Hungary’s Rebirth

With the midterm elections underway and the MAGA movement primed to face a reckoning of its own making, the Democratic Party is beginning to wrestle with the question of how to rescue the country from authoritarianism. Hungary—where, in April, voters ousted the long-standing far-right strongman Viktor Orbán, along with most of the members of parliament from his Fidesz party—offers insights into the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

As a journalist and author who has covered Donald Trump’s mobster-style leadership in both its 1.0 version and its more extreme 2.0 form, I believe that Hungary’s example is apropos, especially given Trump’s admiration for Orbán and his personal endorsement of the autocrat’s failed reelection campaign. So this summer, I traveled to Budapest, the capital of Hungary and long the heart of resistance to Orbánism, to see how the new government, under Prime Minister Péter Magyar, is faring in its attempts at re-democratization after nearly two decades of autocratic rule.

My first stop was the radio station Klubrádió, one of the few Hungarian media outlets that remained independent during Orbán’s final term in office. Even as Orbán expanded his control over state media as part of his project to unravel the country’s democracy, Klubrádió bucked this assault and provided a vital platform to a new generation of political leaders.

The station is housed in an elegant and eminently Mitteleuropean stone-fronted building near Budapest’s Heroes Square. A vast open space, the square is home to several huge statues of military heroes from Hungarian history riding on horseback, including the country’s founding monarch and his successors in what became a 1,000-year kingdom, as well as towering figures in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a dual monarchy that united Hungary and Austria into a huge, ethnically diverse Central European mega-state. At the end of World War I, that mega-state splintered into numerous smaller ones. Hungary veered toward fascism and, in the post–World War II era, became a Soviet satellite state. The country liberalized with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989, but this period of democracy would prove to be a brief interlude before Orbán and his Fidesz party won power in 1998 and, more durably, again in 2010.

During his five terms in office—four of them consecutive—Orbán succeeded in gerrymandering districts to lock in majorities for Fidesz. He also gained control of the judicial system, which then rubber-stamped Fidesz policies; stifled the free press; and handed the reins of the economy to Fidesz-affiliated oligarchs. Orbán’s actions made the words on the plaque in front of the grandiose, neoclassical Museum of Fine Arts especially poignant. They were from a sermon that Pope John Paul II had given in the country two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: “Be mindful of the blessings that freedom, which you have definitively secured, means for your future. Cherish it and make good use of your liberty.”

At Klubrádió’s airy, plant-filled third-floor offices, György Bolgár has just finished his live call-in radio show, Let’s Talk About It, which he hosts every weekday afternoon. It was on this show that, in 2024, a relatively unknown politician, then-43-year-old Péter Magyar, nourished his political ambitions. In the spring of that year, during the darkest days of Orbán’s iron rule, Bolgár invited Magyar for an interview. A former Fidesz insider, Magyar had recently begun criticizing the government in online comments, catching the attention of Hungarians desperate for the country to reclaim the democratic potential unleashed in 1989. Unlike Orbán, who had consistently refused to appear on the program, Magyar accepted the invitation and soon became a regular guest. He hammered home the need to end the culture of cronyism and corruption that had enabled Orbán’s inner circle to enrich themselves at the public’s expense, and to invest more in education, transportation, and healthcare. He explained that in order to do so, a new government led by Magyar and his upstart Tisza Party would need to access the €16 billion in European Union funds that Brussels had frozen as a response to Orbán’s autocratic rule.

Magyar’s anti-corruption, pro-democracy message arrived at exactly the right moment for Hungarians eager for a political reset. That he was youthful, telegenic, and supremely self-confident didn’t hurt either.

The host of Let’s Talk About It understood all too well that Magyar was far from left-wing. On some key issues, including immigration, Magyar’s policy proposals largely mirrored Orbán’s intolerant approach. That wasn’t a surprise, since Magyar had spent his early career as a Fidesz insider: For nearly a decade, he’d lived in Brussels as a diplomatic liaison to the EU, and for many years he was married to Judit Varga, Orbán’s pliant minister of justice. But talking with him week in and week out, Bolgár came to believe that Magyar had experienced a road-to-Damascus conversion regarding the need to scrub the political system clean of Fidesz’s corruption.

“It’s a people’s party” was the way that Bolgár described his guest’s vision for Tisza, which had been a small and powerless opposition party until Magyar joined it in 2024. Magyar was promising a genuine social compact with the people and a return of decency to politics. “His intention is to restore some kind of balance,” Bolgár tells me. Even the name of the party, an acronym in Hungarian for “Respect and Freedom,” signified a desire for a fresh start after Orbán.

To defeat the then-61-year-old autocrat, Magyar knew he needed to build an ideologically diverse coalition united around the popular disgust with Fidesz’s corruption and cronyism, as well as the economic malaise triggered by Orbán’s fight with the EU; a burgeoning scandal over the presidential pardon of someone who had attempted to cover up years of sexual abuse by the director of a children’s home in rural Hungary, which belied Fidesz’s claim to be the party of family values; and the regime’s escalating assault on the rule of law and freedom of the press. “He understood the political opening here,” Bolgár says. “He was convincing. He provided something no other opposition politician could provide in the first 14 years of the Orbán regime: He could provide hope.”

