Orbán's defeat is symbolically fraught for Trump

An election that determines the leadership of a central European country with a population of less than 10 million might not seem like a major world event. And yet what happened Sunday in Hungary, marking the end of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's tenure after 16 years, has been the focus of intense attention in Europe and in the United States — so much so that Vice President JD Vance traveled to the country in a last-ditch attempt to boost Orbán and his Fidesz party.

Why was this important, and what will change with Orbán's defeat?

Orbán has punched above his geopolitical weight as a key figure in the right wing nationalist populist movement that has tried to reshape Europe — and, via President Donald Trump, to change American political culture. Though not a true autocrat like his ally Russian President Vladimir Putin, Orbán has used the government in authoritarian ways to increase his power and promote his social and cultural agenda — much as Trump and his administration have been trying to do.

He tinkered with electoral law to make challenges more difficult and presided over the takeover of major media organizations by his cronies. He cracked down on pro-migrant nonprofits. He used spurious regulations to force Central European University, founded by his archenemy George Soros, out of the country. Rod Dreher, a pro-Orbán American conservative, openly admits that the real reason for this move was to keep Soros from cultivating a liberal elite inside Hungary.

Orbán capitalized on real instances of liberal overreach in Western Europe — including policies that allowed a large, rapid, destabilizing influx of migrants in the mid-2010s — to cast himself as champion of sanity, national sovereignty and popular will against "globalism." Despite his manipulation of the political process, his electoral majorities were genuine.

But as his time in office went on, he became more extreme, with rhetoric that not only criticized uncontrolled migration but explicitly denounced "race-mixing." He also became a literal illustration of the adage that power corrupts: Corruption skyrocketed, and Orbán himself amassed vast wealth while Hungary suffered economic decline, falling behind once-poorer neighbors like Romania.

The war in Ukraine also brought Orbán's bromance with Putin to the fore. He portrayed Putin's invasion of Ukraine as a mutual conflict that should be ended through compromise. Hungary used its European Union membership to block sanctions against Russia and loans to Ukraine. In a recently leaked phone call from October, Orbán told Putin, "I am at your service" and invoked a fable in which a mouse helps a lion free itself from a trap, volunteering to be Putin's "mouse" inside the EU. His campaign made Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the enemy who could draw Hungary into the war.

Orbán's victorious rival, Péter Magyar, is an ex-associate who turned against Fidesz's corruption and cronyism. He is no leftist or even liberal, and supports stringent restrictions on immigration. But he has pledged to rebuild Hungary's ties with the EU and NATO and restore democratic norms such as the right to free assembly. And he made a strong statement naming Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine.

Vance and Trump's desperate efforts to save Orbán point to his symbolic importance to Trumpist national populism. In recent years, Orbán has been a prominent, recurring speaker at the Trump-aligned Conservative Political Action Conference. Could his downfall be a time's-up signal for Trumpism? Maybe — if Democrats can learn the Hungarian lesson that uniting behind a moderate has the best chance to defeat the right.

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.