President Trump knew that Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary was in trouble when he sent Vice President JD Vance to Budapest last week to campaign on his behalf.
Mr. Trump and his MAGA movement have long shared DNA with Mr. Orban’s brand of right-wing politics, with both taking hard-line anti-immigration stances, working to curb press freedoms and expressing concern about falling birthrates. Steve Bannon, a MAGA podcaster and former aide to the president, once called Mr. Orban “Trump before Trump.” They are so close that Mr. Vance dialed Mr. Trump from his rally in Budapest and put him on speaker phone.
“He didn’t allow people to storm your country and invade your country, like other people have, and ruin their countries, frankly,” Mr. Trump said, praising Mr. Orban to a cheering crowd.
Just days later Hungarians roundly rejected a fifth term for Mr. Orban. Now the scale of his defeat is setting off alarm bells for the American right, because many of Mr. Trump’s supporters have seen Mr. Orban as a kindred spirit and as an incubator of ideas that they embraced.
The fear is that Republicans in the U.S., facing flagging poll numbers and an unhappy electorate, could suffer the same fate in 2026 and 2028 by failing to keep right-wing populism popular.
“They are going to pay the price in 2028 for Trump making the same mistakes that Viktor Orban did,” said Rod Dreher, a prominent American conservative writer and supporter of Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Orban’s right-wing populism, who now lives in Hungary. “The fact that Orban, as intelligent as he is, couldn’t pull through, ought to really scare the hell out of Republicans.”
Influential swaths of the American right have for years looked to Hungary for inspiration. When Tucker Carlson was still on Fox News, he broadcast from Budapest for a week in 2021 and called Hungary a place “with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.” The Conservative Political Action Conference gave Mr. Orban a speaking slot at its 2022 gathering and started CPAC Hungary.
Matt Schlapp, a staunch Trump ally and CPAC chairman, downplayed the idea that Mr. Orban’s loss was a warning sign for Mr. Trump.
“I think this has zero impact on American politics,” Mr. Schlapp said.
But he allowed that there could be some similarities. “Are there similar themes that we’re seeing in the American elections?” he asked. “Yes.”
Some conservatives noted that the opposition leader who defeated Mr. Orban, Peter Magyar, also holds conservative views, so they did not see Mr. Orban’s loss as a repudiation of right-wing policies.
But other observers suggested that both men shared key vulnerabilities, and that Mr. Trump’s movement could learn from Mr. Orban’s defeat. The Hungarian prime minister was undone in large part by a sluggish economy that weighed on ordinary citizens at the same time that charges of corruption resonated with voters concerned by income disparities.
Trump Administration: Live Updates
Updated
- Vance says the pope should ‘stick to matters of morality’ and let Trump run American public policy.
- Youths who sued Trump over orders to ‘unleash’ energy try to revive case.
- Threats to library funding end with a settlement by Trump Administration.
“When all boats aren’t rising, everybody looks at who’s on the yacht,” Mr. Dreher said. “In terms of MAGA, populism is great, but if you can’t deliver on the economy, none of it is going to matter.”
Mr. Bannon suggested in an interview that Mr. Orban’s loss should serve as a “warning flare” to the MAGA movement not to get complacent or lose touch with the issues that motivated its voters to turn out for the president.
“You have to energize your base, and they have to come with a sense of urgency,” Mr. Bannon said. “If you’re going to go middle of the road and moderate your policies, you’re just not going to have a motivated base and you’re just not going to have people turn out.”
He added: “People should not dismiss this. They should take this and redouble our efforts.”
Democrats greeted Mr. Orban’s defeat with glee, and said it foreshadowed Republican losses this fall.
“Far-right authoritarian Viktor Orban has lost the election,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House, wrote on social media. “Trump sycophants and MAGA extremists in Congress are up next in November.”
Some Republican officeholders seemed divided on the Hungarian election outcome.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and former leader who is the face of the MAGA-skeptical old guard of establishment conservatism, wrote in a Fox News opinion piece that there was a lesson for “those on the right drawn to Orban” even as he found it “endlessly puzzling” that the American right fawned over Hungary.
Others seemed to mourn Mr. Orban’s loss. “Should Viktor Orban be offered asylum in the U.S.?” Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, wrote on X.
Because Mr. Magyar shares many of Mr. Orban’s right-wing views on issues like immigration, Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said the result showed that conservative policies remained popular with voters.
And he argued that Mr. Orban’s 16-year tenure of cronyism meant the Hungarian prime minister had grown out of touch with voters over many years.
“There’s no repudiation of the Trump worldview here,” said Mr. Gonzalez, whose think tank shares some of Mr. Orban’s right-wing populist beliefs. “I think that the lessons are: Stay hungry, don’t ever get too accustomed to being in power.”
CJ Pearson, a Republican influencer and strategist, agreed that Mr. Orban’s loss didn’t portend risk for MAGA. But he said it was a good reminder to stay focused on voters.
“If we’re trying to prevent what happened in Hungary to Orban, in terms of having that happen here in America,” Mr. Pearson said, “it’s going to be critical to do all we can here on the home front to deliver on the domestic policy agenda that President Trump oftentimes talks about.”
In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Mr. Vance said he had no regrets about making the trek to Hungary to campaign for Mr. Orban, even though he knew “there was a very good chance that Viktor would lose that election.”
“We went because it’s the right thing to do to stand behind a person who had stood by us for a very long time,” Mr. Vance said.
Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.
Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.
The post MAGA Absorbs the Loss of Orban, a Kindred Spirit to Trump’s Movement appeared first on New York Times.
