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Notes -
Orbán defeated
As I wrote about it yesterday, Orbán's defeat was clear from the polls, but the scale of it wasn't so sure and it is massive. If you'd like some background on what the topics and issues of the campaign were (not the typical culture wars that many online threads try to shoehorn this into) check that post, but let's now look at the results and what could come.
It's a landslide with a bigger supermajority (around 138-140 seats of 199) than any of Orbán's victories in the last 16 years (the largest was 135 seats). The turnout was 80%, the largest of all free elections since 1990 by a good margin (Orbán's previous defeat in 2002 held the record with 73.5% turnout).
However, this was not only a defeat of Orbán but also of the old opposition. The Socialist party (the legal successor of the old communist state party from before 1990) and its spinoff previously headed by the former Socialist PM Gyurcsány (2004-2009) have been demolished too. The new parliament will be filled with many new faces, and most of them are young enough that they were not involved with or socialized under the pre-1990 system - which I see as a very positive development - and they were also not politicians of either the left or the right in more recent times.
This parliament will have three parties, the broad-tent center-right pro-EU Tisza (138-140 seats), Orbán's pro-Putin right-wing Fidesz (53-55), and the radical nationalist / antivax-right Mi Hazánk (6). The left-wing and progressive liberal parties did not run for the election and instead supported Tisza. This extra-parliamentary party landscape is quite small, but the liberal-progressive centrist Momentum stands out as one that may have a chance to return in a more proportional electoral system and had at least in the past passed the 5% threshold in an EU Parliament election. The green Dialogue for Hungary is only relevant as being the party of the liberal mayor of Budapest, but never had significant measurable support. Now I haven't mentioned the last party who contested yesterday's election: the formerly joke party Two-Tailed Dog Party received less than 1% of the vote and are on the way to irrelevance. It is therefore a moment where the whole political system is prime for refreshment.
Tisza is unlikely to remain as such a broadly popular party. Their main feature is and was in this election that they could form one unified block under a charismatic leader who could unite all opposing sentiment to Orbán's system, from various disparate directions, while not being tainted by the "old opposition". Previously the opposition block always had in its ranks the despised pre-2010 Socialists and their spinoff Democratic Coalition (DK), which simply could not gather the necessary amount of votes. Magyar managed to win by remaining a blank slate on which anyone can project their desires. He avoided divisive topics in the campaign. He promised to keep the southern border fence and not to accept a migration deal, but didn't talk much about the asylum system and immigration. He does not support a fast-tracking of Ukraine's EU membership, but he is against Putin and much less hostile to Ukraine than Orbán. Magyar did not take part in the Pride march last year, which was banned by Orbán and anyway turned out to become the largest participation ever in a Pride march. He supported it in generic terms, the liberty to love who you want etc., but didn't focus on these topics. Instead he toured the countryside in national costumes, always carrying the Hungarian flag, singing folk songs at rallies, visiting Hungarian communities in neighboring countries, wearing national symbols, referring to historical heroes, national poets etc. However, his party does contain more liberal people as well, and social issues will likely be led by Kriszta Bódis who wrote illustrated children's books about gay love and so on. As I said, it is a heterogeneous block.
The supermajority allows reshaping Hungary from the ground up. Magyar has already promised to create a new constitution, and in contrast to Orbán's single-party constitution, it shall be voted on by the people in a referendum. He already called for the resignation of president of the republic Tamás Sulyok, who is even less significant of a figure than would be implied by the symbolic nature of the presidency in Hungary - he is for all intents and purposes an Orbán puppet who signs all laws without question, just like the previous presidents have been in his system. Magyar promises to also join the European Public Prosecutor's Office, and review EU and state fund mismanagement and corruption, to investigate FM Szijjarto's Russian ties and to retrieve stolen wealth by Orbán's inner circle. Such promises we have already seen many times when governments were changed, and usually nothing came of it, there were background deals and the economic sector found new ways to get close to the new system. What may be different this time is that Magyar seems to have a real personal motivation to see the old regime prosecuted. And there is massive public expectation of this and failing to deliver could destabilize this patchwork coalition, as the main topics holding it together are being outraged by Orbán's corruption and the state of public services, and the state of the propaganda media. Improving the education system and hospitals and the punctuality of trains is a much slower and harder task especially when the economy is on a downturn. So he will need some symbolic wins.
