As I said in Friday’s preview, Hungary isn’t a big country. So counting from yesterday’s election didn’t take long, and by breakfast time in eastern Australia the result was already clear: prime minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party had been defeated in a landslide. Opposition leader Péter Magyar will be prime minister with a two-thirds majority in parliament, giving him the power to roll back Orbán’s authoritarian and kleptocratic state.
With 98.9% of the domestic vote counted, Magyar’s centre to centre-right party, Tisza, has 53.1% of the vote against 38.4% for Fidesz and 5.8% for the further-right Our Homeland, the only other party to reach the 5% threshold (see official results here). More than half the parliament is chosen by single-member districts, which when Fidesz was the dominant party worked in its favor (and was designed for that purpose), but that now has benefited Tisza: it won 93 of them against just 13 for Fidesz.
The 93 proportional seats are calculated in such a way as to partly offset the imbalance in the district seats; Tisza so far has won 45 of those, with 42 for Fidesz and six for Our Homeland. Some votes from outside the country are yet to come in, and since they tend to favor Fidesz it’s possible they may tip another seat its way. One of Tisza’s constituency seats is also very close (a margin of 59 votes), so in the worst case it will have 136 seats out of 199. Turnout was an astonishing 79.5%, up about ten points on 2022.
World reaction has been highly positive, at least from democratic governments. Magyar received warm congratulations from, among others, the leaders of Poland, France, Britain and the European Union, all of whom will be glad to see the back of Orbán. The latter, to his credit, conceded defeat promptly and also congratulated Magyar, but there has been no word so far from his allies in Washington and Moscow.
If you’re looking, though, for a reason why the opposition exceeded expectations this time, turning a ten-point lead in the polls into a margin of nearly 15 points (in complete contrast to the 2022 experience), the visit of American vice-president J.D. Vance last week to campaign for Orbán would be a prime suspect. As Australia showed last year, Donald Trump and his cronies are electoral poison around the world.
There are two other important morals, it seems to me, to be drawn. The first is that authoritarians can be beaten. Not all of them, of course: a sufficiently ruthless autocrat can ban opponents from running (as in Russia) or falsify results so as to avoid defeat (as in Venezuela). But many countries that are less than full democracies – as Hungary has been – still have enough democratic forms left for popular sentiment to make itself felt.
That’s an important message to keep in mind for such critical future elections as those for the presidency in Turkey and in the United States in 2028. Even grossly unfair systems that protect corrupt incumbents can be vulnerable to a grassroots campaign that taps into public discontent.
The second lesson is one that’s featured here many times, namely the importance of building a broad coalition against the far right, and especially the crucial role of the centre-right. Magyar was not a leftist of even particularly liberal; he was a former Fidesz insider, generally conservative in his politics. That enabled him to build a broad alliance of left, centre and centre-right, united around the single goal of overthrowing the Orbán regime.
Such diversity could create problems in the future, as Magyar’s assorted allies disagree on policy directions (as it has in Poland, which has a similar story to tell). But given the crisis the world faces, that’s very much a secondary consideration. Whatever our other differences, we need to stand together against the enemies of democracy. The idea of a resistance movement that’s confined to the left – a popular idea in France, and surprisingly common even in the US – is a fantasy.
That’s not to say that we need to make concessions to the far right in policy terms: there’s already ample evidence of the failure of that strategy. Magyar didn’t try to out-Putin his opponents. But he also avoided getting bogged down in fighting a culture war, and stuck to themes that the anti-Orbán forces could all agree on: ending corruption, ending economic mismanagement and reconciling with the EU.
It worked for him, and not just Hungary but the world at large will be the better for it.
The World is Not Enough 