The great electoral victory obtained in the Hungarian elections of 12-A by Péter Magyar against Víktor Orban marks a turning point in the political construction of a new international order. This must be highlighted in times where each national election, not only in Europe, adds or subtracts ground in the fight for global hegemony waged by the three empires – China, Russia and the United States – each supported by various intermediate powers.
The US and Russia understood this from the first hour. Viktor Orbán’s government was for Putin and Trump a fundamental strategic piece in their respective international projects: Putin’s territorial and political expansion towards Europe, and the expansion of an i-liberal economy (according to the term invented by Orbán himself) in a Europe to be dominated by the populist national far-right promoted by the Trump government on a global scale.
Magyar’s victory is part of a recent trend that was already being seen in some countries on the European continent. In this chain of events we can mention the arrest of the advance of national-populism in the Netherlands where the figure of the leader Geert Wilders was removed from the game, the communal defeats of the National Regroupment in France, the defeat of Meloni in the plebiscite designed to harm the division of powers through the veiled control of the Judiciary. This democratic trend has been crowned on 12-A by the great victory of Péter Magyar’s Tizsa party over Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party-state.
Orbán’s electoral defeat was total. The Tisza party won two-thirds of the vote. With 138 seats out of 199 and 56% of the votes against Fidesz, which only obtained 37%, the path to implement a gravitational change of orientation in favor of Europe is now clear.
But it was not only a defeat for Orbán. The big losers were the governments of Russia and the US, having decided to intervene directly and jointly in the Hungarian electoral process.
JD Vance’s active presence at Orbán’s side will go down in history as a boomerang, that is, as an American electoral defeat in Hungary. With the calls to vote for Orbán made by Putin and with all of Vance’s populist demagogy brought into play, Hungarian voters, whether they wanted it or not, voted for the political emancipation of Hungary with respect to the great powers. That may not have been the voters’ primary motive, but the net product of their votes can and should be interpreted that way. If Trump was ideologically defeated in Hungary, Putin was defeated politically and even strategically in his war of invasion of Ukraine.
It is likely that Péter Magyar will not become an ardent defender of Ukraine overnight, but everything suggests that he will not be “Putin’s pawn” on the European board, as Orbán was baptized. In any case, economic aid to Ukraine in the war of national liberation that it is carrying out on behalf of Europe against the Russian empire will not be persistently blocked by the Hungarian spearhead that Orbán raised on behalf of Hungary.
It may be true that Hungarian voters would not have voted directly against Putin or Trump. In that sense, we all know that elections can never be won in any country for international or geopolitical reasons and, to a large extent, that also happened in Hungary. Voters vote, first of all, and quite rightly, for or against their material well-being. And there were too many reasons to vote against the disastrous economy that Orbán had brought his country to.
For now, in terms of corruption, Hungary had become a leading country. In the European Union, it ranked last in the 2025 perception index along with Bulgaria. The embezzlement of European funds in favor of friends. and even from Orbán’s relatives, it was a fact well known in Hungary. The EU has even been forced to freeze funds destined for Hungary due to lack of transparency.
To a certain extent, Orbán had reconstructed the mechanisms of corruption that prevailed within the pro-Soviet Communist Party, giving rise to the formation of a “new nomenklatura.” To this bleak panorama we must add that in Hungary, during 2024-2025, the highest inflation in all of Europe occurred. GDP barely grew 0.5% in 2024 after a contraction in 2023.
Due to the aforementioned reasons, foreign investors, including those from China, did not see any reason to invest massively in Hungary.
On the other hand, Orbán’s ideological approach to Russia could not be translated into economic aid, since Russia is only a military power and is not capable of giving aid even to its own population. Seen that way, Orbán failed miserably in building his own utopia: an i-liberal republic. The only existing i-liberalism occurred in the increase in the repressive resources of the state, in the destruction of democratic freedoms, in the almost total takeover of the media, in the disqualification of parliament.
We can then agree. Citizenship manifests itself primarily for material reasons, but those reasons are expressed politically. Corruption generates distrust of the ruling party. In turn, inflation manifests itself in social decline and family insecurity not only in the face of emigrants who are not interested in emigrating to a country that does not offer decent working conditions, but also in the face of the authorities of the nation itself. The fight for needs ends up becoming, in this way, a fight for freedoms. These freedoms exist in the countries that, alongside Russia, Orban fought in the EU.
As happened shortly before the great democratic revolution of 1989, Orbán’s reviled Europe began to be seen again as the promised land. It is not surprising, then, that this “new Europeanism” has caught on strongly among the country’s youth. And here we must highlight something very interesting. The massive participation of Hungarian youth was decisive in Tisza’s victory. The 77.8% participation of young people broke a national record. While official Fidesz maintained a solid base among those over 65 (with support close to 50%), among those under 30 its support fell below 10%. That youth, joined by urban movements and subcultures, including homosexual communities, manifested happily in the streets, with their music, with their banners, with their digital media, with their memes, giving the campaign a libertarian (instead of i-liberal) atmosphere and not lastly, in anti-Russian demonstrations, repeating in the streets the cry of the 1956 revolution: “Russians, get out of here”, thus demonstrating that, although Think otherwise, people do have historical memory. These young people were, as in the past, the human link that united Hungarian social demands with the democratic spirit born in Europe from the French revolution, through the anti-communist revolutions of 1989-1990, until reaching the present day.
Hungary has returned, not so much to the EU, but to Europe. That is why Magyar’s electoral victory, being emphatically Hungarian, was celebrated throughout Europe.
In the EU, the “ultranationalists” have lost their top leader. The anti-European European parties, almost all Putinist and Trumpist, are as big losers as Orbán’s forces. In short, Hungarian citizens have shown that democracy, especially European democracy, has not been defeated and is still capable of resisting for a long time. There may be many battles lost, but there will also be many battles won.
The autocrat Putin and the authoritarian Trump maintain positions in all European countries. Among them some very powerful ones such as National Regrouping, VOX, AfD. But they are not invincible. That was what the great Hungarian rebellion demonstrated, electorally expressed at the polls of 12-A.
*This article was originally published in POLIS.
