Orbán’s Total Defeat

By Henry Olsen

Monday, April 13, 2026

 

I was a 19-year-old College Republican when Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election. That night was a combination of unexpected glee among conservatives who had long dreamed of remaking America and unexpected shock among an establishment that had thought it was invincible. Replace Reagan with Tisza leader Péter Magyar and the liberal elite with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz establishment, and you will understand what has happened in Hungary.

 

Orbán’s defeat was total. At present, his party leads in only 13 of the country’s 106 single-member districts, and it will probably lose a couple of those as the final votes from expats are counted. It lost the party list vote in Hungary by more than 17 points just four years after winning it by more than 16. America has not seen a 33-point shift in the presidential margin since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s historic 1932 landslide.

 

It’s not hard to figure out why Orbán was decisively rejected. His government had allowed cronyism — the opposition calls it corruption — to flourish. That was made worse by the fact that the economy has been stagnant for four years, registering almost no real GDP growth. A scandal also erupted in early 2024, where the president and justice minister resigned after they were caught pardoning someone who had covered up pedophilia. That’s a very tough record to get reelected on.

 

The opposition also had learned from its prior defeats. The old center-left and left-wing opposition parties largely faded away in favor of Tisza, a new, center-right party. Tisza is led by the justice minister’s former husband, Péter Magyar. Magyar proved to be politically talented, rallying disaffected Fidesz voters and the old opposition to his side. He ran on a platform that borrowed elements from Fidesz — anti-Ukraine war, opposition to migration — with criticisms about corruption, the slow economy, and problematic relations with the European Union.

 

That made Magyar an acceptable alternative to Orbán, just as Reagan’s bravura debate performance against Jimmy Carter convinced undecided voters to reject Carter’s smears and trust the newcomer.

 

Tisza supporters are, like Reagan’s, giddy with delight today. They dream of ridding the state of corruption and repurposing the funds to legitimate uses. “Until now, it was like the downside of the Wild West: The sheriffs backed the thieves,” Csabuda Árpád, a local politician who favors greater infrastructure investment, told me. “With Tisza’s victory, the stealing will end and hopefully we can use that money for investments like rail line 75 that goes through my town and would also connect Hungary and Slovakia.”

 

Other Tisza voters want money to be shifted to fixing roads and state-owned hospitals. One man I met in Balatonfüred, a well-off tourist town on Lake Balaton, told me about the decrepit state of the local hospital and streets. “My car sits two inches off the street, and the pan still scrapes the ground” because of frequent potholes, he complained.

 

Still others just want the future to be better for their children. Jonas, a 64-year-old man from Eger, a regional center in northeastern Hungary, benefits from the state’s extra pension payments. But his son moved back to the country recently and wants to start a family. Jonas was concerned that high housing prices and the stagnant economy meant that his son wouldn’t be able to afford to stay, so he decided to vote for Tisza even though he lost some friends who were ardent Fidesz backers.

 

The result should alarm President Trump and Vice President Vance. They committed American prestige to support Orbán and got annihilated. Their intervention did not help Orbán, but it certainly hurt Trump even more with the European leaders whose support he needs in the Middle East. They should resolve to never again do something so unnecessarily politically risky.

 

The Hungary results should also impel Trump and Vance to look at the state of their own electoral prospects. Orbán kept trying to change the subject rather than deal with the issues voters actually cared about, like growth and inflation. Similarly, the economy consistently ranks as the most important issues among voters stateside. American polls have shown for over a year that the swing voters who made Trump president again in 2024 are dissatisfied with Trump’s handling of economic issues, yet the president keeps focusing on cultural issues and foreign affairs.

 

Trump, like Orbán, is governing to please his base rather than his swing voters. Orbán’s defeat showed that there’s only so long that someone can do that and retain office. A similar massive rebuke is facing Trump’s Republican Party if he doesn’t change course soon.

 

That realization may not come, though. Democrats in Reagan’s time had countless warnings that Americans had grown weary of the party’s emphasis on tax-and-spend and its inability to both bring down inflation or stop the Soviet Union’s rise. They were genuinely shocked when Reagan and the GOP won; even if things were bad, it could never come to this. But it did, and the rest is history.

 

Insular elites are always the last ones to see the tidal wave coming. Orbán’s coterie told themselves the polls were wrong, that there was a hidden Fidesz vote that would come out of the woodwork to save them. The deluge that has swamped them also shocked them, just as the 1980s hurricane blew down the house that Democrats had built. We shall see whether Trump has the wisdom to avoid a similar fate.