It is a fact: Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won the Hungarian elections. And Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz lost, for the first time since 2010. Shortly after 9 p.m., Magyar announced that Orbán had personally called him to concede defeat. Magyar will have a two-thirds supermajority, with at least 138 of the 199 seats in Parliament, which will be necessary to relaunch Hungary after 16 years of state capture in the Orbán style.
Orbánism, a genuine variant of far-right politics that exploits national resentment to attack the very essence of the European Union, has suffered a severe blow – perhaps fatal, unless Orbán is already preparing a comeback (it wouldn’t be the first) – and potentially capable of stalling other far-right movements: from France to Germany, Italy, and perhaps even Washington.
This assessment of what happened yesterday in Hungary may seem banal. But it is necessary. The polls were not yet closed when Balázs Orbán, the prime minister’s political director (no relation, except for shared beliefs), began spreading rumors about alleged electoral fraud by Tisza. Both Orbáns are intelligent men. It is unthinkable that they truly believed it. The idea that an opposition party, founded just two years ago and without parliamentary representation, could manipulate elections on a national scale is absurd. So why spread conspiratorial fantasies?
The answer seems obvious: because they are following Donald Trump’s example in 2020. Even before losing that presidential election to Joe Biden, Trump had been spreading lies about widespread fraud for years. He may have done so without a precise strategy, due to his usual aversion to defeat, procedures, and facts. But the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol showed the violent power of a political lie, when thousands of his supporters stormed the Capitol to, in their words, “stop the steal.” There was no steal. But people died because of that lie.
“One submits to tyranny when one gives up the difference between what one wants to hear and what is real,” wrote American historian Timothy Snyder in his book “On Tyranny,” published in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first presidential term. Repeat often enough that the sky is green, the grass is blue, and that a Hungarian electoral system entirely controlled by Fidesz was corrupted by its improvised opponent Magyar, and you will end up believing it.
This is what a decade of Trumpian “alternative facts” politics has produced in Europe as well. The interest of Trump’s MAGA operatives in Europe is remarkable. Since 1945, no American administration had paid so much attention to the internal political dynamics of various European countries. But it is a certain Europe, the one they openly cheer for. “America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this awakening of spirit, and the growing influence of European patriotic parties offers great cause for optimism,” reads the National Security Strategy published by the White House last December.
Hungary and Viktor Orbán are the pivot of this Trumpian strategy. So important that Vice President JD Vance traveled to Budapest a week before the vote to attend a rally. “Will you oppose the Brussels bureaucrats? Will you defend Western civilization? Will you defend freedom, truth, and the God of our fathers? Then, my friends, go vote and support Viktor Orbán!” Vance thundered. He even went so far as to accuse the European Union of “one of the worst examples of foreign interference in an election” he had ever seen.
The irony does not escape the observer. While almost all EU leaders have firmly refrained from commenting on Hungarian domestic politics for months, the Trump administration openly intervened in Sunday’s elections. And the result was a spectacular boomerang. The EU’s approach, careful to avoid even the slightest appearance of interference, was the right one, argues Nicolai von Ondarza of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin.
“History does not repeat itself, but it instructs,” writes Timothy Snyder at the beginning of “On Tyranny.” Will Orbán ride into the sunset, following his daughter and son-in-law (one of the richest Hungarians, thanks to belonging to the Orbán clan) to the United States, to start a lucrative career on the conservative conference circuit? Or will he lick his wounds and prepare a plan to return in four years, as he did after losing power in 2002 and failing to regain it in 2006? Time will tell.
(Excerpt from the European Morning Brief)
