Viktor Orbán, the sole ruler of the European Union, has fallen.
Sunday’s election results in Hungary show that the opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has defeated Orban’s Fidesz party – the party’s first defeat in 20 years. Orbán called Magyar to accept the race within a few hours after the polls closed.
There is a reason for Fidesz’s longevity: After winning the 2010 elections, they had set the electoral field in their favor so that it was difficult for them to lose. That Magyar has won them over is a testament to his skill as a politician and the deep frustration of the Hungarian population with life under Fidesz.
His victory also needed to be won last minute amazing campaign and President Donald Trump to save Europe’s favorite MAGA leader, which included sending Vice President JD Vance to Hungary to march with Orbán last week. On the eve of the election, Trump promised to commit “full economic potential” of the United States to lift the Hungarian economy if Orbán asks.
But Magyar didn’t just win the election: He won with a majority, likely enough to get two-thirds of the seats in the Hungarian parliament. This would be the magic number: it is enough, according to Hungarian law, for Tisza to amend the constitution at will.
With such a large number, Magyar would be able to begin to dismantle the authoritarian regime that Orbán has spent his time building – and potentially restore true democracy to Hungary.
Without it, Tisza will hold the usual power but ultimately be limited in how to use it. Fidesz’s influence over institutions such as the judiciary and the presidency would limit their ability to undo much of what Fidesz has already done. The most likely scenario: Tisza has four disappointing years in power, accomplishes a few things, then returns power to Fidesz.
It largely depends on the exact ways in which the votes are counted. But now, for the first time in a very long time, there is real hope for Hungarian democracy.
How to win authoritarian elections
To understand how remarkable Magyar’s victory is, you need to understand how much Orbán had stacked against him.
After Orbán’s first term in power, from 1998 to 2002, his party claimed they were cheated – and he vowed not to lose again. Over the next eight years, he and his allies in Fidesz developed a series of complex and precise plans to change Hungarian law to build what Orbán called a “political force field” that could hold power for decades.
When they won two-thirds of the vote in the 2010 election, they did put these ideas into action.
Fidesz reworked Hungary’s electoral system, making the district more representative in its rural areas than opposition supporters in the cities. It turned public media into propaganda, and heavily weaponized independent media and sold them to the government or its private sector partners. It created electoral rules that forced several opposition parties to compete. It put in place unfair campaign finance rules that put Fidesz on a better structural footing.
The primary goal was to create a system in which the government is not required to tamper with official elections, in the sense of stuffing the ballot boxes. In general, it can depend on the background of injustice to the system, the structural disadvantages of the opposition parties, to maintain the constitutional majority for sure. Political scientists call this type of government “competitive authoritarianism” – a system in which elections are real, but not fair enough to be called a democratic competition.
“The state became a party state, where there is no border between the government, the ruling party, (and) state institutions,” says Dániel Döbrentey, Coordinator of the Voting Rights Project at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union. “Sources, databases, and everything that should serve the public interest are sometimes not only manipulated but misused by the ruling majority for their campaign purposes.”
Recent evidence suggests the Hungarian government also used more authoritarian methods. A new movie has been created shocking evidence of voter extortion: where local Fidesz leaders threaten voters in remote areas, perhaps with losing their jobs or denying them public benefits, if they don’t vote for the party. Döbrentey estimates that this has affected somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 Hungarians – a large number in a country where the number of eligible voters exceeds nearly 8 million.
The result of all this has been a largely enduring authoritarian system. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz managed to secure two-thirds of the parliamentary votes and less than half of the national votes. In 2022, various opposition parties united around a single candidate and party list to try to deal with its structural flaws – and indeed Fidesz. improved his share of the vote, easily retaining two-thirds of the vote.
“The rules are rigged so much that Orbán can probably make a 10-point, maybe even 15-point difference” in public opinion, says Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian electoral law at Princeton University.
And yet Fidesz was completely defeated. How?
For one thing, Magyar was the best candidate. The defector – his ex-wife was Orbán’s Justice Minister – shared many of his conservative views on social policy and immigration, making it difficult for the government to rally its base by portraying him as an international leftist.
Despite this, the entire opposition – including the left-wing parties – threw their weight behind his new Tisza party, understanding that the only important thing was to oust Fidesz. This allowed the creation of an ideological coalition, which was fundamentally united by the disillusionment with the current government and the desire to return to true democracy.
And this depression ran deep – deep.
Orbán had mismanaged Hungary’s economy, falling behind other ex-Communist states like Poland and the Czech Republic and becoming one of the countries. The poorest countries of the European Union (if not of the poorest). This poor economic performance was inextricably linked to its style of governance: Fidesz gained its hold on power by enabling a few pro-government oligarchs to dominate the business sector. This system gave Orbán great leverage to deal with political challenges and enrich himself, but it produced a stagnant and corrupt private sector where connections with the government were more important than having a sophisticated business model.
Fidesz’s control over the flow of information, however strong, could not compete with the reality that ordinary Hungarians experienced with their eyes and ears.
Perhaps Orbán would have held on if he had faced a smaller opponent, a less united opposition, or poorer voters. But the combination of all three created a kind of perfect election storm, one powerful enough to defeat one of the world’s most powerful election rigging machines.
Can Péter Magyar save Hungarian democracy?
When dictators lose an election, the immediate fear is that they will try to annul or overthrow it – à la Trump in 2020. Orbán’s concessions suggest Hungary can avoid the worst.
Yet Orbán could still use the rest of his term with a two-thirds vote to try and protect the system he created when he left. There are various ways to do this, most of which is the quick convening of parliament to pass amendments to the new constitution. Perhaps the most debated among Hungary watchers is that Fidesz is amending the constitution to change Hungary from a parliamentary to a presidential system.
Hungary already has a president – a supporter of Fidesz who is helpless due to his party’s control over parliament. But Orbán may try to turn that office into Hungary’s chief executive, stripping Magyar of important powers before he even has a chance to use them. Orbán may even find a way to appoint himself president, a trick founded by Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
But even assuming none of that happens, the future of Hungarian democracy will still be at stake – depending, in large part, on exactly how many seats Tisza wins in parliament.
For the past 16 years, Orbán has not only destroyed Hungarian elections: He has destroyed them. everything about the state of Hungary. Courts, regulatory bodies, bureaucracy, even ostensibly political institutions in areas like the arts – almost everything, in one way or another, has been part of the Fidesz machine, either a tool for political control or a way for Fidesz leaders to gain power.
Restoring Hungary’s democracy is therefore not a simple matter of redrawing electoral maps. They will need to oust Orbán’s cronies from court, break the government’s near-monopoly on the media, rebuild anti-corruption protections, create a neutral tax agency, and on and on — all while trying to manage the near-war in Ukraine, rebuild relations with the European Union, and confront the U.S., which has campaigned on behalf of nudity.
This is tantamount to the need for something like a constitutional reform – a reform that is virtually impossible to complete without a two-thirds vote in parliament.
Lacking the power to amend the constitution, Fidesz’s entrenched structure in areas such as the judiciary will hinder the ability of Tisza’s majority to make real changes. A defeated Magyar government, and the return of Fidesz in the next election, would be the most likely outcome: an authoritarian system re-establishing itself even after what might appear, from the outside, as a disastrous defeat. For this reason, the size of Tisza’s majority may be as important as the absolute truth of their victory.
But if he gets two thirds, then Péter Magyar and his allies have achieved the impossible: beating an entrenched dictator in an election he had spent nearly two decades trying to steal.
