The Danube Institute, located in a refurbished villa in Budapest’s wealthy castle district, is one of several government-supported think tanks and foundations in Hungary that cater to foreign conservatives. At a panel discussion on Thursday evening, three days before Hungary’s elections, the mood was grim. The speakers, a mix of Americans and Europeans, hadn’t abandoned hope that Prime Minister Viktor Orban might eke out a victory, but all agreed that his party, Fidesz, was facing the most serious challenge to its rule in the 16 years since Orban returned to power.
“Here’s the problem,” said John Fund, a writer for National Review. “You have to have some kind of positive campaign.”
Orban, seeking a fifth term amid an economy widely seen as terrible — with high unemployment, virtually no growth and threadbare social services — is running on fear. Much of his pitch revolves around the fantastical claim that his center-right opponent, Peter Magyar, is going to drag Hungary to war in Ukraine.
Hungary’s capital, Budapest, is blanketed with posters of side-by-side mug-shot-style photos of Magyar and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, with the words “They Are Dangerous! Stop Them!” In the past, Orban has succeeded by positioning himself against demonized opponents — he pioneered many of the right-wing conspiracy theories about George Soros — but this time, it doesn’t seem to be working. “You have to strain to see an idealistic, positive message about, let’s say, the economy, that Fidesz is putting forward,” said Fund.
Heading into the election, most polls show Magyar’s Tisza Party well ahead, and some indicate it’s on track for a landslide. As the speakers at the Danube Institute understood, an Orban defeat would have serious implications for the conservative movement worldwide. Ralph Schoellhammer, an Austrian political scientist with a post at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a lavishly funded Hungarian educational foundation close to the Orban regime, pointed out that Hungarian taxpayers, “for which I’m eternally grateful,” financed “a conservative ecosystem that did not exist in Europe.”
Under Fidesz, Budapest has become a sort of Disneyland for reactionaries disenchanted with their own governments. American and British conservatives are constantly passing through the city on Danube Institute fellowships. As The Atlantic recently reported, Orban has made Gladden Pappin, a MAGA influencer close to JD Vance who doesn’t speak Hungarian, head of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, which does the same sort of work as the policy planning staff at the State Department. Government funds even support a chain of cafes named for the British conservative Roger Scruton; at one I visited on Thursday, a Scruton quote, “Conservatism is more an instinct than an idea,” was emblazoned on the wall.
Introducing the event on Thursday evening, Patrick Egan, the publisher of Brussels Signal, an Orban-backed right-wing media outlet focused on Europe, compared the atmosphere in Budapest to the heyday of the Left Bank in Paris after World War II. But now this idyll, enabled by Hungarian public money, could be coming to an end.
Crucially, it’s not just material support that Orban provides to the international right. Orban has long held out the system he created in Hungary, which he calls “illiberal democracy,” as a workable Christian nationalist alternative to Western liberalism, and its example has proved enormously influential. In 2022, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said, “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.” More than any other politician, Orban showed conservatives worldwide how to use government power to wage the culture wars. He crushed a prominent liberal university, banned “homosexual propaganda” in schools — a forerunner of Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law — and engineered the takeover of major media outlets by his allies. Steve Bannon once described Orban as “Trump before Trump.”
Now Orban faces a possible rebuke from his own citizenry. And in a poetic coincidence, he’s faltering at the same moment that the intellectual vanguard of the MAGA movement is cracking up under the weight of Trump’s destructive, humiliating war in Iran. For at least the past decade, right-wing enemies of liberalism around the world have seemed to have momentum and energy on their side. They were daring and transgressive, while the old center-left parties that tried to stand in their way appeared exhausted and a little stunned. But today, both Orban, the progenitor of the modern populist right, and Trump, its apotheosis, are flailing.
In 2022, the conservative populist Sohrab Ahmari was an author of a fulsome endorsement of Trump arguing that he alone offered Americans “a chance to confront and chasten their failed elites.” After less than two years of unbridled Trumpian governance, Ahmari misses those elites desperately. In the Republican Party, he told me, “everything that was promising about the populist version of it has run aground.” He was “yearning,” he said, for the return of liberal technocrats.
Fidesz’s rule hasn’t been as ruinous as Trump’s — Hungary didn’t have nearly as far to fall — but it’s been a failure on its own terms. Hungary is now one of the poorest countries in the European Union, and according to Transparency International, tied with Bulgaria for most corrupt. Orban’s government spends more than 5 percent of its gross domestic product on benefits for families, with the aim of increasing fertility, but in 2025, the birthrate fell to 1.31 children per woman. “Depopulation is now progressing at its fastest rate to date,” according to a 2025 report from the Center for Eastern Studies.
