Under normal circumstances, the election in Hungary – a landlocked Central European country of less than 10 million people – would not be a major world event. But for the past 16 years, Hungary has been no ordinary country.
After Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won a landslide victory in Hungary’s 2010 election, he almost immediately began changing the country’s government to ensure he would not lose again. He has ever violate election laws in favor of his Fidesz party, which strengthened control 80 to 90 percent of the media in the countryand packed court with yes-men. By the mid-2010s, Hungarian elections were so heavily tilted in his favor that it became incredibly difficult so that the opponents win.
But this time, they just might hit the jackpot.
Orbán’s opponents have united around a new party, Tisza, led by a defector named Péter Magyar. His message focused on the bad economic record of the administration and extreme corruption, has touched many Hungarians; his skillful use of social media and face-to-face campaigning have helped him avoid huge financial losses and a government crackdown on the media.
Opinion polls show Tisza leading Fidesz to a great extent; it is highly likely that Magyar will be Hungary’s next prime minister, although he will need a majority in parliament to undo some of the worst changes Orbán has made.
The stakes are high: not only for Hungarians, but for America and even the world.
Under Orbán’s far-right administration, Hungary has become Trump’s most reliable ally in Europe. But for many in the broader MAGA movement, it’s more than that: it’s a blueprint for America’s future, similar to what the Nordic countries represent for Bernie Sanders.
If Orbán did indeed fall, their dreams could be shattered – which is why Vice President JD Vance visited Hungary this week to openly campaign for Orbán’s re-election. On Tuesday, he gave a speech at a Fidesz campaign rally, calling President Donald Trump on stage to get his thoughts on Hungary. “Go to the polls this weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán, because he represents you,” Vance said in closing.
The Hungarian Prime Minister is also a close ally of Russia, recently describing himself as a “mouse” helping the “lion” Putin. Hungary’s membership in the European Union and NATO has allowed Orbán to disrupt Western efforts to support Ukraine from within, including withholding aid. If Orbán were to be removed from power, it would be a huge boon for Ukraine’s war effort – and a huge blow to the Kremlin.
Hungary’s 2026 election, in short, is not just like any other election. It is one of the most important elections of the whole year, and maybe even a decade.
How Orbán could lose
Under Orbán, Hungary has become a classic example of a very modern form of libertarianism: one political scientist calls it “competitive dominance.”
In such a system, voters are (mostly) free to vote for the candidate of their choice: Hungary is not like Russia under Putin. But the Hungarian election has been ruled unfair, as the system is designed to give the government in power so many advantages that the opposition should not be able to win. It’s a system based on plausible deniability: retaining enough democratic elements that Hungary can claim to still be a democracy, while doing its best to give voters as little meaningful choice as possible.
The government’s advantage begins with the very structure of the election. Hungarian parliamentary elections operate under a mixed electoral system: More than half of all members of parliament are elected in US-style single-district contests, while the rest are decided by proportional national votes.
One district is it has been made stupid beyond recognition increasing the weight of Fidesz’s rural base and stealing seats from the opposition’s more urban constituency. Moreover, Orbán put in place laws that allow his party to do so transfer of excess votes from gerrymandered districts they win with proportional contests – effectively allowing them to gain results in an already rigged game.
But even more than the official law, the background conditions of the election are not completely fair. They are there million in different ways this is true – from the government’s crackdown on the media to an unfair campaign finance system to a two-tier voting system for Hungarians abroad that favors government supporters over critics. There are many allegations of voter intimidation, such as local officials threatening to cut off the poor state’s health care. unless they vote for Fidesz.
Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian electoral law at Princeton University, estimates that the opposition would need to win by about 10 to 15 points in the national vote to overcome the structural advantage the government has given itself.
And for now, your Magyar and Tisza 10 points ahead in Politico EU polls.
This is a remarkable achievement: a testament to Magyar’s skill as a politician and the successive failures of the Fidesz government.
Magyar used to be a high-ranking member of Fidesz: His ex-wife was Orbán’s justice minister. In 2024, he resigned against the scandal of sexual abuse of children and started attacking the government as corrupt”feudalism“Oligarchy. This is it to a large extent indeed: Orbán’s system is based on abusing regulatory and financial powers to funnel money to a few crony oligarchs, who are dependent on big government and prefer to maintain their wealth.
This has made the prime minister and his friends very rich, but they have also done it real damage to the Hungarian economy: the country is currently one of the poorest in the European Union, if not more of the poorer. As the rich who support Fidesz get richer, the quality of public services declines. Hungary is experiencing population decline thanks to its low birth rate and unusually high levels of immigration.
