National Review Online
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
For a supposed despot, Viktor Orbán accepted his election
shellacking gracefully. The scale of that defeat, ironically, was magnified by
the way that Fidesz, Orbán’s party, had gerrymandered the electoral system.
Fidesz won some 38 percent of the vote (more than Keir Starmer got in his
election) but will only have 29 percent of the seats in the new parliament. A
lesson for gerrymanderers everywhere: Be careful what you wish for. Péter
Magyar’s Tisza will have a supermajority and, thus, a fairly free hand to do what
it wants when it comes to undoing Orbán’s handiwork.
Magyar will become prime minister on, probably, May 5.
The obvious question is, What then? Magyar, a former Fidesz stalwart, only
broke with Orbán in 2024 over, he said, cronyism and corruption, of which there
was plenty enough and which in the end helped, directly and indirectly, bring
Orbán down. Directly, because voters grew exasperated with it; indirectly,
because of the way that it was intimately connected to the statist policies
that led to the economic underperformance that so angered Hungary’s voters.
After 16 years in power, Orbán was hard-pressed to avoid the centrifugal forces
of politics.
Fixing Hungary’s economy will have to be a major priority
for Magyar, who appears to favor the free market economic approach of the younger Orbán. It
served Hungary well at the time and should do so again. Right-populists
everywhere should take note that their project requires prosperity. Meanwhile,
Magyar is, quite rightly, committed to maintaining (and maybe even toughening)
Orbán’s hard line on immigration, one of the areas that could well be a source
of future conflict with the EU.
On the other hand, Brussels will welcome, as do we,
Magyar’s wish to break with Orbán’s hostility to Ukraine. The best original
defense of Orbán’s compliant approach to Moscow was that it was a coldly
pragmatic and transactional response to Budapest’s geographic position and
economic needs (Hungary remains dependent on Russian oil and gas), albeit one
unhealthily influenced by irredentism (there is a Hungarian minority in the
west of Ukraine). However, as time went by, there were obvious signs that the player
was himself being played. Given Hungary’s membership in the EU and NATO, not to
speak of its own history, Orbán’s stance was highly unwelcome. Magyar should
now reorient Hungary firmly back into the Western camp, just as the younger
Orbán once did.
The early signs are that Magyar will do just that. He has
identified Russia as a “security risk”, wants to reduce (in time) Hungary’s energy
dependence on Russia, supports Ukraine’s membership of the EU (but,
understandably enough, not a fast track toward it), rejects (at least in
principle) the idea of Ukrainian territorial concessions to Russia, and will
back a €90 billion EU loan for Ukraine, but, given Hungary’s poor financials,
wants a Hungarian opt-out.
Magyar will not have the kind of relationship with
President Trump that Orbán has enjoyed, but he has stressed the importance of
Hungary’s U.S. alliance. His best course would be to align Hungary with NATO’s
emerging Northeastern European security bloc. It is encouraging that his first foreign trip as prime minister will be to Warsaw. As
far as the Middle East is concerned, Magyar has pledged to maintain Hungary’s
close ties to Israel but has said that Hungary will not continue Orbán’s policy
of automatically vetoing the EU’s moves against that country. He also will take
Hungary back within the jurisdiction of the highly politicized International
Criminal Court, from which it had withdrawn after the ICC issued an arrest
warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu.
Magyar has promised, not unreasonably, to clean house
back home, but he should do so in a way consistent with the law and democratic
politics, not a vendetta. That will be in his hands. He will find it harder to
restore relations with Brussels to the degree necessary to unlock some €33
billion in badly needed EU funds that are currently either frozen or “pending.”
Doing so while standing up for Hungarian sovereignty won’t be easy. Orbán was
right to push back against the relentless accumulation of power by Brussels’s
technocrats at the expense of the EU’s member-states as well as its thumb on
the scale against the social and cultural right within those states. Ominously,
one of the early responses of Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU
Commission, to Magyar’s victory was to call for an end to the national veto on
EU foreign policy, an idea that Hungary and any other self-respecting country
should reject out of hand.
Even if Magyar turns out to be a gracious winner, will
the same be said of Brussels?
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