When Viktor Orbán lost his reelection bid in April, political dissidents, foreign workers, and liberal young Hungarians breathed a collective sigh of relief. After years of working in the shadows, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Vietnamese bike couriers could finally deliver food and alcohol without fear of arrest or deportation. Suddenly, a range of sex toys appeared on the same couriers’ delivery apps. Jubilant posts, memes, and news articles erupted online as Orbán’s media machine abruptly lost its grip. Many Hungarians can now look forward to a summer spent in Budapest’s newly-revived party district or at one of the city’s electronic music clubs, attending a sure-to-be raucous gay pride parade, or perhaps enjoying a weekend music festival in the country. The fall of Orbán will also have far-reaching consequences beyond the local party scene: church attendance will surely drop without the watchful prodding of the outgoing Fidesz Party.
Anyone who has visited Hungary in the past few years will recognize that nothing in the preceding paragraph actually changed with the recent parliamentary elections. Orbán’s defeat is often described in grand ideological terms, either as a setback for right-wing authoritarianism or a victory for left-liberalism. The truth is considerably less exciting. Orbán’s defeat was a product of prosaic political factors that apply to elections and candidates across the globe. His flaws and his strengths were those of a long-serving conservative politician, not a postliberal visionary or a reactionary autocrat.
Over the past several years, two distinct charges were routinely leveled against Orbán. The first is that he and his government represented a full-bodied alternative to Western liberalism. Funnily enough, this interpretation was often endorsed by Orbán’s admirers as well as his detractors, who thought they had found a postliberal champion in the Hungarian prime minister.
Westerners typically fall in love with Eastern European dissidents and writers, not political leaders. Orbán became an unlikely celebrity because he was an early adopter of conservative populism, challenging the Western consensus on immigration, EU integration, and multiculturalism before it was fashionable. In the 2010s, Orbán was a lonely but forceful populist tribune as the old European center-right drifted into irrelevance. It is probably not a coincidence that his political star has faded just as a new generation of conservative leaders has appeared to pick up the populist torch, from Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, to Nigel Farage in Britain, to Jordan Bardella and the National Rally in France.
Although Orbán’s politics are controversial, the idea that he represented a total break with Western liberalism was always exaggerated. Orbán’s core domestic priorities – limiting immigration, boosting the Hungarian birthrate, keeping energy prices low, and so forth – were broadly in line with a venerable brand of European conservatism. His agenda would have been immediately familiar to the late 20th century Christian Democratic parties of France, Germany, and Italy, which embraced a similar blend of ecumenical traditionalism and conservative welfare statism.
Meanwhile, everyday life in Budapest or the bigger Hungarian towns wasn’t appreciably different from what you might find in other Central European countries. Although Hungary has not exactly embraced mass immigration, the country recently started recruiting guest workers for a variety of jobs, from bike couriers to factory workers to municipal bus drivers. One reason tourists have flocked to Budapest in recent years is because the city combines grand architecture and spectacular views with most of the amenities you would find in a Western capital. Coffee shops with gay pride flags, pubs, dance clubs, and foreign workers delivering booze, fast food, and sex toys all managed to flourish under Orbán’s “postliberal” regime. Since 2019, the mayoralty of Budapest, arguably the country’s second most important political office, has been held by a member of the Green Party.
There are, of course, more conservative regions in Hungary where (mostly older) people attend church regularly and have more right-wing views on a range of issues. This was safe Fidesz territory until the recent election. For years, Orbán’s left-wing critics seemed to think they could “dissolve the people and elect another,” to borrow from Berthold Brecht. Newly-elected Prime Minister Péter Magyar won by taking the opposite approach, campaigning vigorously in rural areas and emphasizing his patriotic and conservative bona fides. On certain issues, Magyar actually outflanked Fidesz from the right; he has called for reinforcing Hungary’s border fence and cracking down on foreign guest workers to boost native wages.
Viewed from this perspective, Orbán’s ideological clashes with the left look less like a fundamental break with liberalism and more like disagreements over issues that should be within the realm of legitimate political debate, such as the desirability of large-scale immigration and to what extent the state should promote childbearing. You might disagree with Orbán’s views, but they still enjoy widespread support among the Hungarian electorate, which is why Magyar has pledged to keep many Fidesz policies in place, such as strict border controls and the purchase of Russian energy.
To be fair, Orbán clearly enjoyed his notoriety and cultivated links to intellectuals and institutions across the Western world. As his reputation grew, many conservatives embraced Hungary as a standard bearer for right-wing populism, just as an earlier generation of American leftists looked to social democratic Sweden. A bellhop at a luxury hotel in downtown Budapest once remarked that it was always the American and Western European guests who were most enthusiastic about Orbán. But all this tells us is that admirers and critics alike ascribed outsized importance to the former prime minister, who became a convenient stand-in for a certain type of conservative’s ambitions and a certain type of liberal’s fears.
