For years, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ironclad Christian nationalist rule over his country was a source of inspiration to U.S. conservatives — “Trump before Trump,” conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon once declared.
Now his electoral trouncing after receiving unusually energetic election support from President Donald Trump is demonstrating the limits of the president’s influence abroad.
During 16 years in power, Orban built Budapest into a global capital of conservative thought, funding think tanks and throwing the city’s elegant doors open to Americans who shared his anti-immigrant, deeply conservative views — all while reshaping the government’s structures to entrench his rule in ways that presaged Trump’s reliance on executive power in his second term.
Orban long exhorted American conservatives to seize hold of their country’s institutions. “Have your own media,” he once told a gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, declaring it was the only way to combat the “insanity of the progressive left.” Later, he was a thorn in the side of the European Union and NATO in a way that magnified Trump’s policies, framing bids to aid Ukraine as being pro-peace and anti-war.
Trump returned the embrace, dispatching Vice President JD Vance last week to campaign for Orban, exempting the Hungarian from demands made to other European countries to wean off Russian energy, and telling Hungarians that if they reelected their prime minister, they were guaranteed a friend in Washington.
But it wasn’t enough: Orban’s years in power are coming to an end, deposed by a constitutional supermajority for the opposition, which will be empowered to rewrite election laws that the prime minister once reshaped to favor his own party. Trump’s vow on social media last week to use “the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy” if Orban were reelected proved unconvincing to the country’s voters.
“We didn’t go because we expected him to cruise to an election victory. We went because we thought it was the right thing to do to stand behind a person who stood behind us for a long time,” Vance told Fox News on Monday. “I’m sad that he lost. We will work very well, I’m sure, with the next prime minister of Hungary. It wasn’t a bad trip at all because it’s worth standing by people, even if you don’t win every race.”
American conservatives with ties to Hungary shied away from suggesting that Orban’s defeat would have direct consequences in Washington. But some of the issues that hurt him — notably corruption scandals and high prices exacerbated by Trump’s war against Iran — highlight challenges that may also apply to Republicans and the White House in the midterm elections.
“The anti-war message from Orban was blunted a little bit by what’s happening in Iran,” said Matt Schlapp, the chairman of CPAC, which has held five conferences in Budapest, including one just last month.
“Not that I’m a skeptic on Iran at all. I think the president’s doing what needs to be done,” Schlapp added. “Just the timing of it is a little unfortunate for people that are seen as close allies to Trump, and of course, JD Vance had just been there. I think in the long run, it’ll turn out to be very popular politically in these countries, but you’ve got to deal with the short-term consequences, and sometimes the timing of elections are not ideal.”
Some anti-Trump voices within the Republican party said Trump’s effort to back Orban was a significant backfire.
“President Trump and Vice President Vance broke the norms by going and campaigning for a candidate in another democracy,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska), who is not running for reelection and decried what he called on X a “fiddle-paddle” in another democracy.
“It’s not appropriate to do it, and then they failed,” he said in an interview. “So it’s like a double-dumb move, and it just undermines us.”
Rod Dreher, a prominent American conservative whom Vance has declared “a true friend and an important figure in the vice president’s initial rise to prominence, wrote Monday that “there’s no question but that nationalist-sovereigntist, Christian conservatives like me have lost a big one here.”
Dreher wrote, though, that he didn’t view Orban’s defeat as a loss for Trump’s model of nationalist populism.
“What it is, is a loss to the idea that you can govern as a populist with three years of no economic growth, and with indifference to insiders connected to you getting rich off of cronyism,” he said.
Dreher also announced plans to pick up stakes for Vienna, a decision he portrayed as connected both to the outcome of the election and to unrelated family considerations. Dreher had worked with the Danube Institute, a conservative group that was funded by the Orban government and whose future is now in question.
In Orban’s years, Budapest became a gathering place for U.S. and European conservatives to exchange ideas, deepen ties and swap tactics as CPAC and other groups sought to build a global network. The future of that remains unclear. Orban invested deeply in outreach to Washington. But his successor, Peter Magyar, is also culturally conservative, and there may still be some policy affinities with the U.S. groups that were tied to his opponent.
Schlapp said conservative movements remain strong in Europe and that he plans to keep working with groups in Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Greece and elsewhere as they seek to bend their nations’ fate toward their vision. Orban’s loss shouldn’t be read as a rejection of conservative ideas, he said.
“He became the face of economic problems that the people are facing. They’re legitimate problems,” Schlapp said. “You can’t blame the previous guy. When you’ve been there 16 years, you are the previous guy, right?”
Still, Orban’s ouster will deprive Trump of an important ally in Europe.
Orban “was a voice that was not necessarily aligned with a lot of what was coming out of Brussels. There were synergies between some of those positions and conservatives in Washington,” said Connie Mack, a former Republican congressman who lobbied for Orban.
“There’s a chance it could last because the new person is right of center. Everyone involved is going to try to see if there’s a way to make it continue to work,” he said.
One Republican strategist who has done extensive work in Europe said Orban’s election was “a harbinger” for what might be coming in the midterm elections in the fall.
“If you don’t define your campaign on an issue set that gets your base energized to turnout in huge numbers,” the strategist said, it “will be a problem.” The strategist spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about sensitive campaign considerations.
James Carafano, another prominent American conservative who has built ties to Budapest, said he was waiting to see how the new government approaches the political network that Orban built since 2010.
“Orban built a very robust conservative civil society with lots of think tanks, almost all of which, even the ones that were domestically focused, had very significant transatlantic reach. They’d show up at conferences. They’re everywhere,” said Carafano, who is a senior counselor to the president at the Heritage Foundation. “There was an effort to kind of make it self-sustaining, because they knew that they probably wouldn’t be ruling forever.”
He said Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni remained a key ally for many U.S. activists who share her skepticism of migration and deep cultural conservatism.
Meloni, however, has taken a far more pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine approach than Trump, and she has been skeptical of his war in Iran, bending to popular opinion in Italy, where the U.S. president is increasingly unpopular.
Carafano said he planned to keep engaging with European conservatives across the continent, recognizing that there would be some areas where they didn’t fully align.
“The trick today is for the United States to successfully engage with the European conservative movement. They have to be open to dealing with a broad array of people who align with them on some issues that don’t align with them on others. And for the European right to engage in the United States, they have to do the same,” he said.
“I don’t think anybody who is deeply engaged in building transatlantic conservative ties thought that those ties hinged on whether Orban was reelected or not,” he said.
Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.
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