It is over, God willing, the Hungarian anomaly with the electoral defeat of Viktor Orban, who had turned his country into a half or full Russian enclave within the European Union. An enclave no longer Soviet only in words, because in reality Putin has brought Sovietism back to the Kremlin, combining it with Tsarist traditions, let’s call them that.
Politically fatal to Orban, after sixteen years of power and proudly illiberal democracy, was the support of Trump, the American friend of Putin without whose substantial backing, or tolerance, the Russian invasion war in Ukraine would not have lasted so long. The metaphorical kiss from the American vice president Vance, who landed in Hungary just on the eve of the vote not as the royal eagle of the White House but as an owl of ill omen, was perhaps decisive in pushing the last undecided voters to vote for Peter Magyar. He is right-wing like Orban, but of a European right, whose advantages the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni will end up appreciating as well, thus closing the anomaly – another one – of support for Orban.
More than the sixteen years of Orban’s republican reign, Hungary has paradoxically and happily gone back 70 years: to that 1956 of the anti-Soviet uprising, unfortunately crushed in blood. As 12 years later would also happen to the Prague Spring.
In 1956 the 62-year-old president defeated in the Hungarian elections of this 2026 was not yet born. Much less the winner Magyar, aged 45. Yet it has fallen to both, respectively, to extinguish and reignite the Hungarian anti-communist patriotism of 70 years ago.
