BUDAPEST—When Viktor Orbán suffered a decisive defeat in Hungary’s April 12 election, commentators were quick to frame it as a major blow to the political right. Some went even further, casting the opposition Tisza party’s landslide as a twilight for right-wing populism in Europe.
During his 16-year tenure as an authoritarian, Orbán did more than demolish Hungary’s democracy. He positioned himself as a model for like-minded leaders abroad. Through a mix of legal engineering, institutional capture and relentless messaging around sovereignty, Christianity and family values, he sought to demonstrate that liberal democracy could be hollowed out from within.
His downfall, then, appears to carry a powerful implication: If one of the most entrenched architects of “illiberal democracy” can be unseated, others could follow, potentially altering the agenda of populist leaders.
But that conclusion, analysts caution, risks overstating both Orbán’s appeal and the significance of his fall. His Hungary was as much an outlier as a blueprint: while it inspired admiration across the right, few parties shared either his ideological ambition or his willingness to push democratic constraints to their limits.
As much of Europe’s right has moved into the mainstream, its priorities have been shaped less by transnational models than by voters at home.
“They will continue to advocate for the same policies simply because they remain relatively popular,” Sheri Berman, a political scientist specializing in populism and fascism at Columbia University, said of the European hard right. “I don’t think they lost a hero in Viktor Orbán.”
What may prove more consequential, however, is not the electoral fate of right-wing parties, but the durability of the international ecosystem Orbán spent years cultivating — a web of institutions, funding streams and ideological allies that extended well beyond Hungary’s borders, and whose future is now far less certain.
Making of a movement
In the final days of Orbán’s rule, Budapest looked like any democracy on the cusp of a vote. In parks, shops and at bus stops, Hungarians spoke openly about their choices — about why they would cast their ballot for the opposition, or why Orbán remained the better choice. In Heroes’ Square, crews wired up for a concert in support of government change. Across the Danube, Fidesz, the party Orbán co-founded in 1988, was assembling the stage for its election-eve rally.
The campaign posters, too, conspired in the democratic illusion: opposition leaders from across the spectrum stared out from lampposts and road signs, projecting reassuring pluralism.
In reality, though, Hungarians were heading into an election shaped and tilted in the ruling party’s favor. Billboard space, largely controlled by Fidesz, was generously allotted to minor parties with no chance of clearing the parliamentary threshold, siphoning support for the Tisza party, the only serious challenger.
It was this hybrid system — free but unfair elections, an autocracy that mimics democracy — that Orbán put on export to like-minded leaders abroad. “It was a strategic blueprint,” said Daniel Hegedüs, deputy director of the Institute for European Politics. “Both for how you can get into power, and remain there through hollowing out checks and balances, media pluralism and the functioning democratic ecosystem.”
After a landslide victory in 2010, Orbán’s Fidesz used its parliamentary supermajority to consolidate control across the state.
Having entrenched his position at home, he then turned outward.
Drawing on cross-national surveys he’d conducted for years, Orbán concluded that European elites were “more progressive than the voters,” said Zsolt Enyedi, a senior researcher at Central European University’s Democracy Institute in Budapest. He saw an opportunity to exploit that gap — positioning himself to drive a broader counter-revolution against progressive politics. In Enyedi’s account, Orbán believed this could ultimately redirect the European Union and elevate him within a new transnational elite.
To that end, Fidesz built an international ecosystem of schools, fellowships and think tanks stretching from Central Europe to the United Kingdom and the United States. At its center sits the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a private educational institution run by Orbán’s political allies and lavishly endowed in 2020 with €1.3 billion in state assets, including a stake in oil and gas company MOL.
“He created a royal court around himself,” Enyedi said, “composed of various intellectuals who were in one way or another opposed to either the progressives more specifically or against liberal democracy in general.”
Orbán’s reach was visible in the open support he drew ahead of last month’s vote. U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance both endorsed him, with Vance traveling to Hungary just ahead of the election. A few weeks earlier, France’s Marine Le Pen had also joined the campaign in Budapest, calling the Fidesz leader “a visionary and above all a pioneer.” Other well-wishers included Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders, Alice Weidel and Benjamin Netanyahu.