Overall, what I see is that post-1990 Hungary had an era of somewhat naive attempt at copying western democracy, switching the governing side each 4 years, until around 2006-2010 which was the first big flip and disillusionment and phase change into the Orbán era, and now there is another big reordering and phase change. I believe Hungarians, mainly the intellectuals, have become much less naive than they were in the 90s. Orbán ditched many unwritten rules and will have a hard time to criticize anything Tisza may do, including using legal trickery to remove Orbán's puppets from high positions even if they were elected for 9 or 12 years (except the chairman of the national bank, whom he said he'd leave there not to scare the markets) and to starve off Orbán's economic empire. Anything Magyar may do, there will be plenty of examples to point to in Orbán's conduct, and backed by an even larger mandate with record turnout, it will be difficult to claim that all this is really done by Brussels and Zelensky. Of course Magyar will want to present himself as not simply copying Orbán's methods. One big promise is to introduce a two-term limit for prime ministers, which is unusual in parliamentary systems, but signals that he doesn't have ambitions for serving as long as Orbán.
I guess all those people handwringing about democratic backsliding were full of shit. Orban used to be popular, and now he's not. Simple as.
The real question is, what changed since 2022? The main things are the prolonged invasion of Ukraine and the return of Trump. Was this a foreign policy election?
You can check my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3671/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/430673?context=8#context
In 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war was very fresh, the invasion was barely more than a month old at the time of the election. The opposition candidate said a few stupid things in interviews about sending weapons and possibly Hungarian soldiers to Ukraine if NATO would decide so. Or that Ukraine is fighting our war too, and "blood is more important than oil" etc, which were blasted all around the pro-Fidesz media, there were huge billboards etc. saying that Fidesz will keep Hungary out of the war and will keep a strategic calm while the opposition would let Hungary slip into the war. It scared many people.
But even the baseline was different. In 2022, the opposition was a multi-party patchwork which included the despised previous Socialist PM who was in power before Orbán, and there were constant internal squabbles between the opposition parties, leading to an ineffective campaign.
I don't think this is so black-and-white. Of course some ignorant people claimed that Orbán is like Erdogan or Lukashenka or Putin. He never was that sort of dictator with blood on his hands, people never fell out of windows of tall buildings, journalists were not imprisoned, there was no novichok, etc. The democratic backsliding is about making a joke out of institutions, placing puppets everywhere from his small inner circle including the constitutional court, the public prosecutor's office, the president of the republic, the national bank, etc, funneling about a quarter of all public contract money to his frontmen, making a joke out of the public state media (you cannot imagine it, it is parody-level extreme bias, something you couldn't imagine if your standard is the left-bias of western media), taking over a lot of private media, threatening to pass a law that would crush them under claims of being foreign agents, constantly keeping some state of emergency to make passing laws even easier, and ruling by decree, on a whim. First with the justification of the dangers of migration, then covid, then the Ukraine war, there was always some special emergency state for the legal system. They often passed totally unrelated laws and bypassed the need for public tenders and gave government contracts to their friends and themselves with the justification of the state of emergency. They constantly gerrymandered and originally tailored the electoral law to benefit them. They won a 2/3 constitutional parliamentary supermajority in 2014 with less than 45% of the votes because the voting system they designed benefited them. The system forced parties to join up, since one large party and many small ones simply results in this distorted outcome. But they made sure to give enough media space to small parties to avoid having any one of them grow too big. So in many of the elections a lot of energy was spent on the squabbles of the opposition parties and in what form they should run together, what to do with the party of former PM Gyurcsány who still had significant support, but not enough to win alone, but many voters outright rejected Gyurcsány, so it was a neither with, neither without situation.
Being a former Fidesz insider, Magyar could draw a line and he held to it throughout it all, that he will not collaborate with anyone from the former opposition parties. Every single person of their candidates is someone new, who was never an MP, and never held high political positions. Gyurcsány even resigned from chairing his party and it was taken over by his wife (whom he also divorced). The small parties also just withdrew from the election. But by then they were already led by unknown people and had very low support, each below the 5% threshold, because the 2022 parliamentary and 2024 European elections led to resignations of known figures in those opposition parties.
It's certainly a combination of incompetence (or deals with Fidesz) of the opposition parties, combined with good machinations by Orbán, tending to his little garden of opposition parties well. But he also centralized power in a way that can be labeled authoritarian and made a puppet show out of the institutional checks and balances. The country was basically ruled by Orbán's college dorm friends and his childhood friends.