In the months that followed his initial interview, Magyar appeared regularly on the Klubrádió show, and in the spring of 2026, he pulled off what many regarded as something close to an election miracle. With 80 percent of the country’s voters flocking to the polls—enough to swamp all of Fidesz’s gerrymandering efforts—the new Tisza Party leader ousted Orbán and established himself as a model for anti-autocratic movements around the world. “It [was] really astonishing,” Bolgár says. “Nobody would have believed it.”

Bolgár knows firsthand the costs of living under an autocratic ruler bent on destroying civil society. After honing his English-language and broadcasting skills as a US correspondent for Hungarian state radio in the dying days of Communist rule, when he’d worked out of an office in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, Bolgár had returned to Hungary, where he brought some of Rush Limbaugh’s methods—albeit in the service of a more social-democratic message—to the newly liberalized airwaves in his homeland. But in 1994, during Orbán’s first administration, he was abruptly fired as part of a purge of hundreds of journalists who were critical of the Hungarian leader.

Bolgár was rehired in the interlude between Orbán’s first and subsequent terms in office, then fired once more as conservative attacks on the media picked up steam. In 2010, when Orbán returned as prime minister, Fidesz passed a law in parliament that placed the media under the control of a quiescent National Media and Communications Authority, allowing fines to be imposed on outlets that were deemed critical of the government. The new Orbán administration used state media outlets to push Fidesz propaganda; stripped hostile TV and radio stations of their broadcasting rights; encouraged pro-Orbán oligarchs to purchase newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, and even some Internet sites; and then heavily subsidized those pro-regime outlets by funneling huge sums of government money their way via the purchase of overpriced ads.

Ostracized by his former employers at the state radio outlets, Bolgár landed at the private Klubrádió station—but the attacks followed him there. In February 2021, the station was deprived of its broadcast frequency as the Fidesz government, by then positioning itself at the head of an international hard-right nationalist movement, turned the screws ever tighter on what remained of the free press. Bolgár, who is now 80, ended up being exiled along with many of his colleagues to the Internet, where, he says, his show now gets up to 80,000 listeners a day.

Despite the government’s ruthless crackdown on the print media, TV, and radio, it never succeeded in controlling the online space, perhaps because Orbán himself never fully appreciated how influential online media could be. Magyar, however, saw its promise early on: Much like Trump the insurgent in 2016, he cultivated an extremely loyal online following. Before he appeared on Let’s Talk About It, Magyar had begun fine-tuning ways on social media to expose the fissures within the Fidesz government and to argue that it was irredeemably rotten, building up a huge following on Facebook in particular. He then announced his opposition to the government on a popular Hungarian YouTube channel, Partizán, while talking with its founder, Márton Gulyás, who had built a career on YouTube during the final years of Fidesz rule by interviewing people and investigating stories that the government and its allies in the legacy media preferred to ignore. “Certain things have to be said now,” Magyar declared in that interview, before laying out the crisis of legitimacy faced by Orbán’s regime and describing how Fidesz’s propaganda was unraveling what was left of the country’s democratic institutions. “The prime minister is the sun in the Fidesz solar system,” he continued, detailing the cult of personality that surrounded Orbán—one that everyone knew existed but that no political insider had dared to articulate before.

Sitting in a fashionable bakery in the center of Budapest, Gulyás—who was born three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall—told me that Magyar’s style came across as a breath of fresh air. “When the interview was on-air, I saw the numbers of live viewers,” he recalls over a large croissant and a glass of orange juice. In the days that followed, their conversation was watched by more than 2.5 million people—an extraordinary number, given that Hungary’s population is slightly less than 10 million—and it catapulted Magyar overnight from relative obscurity to a national sensation.

It also marked the moment that Orbán’s public image began to crack.

Before finally losing the prime ministership this past April, Orbán had conducted, for more than a decade, a master class in state capture. The authoritarian strongman found ways to control and leverage the country’s political, academic, economic, and media ecosystems to consolidate his power and channel resources to himself and his inner circle. Everyone within these ecosystems—as well as many outside them—knew they had been corrupted, but enough people benefited from the corruption to keep Fidesz’s winning streak going.

Orbán turned civil society on its head, promoting a no-holds-barred form of political extremism that he labeled “illiberal democracy.” In reality, this meant a form of exclusionary hard-right populism characterized by the demonization of immigrants, the LGBTQ population, and other marginalized groups, wrapped up in the language of Christian nationalism and family values. In her book Tainted Democracy, the former liberal MP Zsuzsanna Szelényi wrote that because of Orbán’s efforts to amend the country’s Constitution and personalize its politics, “Hungary came to acquire a level of concentration of power never seen in European democracies.” This agenda was never popular in urban areas—Budapest’s city government remained liberal and pro-European throughout Orbán’s tenure—or with young people and intellectuals. But, as with Trump in the United States, it appealed to many rural residents, working-class voters who felt sidelined by the priorities of the previous governments, and elites who found ways to benefit financially from Fidesz’s policies.

