for whoever you want, and the "fairness" comes from everyone being on the same level playing field, based on whatever rules that country has. China, for example, is another example of free but unfair, because you're free to vote for whoever you like, but your only options come from the Chinese Communist Party. So, not all elections are created equal. In Hungary, the last elections saw state-funded ads and biased media coverage from stations purchased over the years by Orban and his allies.

It's like expecting Obama to get a fair shot on Fox News. But all you have to watch is Fox News. So voters are naturally going to swing a certain way. Except in Hungary, their Fox Newses were all literally (if not figuratively) owned by the Republican Party.

But I think even Orban saw the writing on the wall, and the odds were stacked against him to the point where he couldn't rig the system. Politicians who are winning don't import foreign leaders to campaign for them. It's not a position of strength — and when your party is xenophobic, there's a delicious irony in bringing in foreign workers to do the job no one at home is willing to do. It's begging for a prom date. You might end up at the dance, but it costs you your self-respect to get there — and like with Iran negotiations and the last pope, the JD kiss of death struck again.

JD Vance campaigning in Hungary, Jonathan Ernst-Pool/Getty Images

As an American, it was embarrassing to watch. Since becoming a superpower, the US didn't campaign for foreign candidates — we didn't need to. From Truman to Obama, whoever was president was the major player, and the Western world worked with them. CIA-backed “interventions” aside, we left elections to the voters. But there's a deeper strategy and logic behind supporting Orban - at least in Trump’s opinion. With Orbán in office, Europe stayed less unified and was unable to fill the void left by an increasingly isolated United States. America First requires a weaker Europe — a strong, unified EU is a direct alternative to Trump's vision of American dominance. Now, without an automatic veto coming from Budapest, that alternative becomes possible.

But what can little old Hungary do to keep Europe from making any progress? The European Union is a collection of European states, but doesn't really do anything big or transformative unless every one of its 27 members - from super wealthy and powerful Germany in Northern Europe to tiny little Cyprus in the Mediterranean - all have to agree on all the details. It's set up this way because the national governments all have sovereignty, so when the EU really throws the weight that 450 million European citizens give it, every national government has to be on board. That's the loophole Orbán has spent sixteen years exploiting — and the one the UK never quite understood before Brexit made it moot.

For over a decade, Hungary has been the thorn in the side of the rest of Europe. Occasionally, you have "less-than-liberal" (and I don't mean left-wing progressive, I mean classical liberal) governments come and go like Poland, Czechia, etc. But Victor Orban has been in office since 2010 and has vetoed lots of things that the rest of Europe is in favor of - like more support of Ukraine, foreign sanctions, or updates to energy or immigration policy. Lots of people point to Orban's closeness to Putin and Russia - and it makes sense because a stronger Europe is a bad thing for Russia, just like it’s a bad thing for “America First”.

Yet, record turnout can overwhelm even a rigged system. Orban has called Hungary an "illiberal democracy" for over a decade. He's gerrymandered seats to a point that would make Texas blush, buying independent media, packing their supreme court, essentially outlawing George Soros, and using every tool at his disposal - there comes a point where if turnout overwhelms what you can rig, it's impossible to hide the results. Turnout reached a record high - almost 78% of Hungarians showed up at the polls, over 10% more than the last election in 2022.

Incoming Prime Minister, Peter Magyar, (CNN)

But it's not a progressive renaissance in Budapest. While Prime Minister in waiting Peter Magyar's victorious Tisza is centre-right, he himself is a former member of Orban's party - so the biggest differences are being pro-EU (compared to Orban's VERY eurosceptic outlook) and a return to those liberal democratic norms such as free-and-fair elections, judicial independence, breaking up media monopolies, and re-writing the electoral system to remove the advantages Orban wrote for his own Fidesz party. And since that's largely the sum total of what Orbán was known for, it's a huge shift, even if everything remains on the political right.

I'm not here to say that right-wing populism is dead. But…it's on the ropes. Could it find new life with a new generation of Andrew Tate-fueled millennials taking the banner? Possibly. But that requires the old guard to give up power, and if there's one thing right-wing populists hate, it's giving up power.

AfD in Germany could make more gains, but Trump's unpopularity is weighing down right-wing parties in the UK, France, and across Europe. Could Orban have won if Trump's unilateral decision to attack Iran and therefore make gas prices rise by up to 30% in the past month had not happened? Maybe. But the breadth of his rejection, with a massive turnout giving the new government what is essentially a big enough majority to undo everything Orban has done, probably means he was doomed to begin with, and not even JD Vance going straight to Trump's voicemail last week could have saved him.