And the White House wasn’t condemning this behavior, or Russia’s involvement, but aligning itself with Orbán. After the Munich Security Conference in February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio flew to Budapest, where he told Orbán that “your success is our success” and that the U.S.-Hungary relationship was “essential and vital for our national interests in the years to come.” And in the waning days of the election, Vice President J.D. Vance flew to Budapest last Tuesday to campaign with Orbán.
Andrea Virág, a director of strategy at the Budapest-based Republikon Institute, told TMD, “They were hoping for a presidential visit. Instead, they got Vice President Vance, who is, with all due respect, completely unknown here in Hungary.” The closest Orbán got was a Thursday Truth Social post in which President Donald Trump told Hungarians to “GET OUT AND VOTE FOR VIKTOR ORBÁN.”
But despite all this, he lost. What should we expect from a Magyar premiership? And how will Orbán’s defeat reshape Hungary’s place in Europe and the West?
All 199 seats were up for reelection in the Hungarian parliament, with 106 in single-member constituencies and 93 by proportional representation. With almost all votes counted—in the highest turnout election in post-communist Hungary—Magyar’s Tisza Party will secure 138 seats. The result is striking not just for the majority itself, but for its scale: Tisza’s 138 seats surpass the 133-seat two-thirds majority threshold needed to amend Hungary’s constitution. Orbán’s Fidesz party—together with the allied Christian Democratic People’s Party, KDNP—will get just 55 seats. The far-right Mi Hazánk (“Our Homeland”) party won six seats.
Over 16 years, Orbán and his loyalists used 15 constitutional amendments and a cascade of legislation to remake Hungary into a semi-authoritarian system. They limited press freedom, impeded judicial independence, and—in Orbán’s own words—turned Hungary into an “illiberal state.” In 2022, lawmakers in the European Parliament formally declared that Hungary was no longer a democracy, but a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.”
“The electoral system as such is constructed in a way to favor the governing party, and the institutional checks and balances that would hold the executive accountable have been eroded,” Zsuzsanna Végh, a Central Europe analyst at the German Marshall Fund, told TMD.
When Orbán took power in 2010, Hungary ranked 23rd in the world for press freedom. By 2025, it had fallen to 68th, with the government seizing control over public media and wealthy Fidesz backers acquiring most private outlets, bringing nearly 80 percent of Hungary’s media market under some form of Fidesz oversight.
In the months before the election, Orbán attempted to draw attention away from domestic failures and onto international scapegoats—above all, Ukraine. Orbán accused Magyar of being a stooge for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Fidesz campaign posters told voters not to “let [Zelensky] have the last laugh.”
After “the full-scale invasion four years ago, we gradually moved from the enemy being Brussels and the EU in general, to Ukraine,” Végh said. “The government’s attitude, to a very large extent, can be explained by its close connections with the Kremlin, and over the past years, it became really a Russian Trojan horse in the EU.”
But with fewer checks on government power, corruption also flourished under Orbán, with Hungary ranking as the EU’s most corrupt state in a 2025 report by Transparency International. It was his opposition to graft that brought Magyar to the national stage when, in February 2024, he accused Orbán’s government of interfering in a corruption investigation and scapegoating the government’s former justice minister, Magyar’s ex-wife. Magyar left Fidesz—accusing the party of a culture of impunity—and became the party leader for its chief opposition, Tisza. In interviews, he said “a few families own half the country,” and has campaigned to root out corruption, fight inflation, and rebuild Hungary’s global relationships. Ahead of the election, Magyar said it was “a referendum on our country’s place in the world.”
Under Orbán, economic growth slowed, and inflation surged to the highest in the EU, peaking above 25 percent in early 2023. Price caps on fuel, food staples, and mortgage rates, introduced to alleviate inflation, led to shortages and rationing. “They’ll really face an uphill struggle in dealing with the economy, slow growth, growing debt problem that Hungary has,” Dalibor Rohac, a Europe expert at the American Enterprise Institute, told TMD, not helped by the fact that the “whole of public administration”—including the central bank—is controlled by Orbán allies.
