On Saturday, the day before the Hungarian election, I went to Puspokladany, a run-down town of about 16,000 in northeastern Hungary, for the penultimate rally of opposition leader Peter Magyar. Though the region has traditionally been a stronghold of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz Party, the square where Magyar spoke was overflowing; there seemed to be at least 1,000 people, many of them teenagers and young families. Over and over, Magyar beseeched the crowd, “Do not be afraid!” The crowd, in turn, broke into a chant: “We are not afraid!”
I asked a woman I met in the crowd, Mariann Szabo, to explain Magyar’s words: What had people been afraid of? An elementary school teacher and mother of two, Szabo said that people like her, who worked in the public sector, feared that if they were seen to oppose Fidesz, they could lose their jobs and thus their ability to survive. That fear kept many people quiet about their politics. Before Magyar’s campaign, Szabo knew there were other people in her town who didn’t like Orban, but not how many.
Suddenly, it seemed like everything was about to change. “The only moment you can compare it to is 1989,” she said, when, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hungary’s Communist dictatorship came to an end.
On Sunday, it happened: Orban was defeated. In an election with the highest voter turnout in Hungary’s democratic history, Magyar’s Tisza Party won a two-thirds supermajority, enough to alter the constitution that Orban had rewritten to shore up his power. In Budapest, Hungarians thronged the bank of the Danube across from the city’s majestic neo-Gothic Parliament, cheering, waving flags and popping champagne. When Orban’s concession speech played on a giant screen, 50-year-old Zoli Kertesz exclaimed, “This is music!”
Some admirers of Orban have argued that the fact that he lost proves he was never an autocrat to begin with. What it really demonstrates, however, is that opposition to Fidesz was so strong it was able to overwhelm all the structures Orban put in place to protect his rule: wildly distorted voting districts, a captured media, state-sponsored propaganda, local patronage networks, and widespread threats and intimidation.
Agnes Kunhalmi, a member of Parliament and the former co-president of Hungary’s Socialist Party, told me that when she was recruiting candidates in 2022, a school principal turned her down for fear that his daughter, a teacher, would be fired if he ran. Another declined because he worried his son would be cut off from a business arrangement with a Fidesz controlled company. On the stump, Magyar constantly said that Orban was running a “mafia state.” If that hadn’t resonated, he probably wouldn’t have won by so much.
In recent days, as it became increasingly clear that Orban was losing, some American and British conservatives argued that his ultimate success lay in destroying the Hungarian left. “The reason Peter Magyar has a chance to beat Orban,” wrote Rod Dreher, the doyen of American conservatives in Budapest, is because “he accepts, at least publicly, all the things Orban stands for.”
There is a grain of truth to this. Hungary’s election, like Poland’s election in 2023, was a choice between the center-right and the authoritarian right. Magyar voted to keep resisting illegal migration, an issue Orban is known for. Last year, when more than 100,000 people defied Orban’s attempt to ban a gay pride parade by marching in Budapest, Magyar didn’t attend. Kunhalmi told me that the Parliament elected on Sunday will be the first since 1989 with no left-wing representation, in part because many progressive candidates stood down to avoid splitting the anti-Orban vote. Kunhalmi withdrew her own candidacy two weeks ago, making Election Day bittersweet.
But it is a mistake to understate the profound differences between Orban and Magyar, or at least what Magyar is promising. Magyar campaigned on a clean break from the existing order — a message Democrats in the US might learn from — pledging to prosecute those who’ve enriched themselves at public expense. In the run-up to the election, people in Hungary spoke less about a change in leadership than a change in regime, from one that is Russian-aligned and kleptocratic, with the ruling party embedded in virtually every institution, to one that is free, liberal and oriented toward Europe. If Magyar was just a slightly less corrupt version of Orban, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have cared so much about thwarting him.
The geopolitical consequences of Magyar’s victory could be profound. Under Orban, Hungary has vetoed aid to Ukraine and sanctions on both Russia and Israel. Magyar’s movement is hostile to Russia; people at his rallies have taken up the chant “Russians Go Home,” a slogan from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. “There is a strong narrative of commitment to the European Union and NATO,” said Zsuzsanna Végh, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund. And since Magyar doesn’t have a personal relationship with Netanyahu, she said, “some sanctions against Israel would likely be acceptable” to a Tisza government.
And while Magyar didn’t march in the pride parade, he’s unlikely to demonize L.G.B.T.Q. people the way Orban did. Among those celebrating by the Danube on Sunday night were Eszter Kalocsai, a 30-year-old bisexual woman, and Milan Gabriel Berki, a 24-year-old gay man. They were delirious with joy. Kalocsai said she’s spent the last 10 years hiding her attraction to women. “It’s amazing!” she cried. “I feel like I can go out and say that I love all people! Oh my God!” Added Berki, “The feeling is overwhelming!” Magyar told people not to be afraid, and they weren’t.
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