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The atmosphere in Budapest last night was quite something. The streets were awash with people getting piss drunk, shouting, high-fiving passersby, climbing up on buses, cars honking late into the night; one could really imagine this is what it was like when the Berlin Wall fell. I almost can't wait for the inevitable disappointment to set in so I can get more mileage out of the evergreen "first time?" image macro.
I really had the sense that the opposition supporters were deathly anxious right until the moment the preliminary results started rolling in, perhaps expecting some Trump 2016 style flood of dark-matter enemy voters or shenanigans popping their bubble. Someone with good understanding of crowd psychology had the great idea to let a veritable rave to be held in the square in front of the parliament building through the evening after polls closed (tagline: "More Techno in Parliament") which allowed people to blow off steam, but judging from people's demeanor and the sheer amount of vomit puddles around its periphery I would guess there was a lot of steam built up to blow off indeed (while opposition (after)parties through the previous days had more of an exam night vibe).
There's definitely something to be said about the youth involvement in this election. In previous elections, young people were not very politically active and were apathetic. There were always some "activist" types who cared and who Deutsche Welle or Arte could make nice videos about, the slam poetry folks etc, but this time it really was something different. There was a bit of this already in 2022, but the story was much less clear and there was a lot of intra-opposition squabbling and the candidate was just not as talented.
It's also a generational effect. There are now many young voters whose only political memories are from Orbán's system. If, say, you first understand something about politics when you're 10, then everyone under 26 have no memory of anything else than Orbán being in power. And young people really resonated with the appearance of Magyar, it started with a YouTube interview on a channel watched by many young people, and they could follow the story right from the beginning, many "grew up" in a political sense with this story, it required little prior knowledge, and it started with a morally clear cut black and white story, the pardon scandal where Orbán's allies pardoned someone convicted for covering up child sexual abuse in a children's home. This led to a huge protest (independent of Péter Magyar) led by young social media influencers to stand up for children in children's homes overall. Many young people were reached by this campaign and Magyar could channel this moment and flurry around himself and formed a new movement. People were looking for someone to rally around and the 2022 defeat of the opposition had blown up the old opposition, so there was a vacuum. Then in the last summer, 2025, essentially all festivals and concerts were loud with chants of "Mocskos Fidesz!" (literally "dirty Fidesz", meaning something like "scumbag Fidesz" in emotional tone), which is really a new development. Young people used to say they want to get away from politics and propaganda during these festivals and they want to forget about it all for at least those times. This time, though, there was such strong consensus in the youth that there was basically no controversy in this.
As shown in this poll, which turned out to be remarkably accurate to the election results, young people in the 18-29 bracket support Tisza with 73% and Fidesz with 11%, and as you go higher with the age bracket, it gradually moves towards Fidesz majority with 28% Tisza and 48% Fidesz for 65+ (the gender gap that Fidesz is relatively stronger with women than with men is most likely due to men dying earlier, and there being more 65+ women than men). For educated people, it's 63% Tisza, 19% Fidesz. Also in Budapest it's 58% Tisza and 23% Fidesz. If you're an educated young person in Budapest, these all would stack up leading to minuscule support for Fidesz in that demographic you likely saw in Budapest.
There was also a massive concert last Friday, two days before the election, with 50 different musicians and bands performing one explicitly regime-critical song of theirs and it was headlined by one of the most popular singers Azahriah (years ago, even Orbán had a Tiktok video where he claimed he likes Azahriah in an attempt to be with the fellowkids). Azahriah is massive with young people, he filled the largest stadium of Hungary (Puskás Aréna, 67k seats) 3 times on 3 consequent days. On this even, the two hero whistleblowers (one a police captain who uncovered an intelligence plot against Tisza party and one a military captain who drew attention to Orbán's son's role in Hungary's mission to Chad and mismanagement in the military) made a surprise appearance on stage, and gave emotional speeches. I would also not underestimate these moments. Everything came together to "click" right for the election day. (There's also a genuine admiration worthy for a popstar towards Magyar from some young women and high school age girls, which would be worth its own exploration, regarding Tiktok and girls painting their nails with the Tisza logo or Magyar's face etc, though this is not really my space...)