These are things that ordinary Hungarians can see and feel in their daily lives. As a former conservative figure in the government, Magyar is a reliable proxy for former Fidesz supporters disaffected by Orbán’s successive defeats. He has traveled the country, using face-to-face events to defeat government financial interests and media censorship, becoming a legend in the few remaining media outlets.
This perfect storm is what it takes to give the opposition a chance to even overcome the structural advantages that Fidesz has put in place to stay in power. Even then, there is a real chance of Orbán trying to cheat: declaring that the election has been annulled due to allegations of fraud, à la Trump in 2020, or putting himself in the presidency of the country (and expanding his powers) instead of leaving.
Whether he could pull this off is a different question. And right now, observers favor Tisza’s chances: the betting markets place Magyar as prime minister. for 66 percent.
What will the defeat of Orbánism mean for the global authoritarian right?
If Magyar wins, restoring democracy will not be easy. Much of Orbánism’s architecture is enshrined in Hungary’s constitution, which requires a two-thirds vote in parliament to amend. Tisza’s full victory, then, requires more than just winning a stolen game – it requires doing so out loud.
But even if domestic reforms prove difficult, Sunday’s results will matter to millions beyond Hungary’s borders.
Under Orbán, Hungary has become more than a symbol of the far-right’s rising political fortunes: It has become an active participant in expanding its international reach and an intellectual leader in shaping its agenda. Budapest has used huge amount of money and political effort to help sister parties in the democratic world. There is a reason why far-right political leaders such as France’s Marine Le Pen, Argentina’s Javier Milei and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu have visited Budapest to campaign with Orbán at the end of the 2026 campaign.
The greatest achievement, however, has been the Hungarian hijacking of right-wing American thought. Beginning in the late 2010s, Trump-leaning academics and political activists began to point to Hungary as an example of what the right should aim to do in the United States. They describe it not as an authoritarian camp of the poor, but as a conservative Christian democracy that took tough-but-necessary steps to destroy the unhealthy influence of cultural discrimination on society.
Supporters of this view can be found in the Trump administration, and Vance himself is perhaps the most prominent. In 2024 interview with Rod Drehera conservative American writer who defected to Budapest to take a job at a government-backed think tank, the future vice president hailed Orbán’s crackdown on academic freedom — which included forcing an entire university out of the country — as an example of American justice.
“The closest conservatives have ever come to successfully dealing with the left-wing dominance of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” Vance said. “I think his way should be a model for us.”
Conservative elites share the same opinion: Dreher is not the only one who moved to Hungary to work with a government-linked outfit. If the Hungarian regime had well and truly fallen, it would have represented an ideological defeat for the movement, which would have raised questions about its political strength in Europe, America and elsewhere.
Orbán’s failure is Putin’s failure
Hungary’s competition also has a big stake in the still-brutal war in Ukraine.
Since the Russian invasion of 2022, Orbán has emerged as the main opponent of the country in the Western alliance. He has repeatedly blocked European and NATO support for Ukraine – he currently holds about $100 million in EU loans to the country – and has fueled conflict with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum recently reported that some European leaders we are no longer talking about war in front of Orbánbecause there is an expectation that whatever he says will come back to Putin.
This does not come out of nowhere: there is a long-standing suspicion of Ukrainians in Hungary, due to the treatment of the Hungarian minority in the country. The main argument for Orbán’s re-election has been that Magyar would be a pro-Ukraine puppet; he has repeated against Zelenskyy the same lines of conspiratorial attack, sometimes verbatim, that he once used against the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros (both men are Jewish).
Perhaps for this reason, the nationalist Magyar has been sympathetic towards Zelenskyy and Ukraine during the campaign – taking a more hostile stance than any other right-wing party in Europe. But at the same time, he has no love for the Kremlin, which at the moment he is busy trying to get Orbán re-elected. So while Hungary under Magyar may not be a pro-Ukrainian nation, it will certainly be more anti-Russian than it is under Orbán.
A Magyar victory – even a simple majority – would mean that Russia would lose its mole in Europe. To a large extent, it may cause Ukraine to receive the largest amount of European aid.
So you can say this to Viktor Orbán: He has made Hungary an extreme player on the international stage, although it does more harm to the patient than good. Its fall would be a shock in Brussels, Washington, and Moscow – undermining the financial foundations of the European right, the ideological foundations of the MAGA movement, and the political foundations of Putin’s efforts to divide Europe from Ukraine.
But if Orbán wins, none of this will come true. And the fate of Hungarian democracy may be sealed.