Magyar has also promised to repair Hungary’s relationship with the EU, promising that “Hungary will once again be a full-fledged member of the European Union” and even fulfill the conditions for adopting the euro by 2030. Brussels has frozen €17 billion (almost $20 billion) in funds for Hungary—roughly 8 percent of the country’s annual GDP—over concerns about democratic backsliding and corruption. Orbán also repeatedly vetoed EU aid to Ukraine—most recently blocking a €90 billion loan in March that the bloc had already agreed to—further straining relations with Brussels.
Virág said that accessing these funds will be one of Magyar’s first priorities. “That would give them a chance to really deliver on their key promises,” she said.
It’s less clear what kind of relationship Magyar can build with the U.S. Orbán’s orbit has been closely tied to the MAGA movement, with the state-funded Mathias Corvinus Collegium and Danube Institute co-sponsoring Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism Conference, and Orbán speaking at CPAC Hungary events. Anna Grzymala-Busse, a political scientist at Stanford University, told TMD that Orbán’s defeat is “yet another repudiation of the Trump administration’s ideological project.”
But despite his close ties to the president’s orbit, Orbán’s own policies have been largely at odds with the White House. Only 2 percent of Hungary’s GDP goes toward defense spending—below Trump’s demanded NATO benchmark of 5 percent—and Orbán has embraced Chinese investment, while also being one of the last EU members that is heavily reliant on Russian oil imports. In 2025, 93 percent of Hungary’s crude oil came from Russia, according to a report by the European Center for the Study of Democracy. Hungary has even cultivated ties with Iran, including high-level visits to Tehran and growing business and educational links.
Tisza has promised to review large Chinese-backed battery manufacturing operations in the country for environmental compliance, and to raise military spending toward NATO’s 5 percent GDP target by 2035. The party’s platform also pledged to end Hungary’s dependence on Russian energy by 2035 and to conduct a “comprehensive review” of the Russian-built Paks 2 nuclear plant. But in an interview with Radio Free Europe, Magyar indicated there would be “no quick end” to Russian fossil fuel imports.
Even with a supermajority, governing won’t be straightforward for Tisza. Over the past decade and a half, Orbán has reworked Hungary’s institutions to entrench Fidesz influence well beyond parliament. The Constitutional Court, the public prosecutor’s office, regulatory authorities, and the Fiscal Council are all stacked with Orbán loyalists—and Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok, a close Orbán ally, remains in office.
The Fiscal Council poses a particularly acute threat. The three-member body—whose members were all appointed under Fidesz—must approve the national budget. If the budget is blocked and not adopted by the end of March 2027, President Sulyok can dissolve parliament and call new elections, potentially returning Orbán to power within a year. “It is effectively up to them to allow [the budget] to go forward,” Végh said. “There are really avenues for Fidesz to undermine the new government.”
As Rohac noted, “Countries emerge damaged and stay damaged for a while when they’ve been under semi-authoritarian rule for 16 years.”
Still, the two-thirds majority gives Magyar tools that would have been unthinkable with a narrower win. Constitutional amendments—Orbán’s signature method for consolidating power—are now available to reverse some of the former ruling party’s changes, potentially allowing Magyar to undo gerrymandered electoral districts, restore judicial independence, and unwind the institutional architecture that allowed Fidesz to govern with outsized leverage. In the last election, Fidesz won only 54 percent of the vote but secured 135 of the 199 parliamentary seats.
The supermajority also neutralizes what would have been Fidesz’s most potent remaining weapon: the ability of Sulyok and the Constitutional Court to delay or derail legislation, since Magyar can now amend the constitutional provisions that grant them that authority.
Addressing tens of thousands of supporters gathered along the Danube—who chanted “Russians, go home!”—Magyar declared: “Together, we have replaced the Orbán system, liberated Hungary, and reclaimed our country.” The new National Assembly is expected to convene within weeks, at which point Magyar will be formally elected prime minister.