“And now [Orbán’s defeat] is the first example of illiberalism failing spectacularly,” Enyedi said.
But analysts who spoke to The Parliament cautioned against overreading the moment. To them, Orbán’s downfall, symbolically potent as it is, is unlikely to alter the direction or dent support for Europe’s political right.
“I have heard the peak ‘populism’ (which is a euphemism for ‘far-right’) argument so often over the past decades,” Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia specializing in political extremism and populism in Europe and the U.S., wrote in an email. Seeing no watershed moment in a single defeat, Mudde noted that rather than experiencing a twilight, the right continues to gain ground in many countries.
Voters, not visionaries
Paradoxically, the same sui generis model that made Fidesz’s Hungary so influential also set him apart, potentially limiting how far the effects of its downfall will now travel.
Orbán straddled contradictions few others could sustain: an EU and NATO insider aligning himself with Russia, China, and MAGA Republicans in the U.S.; the European Council’s foremost antagonist who also channeled EU funds into an illiberal project at home and abroad.
Within Europe’s right, there was clear sympathy for Orbán’s hard line on migration and national sovereignty, said Berman. Yet he remained an outlier. Parties like Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and the Sweden Democrats, she said, likely lack both the ambition and capacity to follow him far down an authoritarian path, and have shown little appetite to replicate his disruptive agenda within the EU.
The themes he championed, however — migration, sovereignty, cultural protection — are unlikely to fade, given their continued electoral appeal, she added.
A 2025 study by the European Policy Centre underscored how domestic electorates ultimately outweigh the influence of high-profile figures. U.S. President Donald Trump’s election victory in November 2024 and return to power the following year was widely expected to boost support for Europe’s far right; his later clashes with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and tariff moves against Europe were predicted to dent it. According to the study, neither happened.
In the six months following Trump's re-election, electoral support for right-wing parties largely held steady across Europe. Gains in some countries were offset by declines in others, with no clear spillover from U.S. events.
The Hungarian election is likely to similarly have a limited effect on electoral support in Europe, said Javier Carbonell, a policy analyst at the EPC who co-authored the study. The reason, he said, is that right-wing parties have become so normalized that they now rise and fall on the same bread-and-butter issues as any other.
In Hungary, that has meant economic strain, much of it tied to corruption.
Conversations with voters in Budapest during election weekend bore this out. Many, including long-time Fidesz supporters, were turning to the opposition simply because homeownership and upward mobility seemed an increasingly distant prospect.
For most of Orbán’s time in office, Hegedüs said, analysts believed Hungarians couldn’t be mobilized by anti-corruption narratives. But that changed when the graft and nepotism under Fidesz began to bleed into household finances.
The center-right opposition party, Tisza, increasingly came to be seen as the stronger vehicle for restoring prosperity. Its rise accelerated in 2024 after Péter Magyar broke with Fidesz following a pardon scandal tied to a child-abuse cover-up case and joined Tisza, officially becoming the party leader in July that year. Speaking as a former insider, Magyar drew a direct line between elite corruption and declining living standards.
“That economic growth is low because they steal,” Hegedüs said, “[that] public services are in this desolate state because they have stolen their money and funneled it into their corruption networks.”
Among those still backing Fidesz, some had inevitably bought into Orbán’s fear campaign — viewing the EU and Ukraine’s Zelenskyy as a gateway into war, chaos and loss of national sovereignty. But largely, concerns converged on everyday security.
“I’m planning to start a family,” said Balint Haraszti, standing on the sidelines of Fidesz closing rally in Budapest the night before the election. To Haraszti, a tour guide, Orbán was the safest bet to keep gas prices down by keeping the Russian pipeline open, and preserve state-backed family benefits. “You can’t plan your life if you can’t trust what the other side will do.”
The same logic applies in the U.S., said Berman. “The thing that’s going to hurt Trump and the Republicans are those same basic performance-related issues,” she said, adding that much of the criticism surrounding the war in Iran is tied to fuel prices. Just as JD Vance’s visit to Hungary failed to shift voter preferences, she said, Orbán’s defeat is unlikely to influence U.S. midterm outcomes or the 2028 presidential race.
