BUDAPEST—The scene at Batthyány Square, on the Buda bank of the Danube, was as euphoric as moments like this come: the apparent end of 16 years of entrenched corruption and democratic backsliding.
And the moment came in a spectacular fashion.
By around 9 p.m. on Sunday, it was clear that the opposition, centre-right Tisza party — led by Péter Magyar — had not only won, but, on the back of record turnout, was on course to secure a two-thirds supermajority in the Hungarian Parliament. The scale of the victory effectively neutralized the risk many had feared: that Viktor Orbán’s far-right Fidesz machine, deeply embedded across the state, could obstruct any successor government.
“I congratulated the victorious party,” Orbán said in an unexpected show of magnanimity. “We are going to serve the Hungarian nation and our homeland from opposition as well.”
In an election framed by the ruling party as a choice between war and peace, Brussels or sovereignty, it was the opposition’s promise that prevailed: to end the graft and cronyism that has run the Hungarian economy into the ground, and reset a strained relationship with the European Union.
European Council President António Costa was quick to respond, praising the democratic spirit of Hungarian voters. “I look forward to working with Péter Magyar to make Europe stronger and more prosperous,” he wrote on X.
For Brussels, the pro-EU Magyar will be a welcome replacement of Orbán, who has long played the role of the Union’s chief insider antagonist — most recently by blocking a €90 billion lifeline for Ukraine. Armed with a supermajority, Magyar now has the political capital to begin dismantling Orbán’s system of patronage and state capture, and unlock billions in EU funds frozen since 2022 over rule-of-law and corruption concerns.
“There will be a renaissance in Hungary-European relations,” said Timothy Ash, an associate fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House in London. “Funding will come back on stream.”
How the opposition broke Orbán’s machine
In the run-up to the election this past weekend, Budapest’s lampposts and road signs were plastered with Fidesz campaign posters, pairing a stern-faced image of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy with an ominous-looking Magyar. The caption read: “Let’s stop them!”
Orbán’s messaging echoed his fear-driven playbook from the 2022 election, when voters were warned an opposition win would drag Hungary into the war between Russia and Ukraine, explained Daniel Hegedüs, deputy director of the Institute for European Politics. What was new this time around, he added, was the “extraordinary widespread use of technology that was still not available in a mature form in 2022 — deepfakes, artificial intelligence, videos.”
AI-generated videos and deepfakes flooded social media during the campaign, many targeting Magyar directly, portraying him as enthralled to Brussels and bent on pulling Hungary into war. Others used fabricated protest scenes and heavy-handed policing to depict a country descending into chaos under his rule.
This approach was captured in an AI-created Facebook clip published by Fidesz in February of a crying girl staring out a window, asking when her father will return home — followed by a cut to his execution on a rain-soaked battlefield.
“This really embodies Orbán’s campaign,” Pavol Szalai, director of Reporter Without Borders’ Central Europe bureau in Prague, said of the Facebook clip. “It’s AI, social networks, propaganda and pure emotion. Fidesz doesn’t really have an electoral program.”
This time around, though, the emotional barrage failed to eclipse the country’s stagnant growth, dwindling opportunity and rising living costs.
“Ten years ago, I paid half [as much],” said Krisztina Molnár, a Budapest native and retired cashier, pointing to one of the fruit stands inside Budapest's Central Market Hall on Saturday, a day ahead of the election. Molnár’s son, who runs a small taxi business, “works all the time, but he can’t even buy a house,” she said. Maybe, she added, “Tisza can stop the corruption.”
For years, the consensus was that corruption didn’t mobilize Hungarian voters, Hegedüs said. But Magyar changed that by linking the regime’s kleptocracy directly to everyday hardship. “That economic growth is low because they steal,” he said, “[that] public services are in this desolate state because they have stolen their money and funneled it into their corruption networks.”
As a Fidesz defector, Magyar spoke with insider credibility, drawing in disillusioned Orbán voters from across the political spectrum and unifying an otherwise fragmented opposition.
At the same time, Magyar built — at remarkable speed — a grassroots network that penetrated rural districts long dominated by Orbán. In 2022, the opposition won just two of 88 countryside districts, a disparity reinforced by gerrymandering.
Since 2010, Orbán has rewritten Hungary’s electoral rules to tilt the field — including a “winner compensation” mechanism that funnels surplus district votes into the national tally. But while the system was built to entrench Fidesz dominance, once the Tisza Party became the largest force, Hegedüs said, it inherited the advantage.
Reform — with Brussels watching
Many observers had feared that even a victorious Tisza party would be crippled by a state apparatus still dominated by Orbán, eroding its credibility and paving the way for a comeback.
After 2010, Fidesz used its supermajority to dismantle checks and balances, rewrite the constitution, and entrench control across the judiciary, media, and academia. Civil society, too, was reshaped through a mix of legal pressure and economic leverage.
Now, with a supermajority of its own, Tisza has the tools to unwind that system — raising hopes in Brussels for a more predictable, less obstructionist Hungary. In his victory speech on Sunday, Magyar reaffirmed that direction, pledging to restore Hungary as a committed EU and NATO ally.
Tisza will likely be much more cooperative, said András Bíró-Nagy, director of Policy Solutions, a Hungary-based think tank. “I would expect Péter Magyar to be focusing on obtaining the EU funds on day one, which means at the same time fulfilling criteria related to rule of law, restoring [the] quality of democracy in Hungary and implementing very strong anti-corruption measures,” he said.
Unlocking the €17 billion in frozen EU funds — almost one-twelfth of Hungary’s GDP — will be an early credibility test for Magyar. But the decision ultimately rests with the European Commission.
“I think there will be an immediate, huge political pressure…to release the money immediately,” said Tineke Strik (Greens/EFA, NL), the European Parliament's rapporteur for the rule of law in Hungary. “I hope the Commission will resist this,” she added. Instead, Strik proposed a more calibrated approach: close coordination with Tisza to deliver reforms, tackle corruption and restore the rule of law before releasing the funds.
A measured pace, she argued, would also push Magyar to address areas where he has been less explicit, including LGBTQ+ rights.
Continuity, however, will remain in some areas. Magyar is likely to maintain a tough line on migration, Bíró-Nagy said. Meanwhile, on Ukraine, his room for manoeuvre is constrained by public opinion shaped under Orbán. “The vast majority of Hungarian society is now against Ukraine's EU membership and against providing financial support,” Bíró-Nagy explained.
However, he said he didn’t expect Magyar to obstruct support for Ukraine in the European Council, as Orbán did. “This would already represent a big change from the current situation, when Orbán is blocking even the others from helping Ukraine.”
Beyond Brussels, Orbán's crushing defeat suggests that high-profile backing from U.S. President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement — openly extended to Orbán during the campaign — may be less of an asset than assumed.
“The halt of the far right shows that Trump's powers to anoint winners in elections doesn't work,” said Ash. Rather, he added, “it's almost a poison chalice.”
While there is little doubt that Orbán’s loss will be felt across Europe’s populist right, its implications are not straightforward, analysts said.
As Strik noted: “You have right-wing populism and you have the extreme right.” The former, she said, seeks to grow by peeling off voters from the latter. While the EU should celebrate Orbán’s loss, she said, “I think that Magyar really belongs to […] right-wing populism.”
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