Viktor Orbán, the European Union’s only autocrat, has fallen.
Results from Sunday’s election in Hungary show that the opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has defeated Orbán’s Fidesz party — the first election the party has lost in 20 years. Orbán called Magyar to concede the race within hours of the polls closing.
There is a reason for Fidesz’s longevity: After winning the 2010 election, they had so thoroughly stacked the electoral playing field in their favor that it became nearly impossible for them to lose. That Magyar has beaten them is a testament both to his skills as a politician and the overwhelming frustration of the Hungarian population with life under Fidesz.
His victory also required overcoming an extraordinary last-minute campaign by President Donald Trump to save MAGA’s favorite European leader, which included sending Vice President JD Vance to Hungary to rally with Orbán last week. On the eve of the election, Trump promised to devote the “full economic might” of the US to boosting Hungary’s economy if Orbán asked.
But Magyar didn’t just win the election: He won by a massive margin, potentially enough to secure a two-thirds majority of seats in Hungary’s parliament. This would be a magic number: enough, per Hungarian law, for Tisza to amend the constitution at will.
With such a majority, Magyar would have the power to begin unwinding the authoritarian regime that Orbán has spent his tenure in power building — and potentially restore true democracy to Hungary.
Without it, Tisza will hold nominal power but ultimately be limited in how to wield it. Fidesz’s influence over institutions like the court and presidency would constrain their ability to undo much of what Fidesz already did. The most likely scenario: Tisza has four frustrating years in power, accomplishes relatively little, and then hands power back to Fidesz.
So much depends on the exact ways that the votes are tallied. But now, for the first time in a very long time, there is genuine hope for Hungarian democracy.
How to win an authoritarian election
To understand how astonishing Magyar’s victory is, you need to understand just how much Orbán had stacked the deck against him.
After Orbán’s first term in office, from 1998 to 2002, his party claimed they were cheated — and he became dedicated to never losing again. For the next eight years, he and his allies in Fidesz developed a series of complex and precise schemes for changing Hungarian law to build what Orbán termed “a political forcefield” that could hold on to power for decades.
When they won a two-thirds majority in the 2010 election, they were able to put these ideas into action.
Fidesz reworked Hungary’s election system, gerrymandering districts to give its rural base vastly more representation than urban opposition supporters. It turned public media into propaganda, and strong-armed independent media into selling to the government or its private-sector allies. It created ballot access rules that forced the several opposition parties to compete against each other. It imposed unequal campaign finance rules that put Fidesz on a structurally superior footing.
The basic goal was to create a system where the government doesn’t have to formally rig elections, in the sense of stuffing ballot boxes. It could generally rely on the background unfairness of the system, the structural disadvantages opposition parties face, to reliably maintain a constitutional majority. Political scientists call this kind of regime “competitive authoritarianism” — a system in which elections are real, but so unfair that they can’t reasonably be termed democratic contests.
“The state became a party state, in which there is no border between the government, the governing party, [and] state institutions,” says Dániel Döbrentey, the Voting Rights Project Coordinator at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union. “Sources, databases, and everything which should serve the public interest are sometimes not just handled but misused by the governing majority for their campaigning purposes.”
Recent evidence shows the Hungarian regime also employed more classically authoritarian tactics. A new documentary compiled damning evidence of widespread voter blackmail: where local Fidesz officials threaten voters in remote areas, perhaps with job loss or cutting them off from public benefits, if they do not vote for the party. Döbrentey estimates that this has affected somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 Hungarians — a significant number in a country where the number of eligible voters tops out at around 8 million.
The result of all this has been a remarkably durable authoritarian system. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz managed to retain its two-thirds majority in parliament with less than half of the national popular vote. In 2022, the various opposition parties united around a single candidate and party list to try and overcome its structural disadvantages — and Fidesz actually improved its vote share, easily retaining its two-thirds majority.
“The rules are so seriously rigged that Orbán can probably make up a 10, maybe even 15 point difference” in underlying public opinion, says Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian election law at Princeton University.
And yet Fidesz just lost resoundingly. How?
For one thing, Magyar was an excellent candidate. A regime defector — his ex-wife served as Orbán’s Minister of Justice — he shared many of its conservative views on social policy and immigration, making it difficult for the government to rally its base by painting him as a left-globalist plant.
Despite this, the entire opposition — including left-wing parties — threw their weight behind his new Tisza party, understanding that the only thing that mattered was ousting Fidesz. This allowed for the creation of a pan-ideological coalition, one united primarily by frustration with the current government and a desire to return to real democracy.
And this frustration ran deep — very deep.
Orbán had badly mismanaged the Hungarian economy, falling well behind other former Communist states like Poland and Czechia to become one of the European Union’s poorest states (if not the poorest). This economic underperformance was inextricably intertwined with his governance model: Fidesz secured its hold on power by empowering a handful of regime-friendly oligarchs to dominate the commercial sector. This system gave Orbán significant power to fend off political challenges and make himself wealthy, but it produced a stagnant and corrupt private sector where connections with the state were more important than having a high-quality business model.
Fidesz’s control over the flow of information, while powerful, simply could not compete with the reality that ordinary Hungarians experienced with their eyes and ears.
Perhaps Orbán might have held if he were facing a lesser opponent, a less united opposition, or a less impoverished electorate. But the conjunction of all three created a kind of electoral perfect storm, one powerful enough to overcome one of the most potent election-rigging machines in the world.
Can Peter Magyar save Hungarian democracy?
When autocrats lose elections, the immediate fear is that they’ll try to annul or overturn them — à la Trump in 2020. Orbán’s concession suggests Hungary may be avoiding the worst-case scenario.
Yet Orbán could still make use of his remaining time with a two-thirds majority to try and protect the system he built on the way out. There are a number of different ways to do so, most of which involve a rapid convening of parliament to pass new constitutional amendments. Perhaps the most discussed one among Hungary watchers is one in which Fidesz amends the constitution to change Hungary from a parliamentary system to a presidential one.
Hungary already has a president — a Fidesz loyalist with little to do given his party’s control over parliament. But Orbán may attempt to turn the office into Hungary’s chief executive, thus stripping Magyar of key powers before he even has a chance to wield them. Orbán might even figure out a way to appoint himself president, a maneuver pioneered by Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
But even assuming none of that happens, the future of Hungarian democracy will still be precarious — hinging, in significant part, on exactly how many seats Tisza has won in parliament.
For the past 16 years, Orbán has not just corrupted Hungarian elections: He has corrupted everything about the Hungarian state. The judiciary, regulatory agencies, bureaucracy, even seemingly apolitical institutions in areas like the arts — nearly everything has, in one way or another, become part of the Fidesz machine, either a vehicle for political control or a means of Fidesz leaders profiting off of power.
Restoring Hungarian democracy is thus not a simple matter of redrawing electoral maps. They will need to kick Orbán’s cronies off the courts, break up the government’s near-monopoly on the press, rebuild safeguards against corruption, create a truly non-partisan tax agency, and on down the line — all while trying to manage the nearby war in Ukraine, rebuild a relationship with the European Union, and deal with a United States that nakedly campaigned on Orbán’s behalf.
This amounts to a need for something like constitutional regime change — a transformation almost certainly impossible to accomplish without a two-thirds majority in parliament.
Absent the power to amend the constitution, Fidesz’s structural entrenchment in areas like the courts will hamstring the Tisza majority’s ability to make real change. A failed Magyar government, and Fidesz restoration in the next elections, would be the most likely outcome: the authoritarian system reasserting itself even after what might seem, on the outside, like a fatal defeat. For this reason, the size of the Tisza majority may matter as much as the sheer fact of them winning.
But if he does get two-thirds, then Péter Magyar and his allies have accomplished the near-impossible: beating an entrenched autocrat in elections that he had spent nearly two decades attempting to rig.
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