That said, treating the right as a cohesive bloc obscures important distinctions, analysts said. While much of the populist mainstream right, including National Rally and Brothers of Italy, has spent years moderating its rhetoric to broaden appeal, Alternative for Germany stands apart, with stronger authoritarian tendencies. “The more authoritarian aspirations a radical right party has,” said Hegedüs, “the more it may view the Hungarian model as a blueprint.”
Likewise, in Central and Eastern Europe, Orbán’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and policies — including restrictions on LGBTQ content in schools and media — was copied in a way it wasn’t in Western Europe, particularly countries like Romania and Bulgaria.
Yet such narratives are likely to persist regardless of Orbán’s defeat, Hegedüs said. “They’ve already learned how to use it.”
More broadly, Orbán’s ability to entrench power remained the exception rather than the rule. Across Europe, coalition politics acts as a brake on democratic backsliding, limiting how far populist parties can reshape institutions. As Berman argued, this makes it far less likely they can achieve the level of institutional control seen in Trump’s Republican Party in the U.S.
For Europe’s right, then, the broader trajectory is unlikely to shift. Its fortunes remain rooted in domestic politics rather than external models. If anything, as Carbonell noted, the Hungarian election result reinforces a lesson already learned: that straying too far beyond the political mainstream, and the electorate’s tolerance, is a losing strategy.
Rather, where the impact may truly land is on the reactionary international movement Orbán helped build: the network of institutions, intellectuals and fellow travelers he funded and amplified beyond Hungary’s borders.
The afterlife of Orbánism
In 2026 alone, the MCC received a €66 million payout from its stake in oil giant MOL. Not all of the money poured into Orbán’s wider network was effective — much of it went to marginal figures, Enyedi said. But some funded think tanks and conferences in hubs like Brussels and Vienna helped shape the broader discourse.
That pipeline is now under threat. Within a day of his election victory, Magyar, the incoming prime minister, pledged to cut off state funding to MCC — which counts around 7,000 students and 300 staff — as well as to the Budapest edition of Conservative Political Action Conference.
“Only a couple of weeks ago,” Enyedi said, “I was pretty sure Orbán had put so much money into the reserves, into various bank accounts, that he could easily finance these think tanks for two, three or four years.” But with Fidesz weakening rapidly, that outlook is less certain. Unless Orbán can reorganize his network to keep money flowing at arm’s length, the funding is likely to dry up, he said.
“I'm fairly sure that we'll have enough funding until September,” said Frank Füredi, executive director of MCC Brussels. “Our aim is to find new funding streams from private funders in Western Europe, Britain, [the] United States, and from our supporters,” he said, adding that while the loss of existing funding is a blow, he sees it as a “creative challenge” — a shift toward operating entirely on supporter and private donor funding.
But sustaining the wider network might be about more than just money. Its reach also depended on political capital — the credibility and connections Orbán cultivated among allies abroad. Here, his defeat may bite harder. While voter behavior is unlikely to shift, the appeal of his international alignment among political elites could fade, Hegedüs said. For instance, allies may draw the lesson that high-profile endorsements from figures like Netanyahu or Vance risk undercutting, rather than reinforcing, claims of serving national interests.
Orbán’s blend of intellectual ambition and international outreach may also prove the hardest to replicate. Even early in his career, first as a liberal activist and later a Christian democrat, he was already invested in alliance-building, Enyedi said. But what he attempted — the “internationalization of the nationalist movement” — was always a difficult project.
While Europe’s right will continue to trade ideas, Berman agreed that Orbán was unusual in the scale of his ambition. Meloni, for instance, cultivated ties with Trump, but not the kind of transnational intellectual project Orbán sought to build. The European mainstream right, she said, is less ideological than often portrayed, and unlikely to inherit his mantle.
That may point to a quieter, more cautious phase ahead. As Enyedi said, Orbán’s defeat “will probably make many right-wingers less bold, less ambitious – thinking more in terms of smaller-scale changes rather than a grand overhaul of liberal democracy.”
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