Of course, the victory of Magyar, Tisza’s leader, isn’t assured. In the past, polls have undercounted support for Fidesz; the last time I was in Hungary, for the election four years ago, surveys showed a competitive race, but Orban’s party won in a landslide. Hungary’s electoral districts are deeply gerrymandered, so he could win a majority of seats in Parliament even without a majority of votes. In March, news broke of a scandal involving claims that Fidesz attempted to buy votes from Hungary’s Roma minority. No one knows what other dirty tricks the election’s final days might bring.
But Tisza’s lead looks as if it could be robust enough to overcome both Fidesz’s structural advantages and its potential cheating. As Fund acknowledged, Orban’s campaign feels enervated and uninspired. Two weeks ago, he was heckled at one of his own rallies, a scene some compared to the pivotal moment when Romanians booed the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who tried to flee the country the next day. “If Fidesz doesn’t do more fraud than it normally does, then the opposition will win, and maybe it will win big,” said Akos Hadhazy, an independent member of Hungary’s National Assembly known for his anticorruption activism.
Even if that happens, Hungary will likely remain a conservative country, because Magyar, a former Fidesz official, is no progressive. Until two years ago, he was a regime insider, the ex-husband of the former Fidesz justice minister Judit Varga. He left the party in a rather spectacular fashion. That February, Orban’s government was shaken by a major scandal when it was revealed that the country’s president, Katalin Novak, had pardoned a man imprisoned for covering up the sexual abuse of minors at a children’s home. Novak was forced to resign, as was Varga, Magyar’s ex, who had countersigned the pardon. The Hungarian political analyst Peter Kreko compared the impact of the episode to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, demonstrating the “moral collapse of a moralizing government.”
After the story broke, amid widespread speculation that others in the government were implicated in the pardon, Magyar took to Facebook to condemn the regime. He expanded his denunciations on the independent YouTube show Partizan, saying, “When you feel that half the country is already in the hands of a few families, then I think, what are you waiting for?” Orban’s allies aren’t known for breaking ranks, and the effect of his interview was electric; he was heralded as a truth-telling dissident.
A few weeks later, on March 15, 2024, a Hungarian national holiday, Magyar organized a rally of tens of thousands of people in Budapest where he announced his new political movement. He has centered his campaign on one thing: opposition to the Orban regime’s epic corruption, which has made Orban’s allies spectacularly rich even as social services are so frayed that people have to bring their own toilet paper when they go to the hospital. “The only policy he’s talking about is that there needs to be a systemic challenge to what has become a kleptocracy that is undermining Hungary and Hungarianness,” said David Pressman, who served as President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Hungary.
Neither Trump nor Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, wants to see this challenge to kleptocracy succeed, and both are trying hard to shore up Orban. In addition to being an inspiration to the American right, Orban is a stalking horse for Russian interests in Europe: Under his leadership, Hungary has blocked European Union sanctions on Russia and aid to Ukraine.
As The Washington Post reported, Russian intelligence suggested staging an assassination attempt on Orban to get Hungarians to rally around him. That hasn’t happened, but earlier this week, Serbia’s Putin-aligned president divulged a purported Ukrainian terrorist plot against energy infrastructure critical to Hungary, a claim that was widely seen as a Russian false flag operation.
Just after this ostensible plot came to light, Vance arrived in Budapest to campaign for Orban, echoing Orban’s accusations of Ukrainian interference. This convergence of Russian and American interests is particularly perverse given that, until Tuesday, the United States was at war with Iran, which was, U.S. officials have said, getting targeting help from Russia. But ordinary American geopolitical interests appear to pale in comparison to Orban’s symbolic importance to the American right.
“We want to get rid of Orban, and these other guys, Trump and Putin, they want to hold on to him,” said Hadhazy, the National Assembly member.
The fact that Trump is working to help a Putin-aligned autocrat demonstrates just how thoroughly he’s inverted American foreign policy. But it also shows why an Orban loss would be so seismic. The most powerful autocrats in the world want Orban to win; in addition to Putin and Trump, he has the endorsement of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the likely support of China, since Orban has embraced the Belt and Road initiative, China’s investment in global infrastructure.
If Magyar beats him anyway, it will be an inspiration to small-d democrats around the world, proving that even in a country where the government has captured most major institutions and tilted the electoral playing field, a popular movement can prevail.
Late Friday afternoon, thousands of young Hungarians streamed into Budapest’s Heroes Square for an anti-regime concert featuring brief sets from dozens of the country’s musical stars. As rap-rock tracks denouncing Fidesz roared from the stage, people who’ve lived under Orban for their entire adult life contemplated a country without him. “We’ve been chasing this for years and years,” said Balint Orvenyesi, a 30-year-old computer programmer. He said he had no idea what happens next, “but I’m pretty sure that people can feel the wind of change, and I’m pretty sure we’re going to sort it out.”
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