Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orban has lost reelection in stunning fashion, an absolute electoral wipeout that presages what his MAGA allies in the U.S. will be facing this November.
The brand-new opposition Tisza party won around 53 percent of the vote, to just 37 percent for Orban’s Fidesz. Tisza is projected to secure around 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament, comfortably above the 133 needed for a supermajority, giving it the power to rewrite Hungary’s constitution and begin dismantling the autocratic system Orban spent 16 years building. Fidesz currently holds 135 seats.
The victory came despite Orban rigging the playing field: gerrymandering the country so the opposition needed about a 5-point margin just to break even, and turning public media into government mouthpieces.
MAGA and Orban have long been tied at the hip. The right-wing CPAC conference has hosted an annual Hungary edition since 2022. There, he’s fed the MAGA faithful red meat like: “Progressive liberals, neo-Marxists intoxicated by the dream of wokeness, those in the pay of George Soros, they want to abolish the Western way of life that you and we love so much.”
He’s also leaned hard into culture war paranoia, telling the CPAC Hungary crowd in 2023: “Gender and woke also divide the nation into classes, and proclaim that class is more important than nation, taking precedence over belonging to the nation and taking precedence over national identity.”
So you can see why the MAGA crowd loves him so much. For many on the American right, Orban isn’t just an ally—he’s a blueprint, with influential voices openly arguing for “Orbanizing” U.S. institutions by using state power to reshape media, universities, and the civil service. Tucker Carlson helped cement that relationship, broadcasting a week of shows from Budapest in 2021.
For millions of MAGA viewers, Hungary wasn’t some distant country—it was a working model of what conservative power could look like in practice, a model Orban actively marketed. “Hungary is actually an incubator where experiments are done on the future of conservative policies,” he said in 2023. “Hungary is the place where we didn't just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it.”
Yeah, he and his party did it. And on Sunday, two-thirds of his country rebelled against it.
Adding to the schadenfreude, Vice President JD Vance actually traveled to Hungary and campaigned for Orban. “What the United States and Hungary represent under Viktor’s leadership and under President Trump’s leadership is the defense of Western civilization,” Vance declared at one rally. At another, he went full sermon: “Will you stand for Western civilization and for the God of our fathers?”
The god of our fathers? Vance is so weird.
His overt meddling drew backlash across Europe, including from Germany, which rejected Vance’s claims that the European Union was the real outside influence in Hungary’s election. But really, everyone should be happy at Vance’s visit, as his “kiss of death” record (literally with the last Pope) remains unvarnished:
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, tried his own version of election interference—dangling U.S. economic support if Hungarians kept Orban in power. It worked in Argentina, where Trump gave his pal Javier Milei a $20 billion taxpayer giveaway in the weeks before his reelection campaign.
“My Administration stands ready to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “We are excited to invest in the future Prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued Leadership!”
Can’t wait to see how “excited” he is now.
Trump’s support was just the latest in a long line of backing for Orban, whom he praises in the same breath as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. And the alignment isn’t just rhetorical. Orban has consistently acted as a spoiler inside the European Union, delaying or weakening sanctions on Russia and complicating efforts to support Ukraine. In practice, that’s made him Vladimir Putin’s most reliable ally inside the EU, a bridge between Moscow’s interests and the MAGA movement that has long admired him.
There is, however, one way Orban appears to be better than Trump or Putin: He has reportedly respected the outcome of this election, calling opposition leader and Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar to concede and congratulate him.
It’s a low bar, but one Trump couldn’t manage to clear.
The geopolitical implications are immediate. Ukraine, in particular, stands to benefit. While Slovakia’s Robert Fico remains aligned with Putin and hostile to EU support for Ukraine, he will now be far more isolated. Without Orban to share the burden, it becomes much harder for a single leader to block aid to Kyiv without facing serious consequences for his poor nation from the rest of Europe.
And for Trump, it’s one less strongman ally. If MAGA wants to keep pointing to the Hungarian model, let them. Voters there just showed how that story ends.
Markos Moulitsas is founder and editor of the blogging website Daily Kos and author of three books.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos
