To the outside world, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán began his rule as a pariah—an obstreperous, often lone dissenter from European Union policies, especially over migration. Then he became a prophet to new-style “national conservatives”—the anti-immigration, anti-elite right-wing movement that has reshaped the politics of the West. After resoundingly losing national elections held on April 12, Orbán has become a parable for how populism can be defeated.
His political demise was hardly inevitable. It had to be shrewdly engineered by politicians and voters who put aside their ideological differences to defeat him. In politics, there is no natural law of self-correction.
From 2010 until now, Orbán and his Fidesz party transformed Hungary into a new kind of state, which he proudly proclaimed as an “illiberal democracy.” He and his allies rewrote the constitution to entrench his power, centralizing control over civil society and countervailing institutions such as courts and universities. Péter Magyar, the presumptive next prime minister, triumphed against a tilted electoral system—gerrymandered districts, government influence over traditional media and even over the country’s billboards—designed to keep Fidesz in power. Magyar understood that such a regime does not simply collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and mismanagement.
Magyar was an unlikely agent for Orbán’s undoing, because he was until recently an apparatchik in the Fidesz machine. But that also meant that Magyar’s criticism of Fidesz corruption could not be so easily dismissed. Two years ago, he released an embarrassing tape of his former wife, then the justice minister, speaking about Orbán officials attempting to tamper with documents in a major corruption case. That was the beginning of the ultimately successful campaign to unseat the ruling party. Tisza, Magyar’s party, barely existed two years ago. Now it has won a parliamentary supermajority capable of turning back Orbán’s constitutional changes.
Crucially, Magyar’s brand of anti-Orbánism was not stridently progressive. He did not repudiate Orbán’s hostility to migration. Quite the opposite: He labeled Orbán a hypocrite for being outwardly hostile to immigration while maintaining a large guest-worker program. Magyar pledged to continue “zero tolerance for illegal immigration” and to keep Fidesz’s opposition to the EU’s migration pact. Magyar avoided being drawn into debates about Orbán’s policies on gay rights, such as the constitutional amendment passed last year that is aimed at shutting down Pride parades. He shunned attempts by foreign reporters to profile him.
[Isaac Stanley-Becker: There’s a message for MAGA in Viktor Orbán’s defeat]
One of Tisza’s most illuminating campaign slogans was “Not left, not right, only Hungarians”—which promised an ideologically diverse movement to roll back Orbán’s corruption and cronyism. Emmanuel Macron’s party deployed a similar slogan, “Neither left nor right,” in 2017, when it also quickly went from nowhere to complete power in France. In the United States, the party duopoly is more entrenched, but you could argue that Barack Obama executed the trick in 2008 when he convincingly pitched himself as president for neither red America nor blue America.
Magyar directly campaigned all throughout Hungary, including in rural constituencies that tended to go unvisited because they were considered Fidesz’s heartland. Benjamin Novak, a former journalist and an analyst of Hungarian politics, told me that after years of scandal and inflation and slow growth in the country, Magyar’s indictment of the Orbán regime resonated widely. “The lived experience of Hungarians was that Hungary is falling apart,” Novak said. “And these guys are so corrupt that they have no idea what they’re doing.” Magyar’s momentum persuaded other opposition parties across the political spectrum to stand down to avoid splitting the anti-Fidesz vote. Factionalism was effectively suspended. In American terms, the rallying behind Magyar (whose name is the Hungarian word for “Hungarian”) would be like an ex-MAGA Republican named Peter American winning the Democratic nomination with the endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Until now, Orbán had succeeded through us-versus-them politics—Budapest against Brussels, Hungarians against Ukrainians, citizens against globalists. But instead of taking the opposite of Orbán’s side on the wisdom of EU bureaucracy, trans rights, or the Russia-Ukraine war, Magyar constructed an entirely different debate focused on the ruling party’s corruption, inflation, and neglect of public services. (In political-science terms, Magyar succeeded because his party achieved “transformative repolarization” rather than “reciprocal polarization.”)
The parties that have had the most success against the populist right have shown similar messaging discipline. In Poland, the nationalist, conservative Law and Justice Party lost in 2023 to a broad coalition led by Donald Tusk—a centrist former president of the European Council who nevertheless opposes current EU migration policy and makes statements such as “If we are open to all forms of migration without any control, our world will collapse.” In Denmark, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the leader of the center-left Social Democrats, has maintained power for seven years in part by championing strict laws on asylum and assimilation that might exceed even the imagination of Stephen Miller (for example: tearing down homes in neighborhoods that had too many “non-Western” residents). In each case, mainstream parties learned to adapt in ways that made them more competitive against radical ones.
In the United States, many of Donald Trump’s most fervent critics do something rather different: When the president and Fox News criticize an idea, Democrats declare themselves to be for it. This dynamic not only allows MAGA Republicans to set the terms of the American political debate but also boxes Democrats into backing unpopular policy positions: defunding the police; limiting immigration enforcement, even for criminals; insisting upon allowing the participation of trans women in women’s sports. Roger Scruton, the late British conservative philosopher, brought to prominence the idea of “oikophobia”—that is, a feeling of embarrassment about one’s home country and of affection for foreign societies that arises as a reaction to xenophobia. This affliction is not uncommon among American Democrats, and it concedes the field of patriotism to Republicans. This is an error that successful anti-populists such as Magyar and Tusk do not fall into.
Because Orbán was the preeminent national conservative, many of his critics might hope that his political demise will be contagious. He not only established Hungary as the prototype but also used government resources to foster organizations devoted to promoting this ideology abroad. Magyar has pledged to eliminate these state-sponsored sinecures, and a minor repatriation of ideological warriors back to America, Britain, and the rest of Europe may soon commence. Rod Dreher, a conservative American writer who has been living in Budapest (and who has since announced that he will move to Vienna), rationalized Orbán’s defeat not as a loss for the national conservative movement but as “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.” In his view, what Magyar offered voters was “Orbán, but without the corruption.”
[Anne Applebaum: Illiberalism is not inevitable]
Dreher’s warning is apt. Anti-populists might be tempted to think that the arc of history is finally bending back toward liberalism. Yet in Europe and America, populist parties and factions are not inexorable, but they remain powerful.
Populism, a set of appeals that pits the common man against the corrupt elite, is neither intrinsically authoritarian nor confined to the right. The fundamental drivers of populism—cultural anxiety about migration, the decline of state capacity, the loss of social trust—remain. It would be unsurprising if AfD (Alternative for Germany) secured wins in regional elections in Germany later this year, and if those were followed next year by the victory of Marine Le Pen’s party in the French presidential elections, followed sometime later by a victory for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in the British general election.
Temporarily embarrassed populist parties have not been permanently vanquished. “You can’t overcome dictatorship without winning an election,” Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton who has studied Hungary since the fall of communism, told me. But prevailing at the ballot box is only the first step, she said. “The more entrenched these institutions get,“ Scheppele went on, “the harder it is to undo the damage.”
Scheppele pointed me to two recent examples. In Poland, Tusk successfully dislodged the Law and Justice Party from power but has struggled to implement his “iron broom” strategy to remove vestiges of the old system. His preferred candidate lost the 2025 Polish presidential election, meaning that Tusk’s constitutional reforms will probably be blocked until at least 2030. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, the former nationalist president whose supporters staged a coup after he lost the election, is serving a long prison sentence for inciting that event. But Flávio Bolsonaro, his son, has now become the candidate of his father’s party—the next presidential election will be in October—and has rapidly gained in the polls.
In America, Democrats have been experiencing their own painful populist rebound ever since Trump returned to the presidency. Whether they are actually learning from that experience is doubtful.
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