Few countries have had as much ideological influence on the MAGA movement as Hungary. Budapest has hosted CPAC Hungary annually since 2022, with Orbán delivering the keynote each year. And Hungarian state-funded institutions—including the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Danube Institute—have co-sponsored and helped organize Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism Conference in Europe, where Orbán has appeared as a featured speaker. Patrick Deneen, whose book-length critiques of liberal democracy are popular among right-wing populists, has met with Orbán and called Hungary a “model” for some U.S. conservatives. Tucker Carlson said in a 2023 speech in Hungary that American liberals don’t hate Hungary “because of what it’s done but because of what it is—it’s a Christian country, and they hate that, and that’s the truth.”
In his 16 years in power, the Orbán-led government has sought to make his country an example for American and European nationalists, and the successful example of—as Orbán himself put it—an “illiberal state, a non-liberal state.” He has pushed through a series of laws bringing the media, civil society, and the judiciary under closer government control, amending the Hungarian Constitution 15 times since taking office. In Orbán’s telling, Fidesz is a bulwark against mass immigration and EU-backed cultural change, and is essential to preserving Hungarian identity, religion, and family values. He has established a “Sovereignty Protection Office”—a government agency that investigates media and civil society groups suspected of foreign influence—and has banned Pride parades.
But a series of explosive scandals may have brought Orbán’s government to the brink by creating an enemy from within Fidesz’s ranks. Péter Magyar, now the leading opposition candidate to Orbán, had been a loyal Fidesz insider until a child abuse scandal in early 2024.
In February 2024, the independent Hungarian news outlet 444 revealed that Orbán ally President Katalin Novák had pardoned an official convicted of helping cover up sexual abuse at a state-run juvenile home near Budapest—and that Magyar’s then-wife, former Justice Minister Judit Varga, had co-signed the pardon. Both Novák and Varga resigned from public life. Magyar seized the moment, announcing that he was leaving Fidesz, accusing Orbán of hiding “behind women’s skirts,” and scapegoating them for a scandal rooted in the party’s own culture of impunity. He then embarked on a media campaign, releasing a secretly recorded tape of Varga from shortly before their divorce that he claimed proved government interference in a corruption investigation. In an interview that has since garnered nearly 3 million views on YouTube, he claimed that “a few families own half the country” and said that Orbán had betrayed his promises to the nation.
Magyar is a conservative candidate, sharing Orbán’s anti-immigration stance and opposition to Ukraine receiving fast-tracked EU membership. But he has also promised that “Hungary will once again be a full-fledged member of the European Union” and pledged to fulfill the conditions for adopting the euro by 2030. Under Orbán, Hungary has repeatedly blocked or delayed EU policies to aid Ukraine, taking advantage of the bloc’s requirement for unanimity for most foreign policy decisions.
For each of the EU’s 19 sanctions packages against Russia, “there’s a Hungary and Slovakia-sized hole in those packages that always have to be crossed,” James Batchik, an associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center, told TMD. “A more acquiescent Hungary would actually, in the short term, make the unanimity issue go away.”
But it’s Magyar’s critiques of government corruption that have struck a nerve. According to public polling by center-left Hungarian think tank Policy Solutions, a majority of Hungarians see corruption as having become worse in recent years, with Tisza voters ranking it as their top voting issue.
“You have no chance in Hungary if you don’t know people, and you’re not part of the circle around the prime minister and his party mates,” Andreas Bock, the head of communications for the European Council on Foreign Relations, told TMD, referencing the ability of Hungarian citizens to gain government contracts or jobs. Hungary has steadily declined in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index since Fidesz took power, dropping from a global rank of 46 to 84.
Much of that graft has directly enriched Orbán. In 2024, independent media published a series of reports on a former Habsburg palace, ostensibly owned by Orbán’s father, that recently underwent a more than $30 million renovation despite the prime minister officially making just more than $270,000 a year. Because of widespread corruption reports and Orbán’s moves to gain influence over the court system, the EU has frozen nearly 20 billion euros in funds earmarked for Hungary.
Restoring those funds has become a Magyar campaign promise. “That money is really needed, for small- and mid-sized enterprises, farmers, for the health care system and education,” he said before European Parliament elections in 2024, in which his party won almost 30 percent of the vote.
EU funds may offer a lifeline for Hungarians struggling with the country’s cost-of-living crisis and flagging economy, another top issue for voters. Hungary’s economy contracted by 0.9 percent in 2023 and has grown by less than 1 percent in each year since, while inflation exceeded 17 percent in 2023 and remained above 3.5 percent through 2025. Industrial output has slumped, damaged by the slowing German auto industry and yet more scandals—investigative reporters uncovered evidence that the government knew in 2023 about dangerous levels of toxic chemicals at a Samsung battery plant but allowed it to keep operating. Orbán’s attempts to tame inflation through price caps on staple foods and fuel in 2021 and 2022 backfired, producing widespread shortages and panic buying at gas stations before the government was forced to abandon the controls. By that point, Hungarian inflation had hit 24.5 percent—the highest in the EU.
But even though polls show Magyar and Tisza in the lead, their victory is far from certain. Fidesz has numerous advantages, not least through its control of public media, Zsuzsanna Végh, a Central Europe analyst at the German Marshall Fund, told TMD. “The public media no longer functions as public service media,” she said. “It functions as a channel for the governing party and portrays the opposition, typically, in a very negative light.”
Péter Krekó, a professor at Central European University in Budapest and an expert in disinformation campaigns, also told TMD that Hungarians might experience an “October surprise” in the coming weeks. Last week, Magyar warned that he believed government-aligned actors were planning to disseminate a secretly recorded video of him having sex with his ex-girlfriend in 2024.
Deepfake videos of Hungarian soldiers being sent to fight in Ukraine and returning home in coffins have also circulated online, aligning with Orbán’s attacks on Magyar and the EU as warmongers seeking to bring Hungary into conflict with Russia. “In the social media space, the astroturfing and the inauthentic profiles, probably some of them with some Russian support, can also make, I think, a shift in the last days of the election,” Krekó said.
If Orbán clearly loses despite his party’s efforts, it’s possible he’ll attempt to hang on to power, but many analysts doubt it. “Parallels with Turkey and parallels with Russia”—two autocratic states that pretend to be popular democracies—“are highly exaggerated,” Krekó said. When asked by a reporter during a press conference with Rubio, Orbán said he plans to step down if he loses the election.
“The next government will be created after the election based on the intention of the Hungarian people,” he told reporters on Monday.
Hungary’s deep economic problems may also mean that Magyar is being handed a poisoned chalice, and that national populism may simply be waiting to make a comeback, Dalibor Rohac, a European analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, told TMD. Orbán may “hand it over to the opposition, the opposition will do three years of firefighting, and [Magyar] is voted out in disgrace,” he said.
But even a temporary departure of Orbán from the European scene might actually redound to the White House’s benefit, if not its chosen intellectuals, according to Batchik: “If you look at what the U.S. government has said is their policy, for example, wanting a stronger Europe, or wanting a peace deal in Ukraine, or wanting Europeans to take ownership of support for Ukraine, much of the problem, or the roadblocks to those stated objectives, are actually Hungary and the Fidesz government.”