Peter Magyar’s landslide victory in Hungary this week offers inspiration to Americans hoping to overcome President Trump’s corrupt, authoritarian approach to politics. The key question is precisely how Mr. Magyar conducted such a successful opposition campaign.
He faced long odds. Viktor Orban had been prime minister for 16 years, during which he changed election rules, installed loyalists in once-nonpartisan government jobs, undermined judicial independence, repressed political opponents and hounded independent media and universities. He tilted the political system in his favor, yet Mr. Magyar nonetheless crushed Mr. Orban in voting on Sunday. Mr. Magyar’s party appears to have won a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament and 53 percent of the popular vote, compared with 38 percent for Mr. Orban’s party.
Hungary is obviously a very different country from the United States. But Mr. Orban’s rise and his use of power were long models for Mr. Trump. Now, Mr. Orban’s demise can be a model for the Democratic Party and any other party that is trying to defeat an authoritarian right-wing threat.
Two aspects of Mr. Magyar’s campaign strategy were especially important. First, he focused on the bread-and-butter issues that often guide the decisions of swing voters, and not just in Hungary. In the United States, these voters soured on Mr. Trump after his first term and helped elect Joe Biden in 2020, only to become frustrated with inflation and vote in 2024 to return Mr. Trump to office.
The campaign platform of the party Mr. Magyar leads, Tisza, was titled “Foundations of a Functional and Humane Hungary.” It criticized the inefficiency of government services. Its agenda included tax cuts for working-class families, expanded health care, increased pensions, larger child benefits and a pay increase for support staff members at schools. It said it would help pay for these programs through both a wealth tax on the very rich and the recovery of European Union transfer payments reduced because of Mr. Orban’s anti-democratic policies. Mr. Magyar’s party spread its campaign themes in innovative ways through social media, making Mr. Orban’s state-run media messaging look old and tired.
Crucially, Mr. Magyar made corruption a core campaign issue. He had spent more than 20 years as a member of Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party, rising to senior roles in state-controlled institutions. But Mr. Magyar quit Fidesz in early 2024 to protest a scandal involving the government’s pardon of a well-connected former official who had sexually abused boys. Mr. Magyar said he was disgusted by the corruption, and he gave a viral interview in which he claimed that “a few families own half the country.” He then joined the Tisza party and rose to become its leader.
On the campaign trail, he linked Mr. Orban’s corruption to Hungarians’ frustration with their stagnant living standards. In his victory speech on Sunday night, Mr. Magyar promised a country where citizens could rely on their government to help provide good medical care, a decent family life and a dignified retirement. What should matter, he said, was not political connections but the kind of person somebody was.
It is easy enough to imagine an American version of this strategy. Mr. Trump, like Mr. Orban, has used his office to enrich himself, his family and his friends. He has issued pardons to political allies who have committed violent crimes, including one accused of sexually abusing children after receiving his pardon. He has cut taxes for the affluent and made it harder for working-class Americans to receive health care. His war in Iran has increased gas prices.
His populism is fake. It serves a small slice of wealthy, well-connected people at the expense of most Americans, and it leaves him and his party politically vulnerable to an opposition that can credibly use government as a force for good. Mr. Magyar’s victory highlights the Democratic Party’s need to develop an ambitious agenda that goes far beyond criticizing Mr. Trump and charts an alternative vision for the country. Democrats do not yet have that agenda, but many in the party recognize that they need one.
The second lesson may be harder for Democrats — and center-left parties in Europe — to absorb. Mr. Magyar, who identifies as center right, won partly by avoiding the social progressivism that dominates elite left-leaning circles and alienates many voters. He ran as an economic progressive and a cultural moderate if not conservative.
He used patriotic symbols like the flag and benefited from having a last name that means “Hungarian.” (Imagine a candidate named “Joe American.”) He portrayed himself as a nationalist and suggested he might expel Slovakia’s ambassador over its treatment of Hungarians living there. He campaigned in rural areas that Mr. Orban’s previous challengers had overlooked. Mr. Magyar promised not to send troops or weapons to Ukraine. He declined to attend a Pride march in Budapest, making it harder for Mr. Orban to paint him as captive to L.G.B.T.Q. activists.
On immigration, which has shaped recent elections around the world, Mr. Magyar called for even tighter restrictions than the Orban had government imposed. He said he would keep a border fence, repeal a guest-worker program and allow no guest workers from outside the European Union. Tisza’s party platform claimed that guest workers “drive down wages, inflate real estate prices and cause social problems.” (Unlike in the United States, crime rates among immigrants in Europe tend to be higher than among native citizens.) Immigration is vital to electability in many countries because it is the issue on which mainstream politicians have most sharply diverged from public opinion, permitting many more arrivals than voters want.
We certainly do not endorse all of Mr. Magyar’s tactics, and we hope no American politician would feel the need to avoid a Pride march. Yet anyone who opposes Orbanism should examine the full Hungarian campaign, not only the convenient parts.
Mr. Magyar is one of many contemporary politicians who have won elections with a mix of economic progressivism and social moderation. Other national candidates have done so in the Netherlands, Poland, Denmark and elsewhere. In the United States, as we have documented, congressional Democrats who have won tough races in recent years almost all offered feisty economic messages while rejecting far-left positions on crime, immigration and other subjects. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton each used a similar approach to win the presidency twice. Only deep blue areas tend to elect down-the-line cultural progressives.
The success of the more heterodox approach is no mystery. In the United States and much of Europe, it is consistent with public opinion. Most voters are frustrated by slow-growing incomes and want the government to help. They are also unhappy with an elite cultural progressivism that has moved rapidly to the left on many difficult questions. They are looking for politicians who authentically share their outlook.
If the stakes involved only the outcome of individual policy issues, these debates would have less urgency. But they involve the health of democracy itself. In many countries, a radicalized political right has taken an authoritarian turn and sought to entrench itself in power while using state power to enrich its allies and repress its critics. Too often, the mainstream left has aided the far right’s rise by clinging to positions that are supported by only a narrow slice of the electorate.
Mr. Orban’s defeat is not nearly the end of the story, not even in Hungary, where his allies will remain entrenched in many parts of government. But his defeat is significant. Many people assumed he was unbeatable. He was Vladimir Putin’s biggest ally inside the European Union and the original 21st-century model of Western illiberalism. Mr. Trump openly admired him, and Vice President JD Vance traveled to Hungary last week to campaign for him.
Mr. Magyar thoroughly defeated this far-right giant. The free world should take an honest look at how he did it.
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