The second and related charge is that Orbán had established himself as an autocrat in all but name. Well, the recent election results certainly suggest otherwise, but the question of Orbán’s authoritarian tendencies is worth investigating at greater length. It is true, as Orbán’s critics point out, that Fidesz benefited from its control of Hungarian state media and official government communications, engaged in tactical gerrymandering, and consolidated authority over certain key public institutions, such as higher education. Some of these moves tilted the playing field in the former Prime Minister’s favor.
But playing political hardball is categorically different from building an authoritarian political system. Beyond the obvious fact that these structural advantages were not enough to prevent the former Prime Minister from losing in April, it’s also worth remembering that ruling parties across the Western world routinely push the envelope to win or hold power. The United States is currently in the midst of a gerrymandering arms race between conservative and liberal state legislatures that could determine which party controls Congress. Britain’s Labor Party plans to lower the voting age to 16 before the next general election, a far greater structural change than anything Orbán or Fidesz implemented.
To get around the fact that Orbán was not an autocrat in the traditional sense of the word, critics invented new and implausible ways to describe his distinct brand of right-wing populism. The oxymoron “competitive authoritarianism” was one such term, appearing in an election postmortem from Lorinc Redei in Foreign Affairs. The lesson of the Orbán loss, according to Redei, is that in a system of competitive authoritarianism, opposition parties must unite to defeat the incumbent. But this is a banal observation that applies to elections across the Western world. A fragmented opposition is always easier to defeat than a united front – witness Donald Trump’s success against a fractured Republican primary field in 2015.
Moreover, Orbán repeatedly backed down from anything that might have marked a fundamental break with the liberal West. Last summer, the Budapest Pride Parade attracted record attendance despite harsh criticism from Orbán and Fidesz. The police did show up to the parade in force, but only to manage traffic and separate marchers from a counter demonstration on Budapest’s Liberty Bridge. During the Covid lockdowns, one old man in rural Hungary was arrested for criticizing the government’s quarantine policies on Facebook. Instead of ushering in a new era of censorship, he was quickly released and emergency Covid measures, which included some genuinely worrying speech restrictions, were allowed to expire. In 2019, widespread protests forced the government to call off a planned Budapest campus for a Chinese university. Critical and dissenting media outlets continued to operate (and flourish) throughout the Orbán era. In the lead-up to election day, massive opposition rallies were held in Budapest, Debrecen, and other locations across the country.
Ultimately, the factors that cost Orbán the election are the same factors that bedevil incumbent politicians the world over. Long-serving elected leaders, from Orbán to Angela Merkel to Tony Blair, are always hampered by voter fatigue and the natural desire for a fresh face. When the economy sours, the incumbent party usually takes the blame. Voter frustration with corruption, exemplified by the twin real estate empires of Orbán’s son-in-law and his childhood best friend, also cost Fidesz dearly. Incumbent fatigue, economic troubles, and corruption are issues that plague most long-serving, democratically elected leaders. Far from being an outlier, Orbán is simply the latest in a long line of successful politicians who outstayed their welcome.
On Saturday, May 9, a festive crowd gathered outside of the Hungarian parliament in Budapest to hear Magyar deliver his inaugural address and celebrate the election results with dancing, Hungarian pop music, and plenty of beer. Many rallygoers wore shirts visualizing the overwhelming parliamentary majority won by Magyar’s Tisza Party, a potent symbol of their desire for systemic political change. Other shirts linked 2026 to 1956, the year of the doomed Hungarian uprising against the Soviets that captured the West’s imagination and is still commemorated annually across the country.
1956 may prove to be an apt comparison, not because Orbán was equivalent to the old Soviet Union, but because the anti-communist uprising marked a subtle rather than an epochal shift in Hungarian politics. After suppressing the revolution, the ruling Communist Party adopted a kinder, gentler form of authoritarianism that came to be known as “goulash communism.” The recent election is similar insofar as it represents a political adjustment instead of a fundamental break with Hungary’s recent past.
Like Orbán, Magyar will govern as the center-right leader of a conservative country. There will be important changes, such as improved relations with the EU, a crackdown on corruption, and systematic reforms to Hungarian state media. Yet Magyar’s public pledges to keep Hungary’s border closed and continue buying oil and gas from Russia suggest that there will also be a great deal of continuity with the recently-ended Orbán era. This may come as a disappointment to Orbán’s most fervent critics, but it is not surprising that “the most right-wing nation in Europe, ” to borrow a 2022 description from two Hungarian academics, opted for a change in upper management and not a comprehensive rejection of the outgoing prime minister’s worldview.
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