Of course they will be disillusioned. I see it on Reddit that they are very enthusiastic right now, it's their first time seeing a non-Orbán in the role of Prime Minister(-elect), and project all their imagination and wishes for endless possibilities. It's really a honeymoon phase right now. Of course, people will have to learn, but this is how youth is. I had the same hope about Orbán back in 2010 when we finally sent Gyurcsány away and Orbán promised a break with all their corruption and campaigned with very similar sentiment as Magyar today. Including about the media, the "new aristocracy" sitting atop Hungarians, about dumb ads and propaganda etc. But I do think we just need this naive energy sometimes, we can't have everyone be cranky old buggers. Based on today's press conference I think Magyar will hold his position well, he's already proving less than fully eager to please whatever they ask for from Brussels. He was measured and didn't overpromise on Ukraine, LGBT or migration, regardless of what the reporters would have wanted to hear. He still wants the opt-out from the 90 billion credit for Ukraine, he still wants no migration pacts, and gave a balanced answer about LGBT rights, saying that everyone should be able to live as they want and love who they want as long as they don't break any laws.
I remember this type of feeling after the 1997 election in the UK. I didn't even support Labour, but the Tories who had been fucking things up since before I was born were finally kicked out, and it felt good.
How did that turn out?
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As Cremieux was covering, Hungary has failed on growth and failed on wealth under Orban's rules. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2043499458395050471, no doubt related to the embrace of retarded socialist style thought among the "postliberal" crowd.
He says
But I have to disagree. They know the economy is important and do try things, Orban put price controls on plenty of different products and services, it's just that those with authoritarian tendencies are also almost always egotistical on everything else.
The issue is that of course the people who think they are and know better than the rest of society on pretty much everything else are also prone to thinking they can control the economy too, and vice versa as to why many socialists tend to end up authoritarian. "Have the government get out of the way because the market does better without you" doesn't make sense to the likes of Orban or Trump.
These are basically propaganda tools. He does this then put billboards everywhere, mandates signs in supermarkets, sends letters in the mail, mandates little orange highlighted boxes on utility bills about how the government saved you X HUF on this bill etc. This is a political product.
Their strategy for the economy is not very deep. Keeping the car assembly plants and now they had the big idea to go all in with the electric vehicle transition and brought Chinese battery factories in massive amounts to Hungary, but this gamble doesn't seem to play out. They brought BYD to Szeged, which does little more than launder tariffs, as they just do the last phase of assembly, but they can then claim EU origins and avoid some fees. There is no high-value contribution here. I'm not saying that it's easy, given the free movement within the EU, it's hard to retain the best experts, and the periphery is by default this kind of assembly place. But Hungary doesn't have great natural resources or oil, even the agriculture is not so competitive. Now, I'm not an economist, but it's clear that the trajectory has been disappointing compared to the regional performance of other Central European countries.
But also regarding social policies and culture war stuff, they have such a primitive and utterly incompetent "intellectual sphere" that you will simply not find thinking people who can go along with that. They try to top-down manufacture Youtube podcasts, some kind of Hungarian Joe Rogans, but their viewership is just tanking. They tried bringing in popular trash celebrities, like the primitive rapper Dopeman, to whose podcast Orbán went twice during the campaign, or the other criminal-looking rapper Jaber. Their Mathias Corvinus Collegium think-tank is just a bootlicking scaffold copy of American think tanks. There really is a dearth of thoughtful backing for any of Orbán's social policies. It's all about winning the moment and doing something for the polls, being able to put something on the billboards. But I even doubt that Orbán has any real principles at all. He turns like a sunflower to whichever direction he hopes to gain from.
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I love that his name is Peter Magyar. Imagine if the POTUS was called Joe America.
Or if the President of France were named Charles de Gaulle.
How did that not occur to me, damn.
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I had a Finnish friend whose surname was Suomi ("Finland" in Finnish)
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A Kiwi Farms user claims:
The USAian person most often memed in an equivalent manner is Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.
The best British example is former Home Secretary and Vice-President of the European Commission Leon Brittan
De Gaulle remains the best example globally, I think.
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In general geographical names are extremely common in Hungary. Not only countries, but also regions like Alföldi, but also cities such as Kecskeméty and of course rivers such as Tisza. It is just the way it is.
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Also Cseh (Czech) and Rácz (Serb) are quite common, and somewhat less common Orosz (Russian), Görög (Greek), Ruszin (Ruthenian).
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