A political earthquake in Hungary

Viktor Orban, the longtime Christian nationalist leader of Hungary, was thrown out of office Sunday night by voters, and it wasn’t even close. Peter Magyar, leader of the upstart Tisza Party, won a landslide victory that removed a bone that had been in the European Union’s throat for 16 years.

You will be told that Orban’s loss is a resounding defeat for nationalism, populism, and Christian governance. Don’t you believe it. While Orban’s thumping defeat is indeed a massive symbolic loss for nationalist conservatives of the social and religious right, it is no victory for liberalism and globalism.

That’s because Magyar, the incoming prime minister, is no liberal. In fact, he spent years as part of the elite of Fidesz, Orban’s governing party. He was married to its justice minister until their acrimonious 2023 divorce.

A religious scandal, in fact, launched Magyar’s political career. In 2019, a man from a politically connected Calvinist family was sentenced for his role in trying to cover up a pedophile scandal at a state-run orphanage. The family reportedly appealed to Zoltan Balog, the Reformed bishop of Hungary and a former Orban cabinet minister, to ask for a pardon from Hungary’s president, Katalin Novak.

Novak, also a Calvinist, and a political protegé of Balog’s when he was in government, quietly granted the request. When an opposition journalist discovered it a year later, the story became a monumental scandal, given Fidesz’s strong pro-family, Christian profile. Both Novak and Judit Varga, the justice minister, resigned. Peter Magyar publicly accused Orban of scapegoating the women. He started his own political party, and now, two years later, is going to rule the country.

Corruption matters. For all the good he has done, on family policy and other things, Orban failed to shore up the underfunded health care system and public education. More importantly, Orban’s Fidesz has permitted far too much cronyism, and the creation of an oligarch class. Nobody liked it, but they overlooked it when the economy was good. But the economy here never recovered from Covid. When all boats are no longer rising, all eyes turn angrily to the yachts.

Even so, had Orban faced a liberal opponent, he would likely be headed into a fifth consecutive term. Hungary is not a particularly religious country, but it is culturally conservative and has a strong sense of national identity. Peter Magyar ran against Orban from the right. On the two issues that most vex the EU with Hungary—its hard line against mass migration and opposition to European involvement in the Ukraine war—Magyar and Orban agreed.

Once in office, if he’s faithful to his campaign promises, Magyar will either have to disappoint his backers in Brussels, or betray many of his voters.

In the election aftermath, the usual transatlantic liberal suspects are taking a victory lap. For years they’ve denounced Orban as a semi-fascist autocrat. How many semi-fascist autocrats offer gracious concession speeches after losing an election, as Orban did? This rhetoric was always propagandistic hatecraft by Soros-sympathizing globalists.

Their great Hun opponent, Viktor Orban, has been slain in electoral battle, but Orbanism lives on. That is, parties across Europe, and in Great Britain, who take a strong line against mass migration, and who stand for greater national sovereignty and a return to law and order, continue to grow in popularity, even as the centrist EU-loving parties decline. As Aris Roussinos of UnHerd commented, “Magyar’s victory seems less a defeat for the European Right than a generational evolution of it.”

Hungary’s young voters, who grew up knowing nothing but Orban’s rule, broke heavily for Magyar (whose name, if he ran in the United States, would be like “Peter the American”). Again: Outside cosmopolitan precincts in Budapest, the left has no traction in Hungary. This was a vote against economic stagnation and the political corruption of a party that has been too long in power. It was no mandate for Euro-liberalism. Orban may be going, but Orbanism is growing in western Europe.

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance placed a heavy bet on Orban, with the vice president coming over for a rally with Orban in the campaign’s final week. It didn’t help, and might actually have hurt Vance’s image. Nevertheless, U.S. commentators who interpret the Hungarian vote as a blow against Trumpism might be right, but not in the way that they think.

It’s like this: Populist nationalism remains popular, but if the economy stinks, and you make poor policy choices (like, say, launching an unpopular war), then voter tolerance for corruption and cronyism will grow short. It’s not enough to be a populist-nationalist; you also have to govern cleanly and competently. This is the real lesson of Orban’s defeat for American conservatives.

One can only hope Team Trump has the capacity to absorb it, and the time to reverse course. Unlike Hungary, the American left has a lot of support. But like Hungary, resentment against the chief executive is immense, and the desire for revenge is potent.