It’s no accident that Trump and his henchmen—as well as America’s latter-day oligarchs, leading conservative media figures such as Tucker Carlson, and hard-right coordinating bodies like the Conservative Political Action Conference—have long lionized Orbán. In his multiple election victories, they saw a template for attacking what they decried as a decadent “woke” culture, for injecting Christian nationalism into public life, for locking out immigrants, and for dismantling the administrative state, as Steve Bannon has long advocated.

When, in the weeks leading up to the election, it became clear how politically vulnerable Orbán was, MAGA leaders launched an all-out effort to get him over the finish line, with Vice President JD Vance flying to Budapest to stump for the prime minister. Vance and Orbán drew parallels between the United States and Hungary in their speeches, with Orbán saying about Trump’s agenda, “Our solutions are similar for fighting liberals: God, family, homeland.”

For Trump, Orbán represented a beachhead from which to pursue his increasingly nativist, anti-EU agenda. Orbán’s status as a thorn in the side of EU bureaucrats delighted Trump—and thus his downfall was a painful setback for MAGA ideologues. It may also have been a warning sign. As David Koranyi of the nonprofit Action for Democracy told NPR, “You can rewrite the constitution, you can capture public media, you can gerrymander election districts, but as long as people still enjoy the freedom to vote and to vote for whomever they want to, these systems can be reversed under the right circumstances.”

For years, Orbán’s opponents had searched for a pathway to unity that would allow them to overcome all of the structural advantages that Fidesz had baked into the political process. In Magyar, the various opposition parties and their supporters saw a charismatic leader who could take the fight to Orbán. “He was capable of reenergizing people and giving them the hope that change is feasible,” Gulyás says.

Dávid Bedő, who was elected to parliament in 2022 at the age of 29, was also impressed, despite the fact that, as a member of the left-wing Momentum movement, he disagrees with Magyar on many issues. Magyar “surrounds himself with the right people, and that’s very important,” Bedő says. “I know quite a few of them personally. They are not yes-men.” Leading up to the election, Bedő was one of several MPs who agreed to stand aside and make way, under a unity banner, for the election of a Tisza candidate. All over the country, sitting MPs as well as neophyte candidates for open seats made a similar decision, sacrificing their careers, at least in the short term, for a higher good: to deliver a large-enough majority to allow the opposition to undo the worst of Fidesz’s policies.

Despite the fact that Orbán and his cronies had spent more than a decade stacking the deck in their favor, Magyar’s campaign picked up steam, and as thousands of “Tisza Island” volunteers spread his message into Orbán’s strongholds in the rural heartlands and began peeling off more and more supporters of Fidesz, it became clear that the Tisza leader had a real chance at victory.

On the eve of the election, Magyar’s closing rally in Debrecen, the country’s second-largest city, drew a large crowd estimated at roughly 10,000 people; Orbán’s rally, on the grounds of the imposing castle on the Buda side of the Danube River in Budapest, attracted barely 3,000. The next day, April 12, 2026, Hungarian voters went to the polls in record numbers. That night, as the votes were tallied, it became clear not only that Magyar had won but that Tisza had secured an electoral landslide—one that Orbán had no way of chalking up to fraud. Hours after the polls closed, he meekly conceded defeat. There would be no equivalent of January 6, 2021, in Hungary. A month later, there was a peaceful transfer of power, and the new Tisza government rapidly set to work implementing its vision.

For liberal Budapest, which had long been held hostage to the conservative cultural leanings of Fidesz’s rural base, it was as if a great weight had been lifted. The year before, the government had attempted to ban the city’s Gay Pride march, going so far as to deploy drones equipped with facial-recognition software to identify the participants and potentially impose criminal penalties on them. In response, hundreds of thousands of defiant city residents had flooded the grand streets of the city center to take part in the banned demonstration. Now, under a new government, the festivities would take place without incurring the wrath of those in power, marking the start of a much broader liberalization that was taking hold in the city. In late June, huge crowds flooded Budapest’s streets, this time not in defiance but in celebration, not only of LGBTQ pride but of what many saw as a rebirth of their country’s democracy.

Indeed, even as it was still staffing its ministries, Magyar’s government immediately set to work negotiating new anti-corruption measures with the EU, including an agreement to allow Hungary to participate in the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. These steps would enable the €16 billion in frozen EU funds to be quickly sent Hungary’s way. By late June, Magyar’s team had unveiled plans to set up a new agency that would be charged with identifying and recovering public assets that had been stolen by Fidesz elites, as well as five parliamentary committees to investigate Orbán-era corruption. As László Andor, once the European Union’s commissioner for employment, social affairs, and inclusion, told me, there was a growing pressure to prosecute the former prime minister, as well as those members of his inner circle who had amassed their own personal financial empires.

“It’s classic anti-corruption machinery,” says Márta Pardavi, cochair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human-rights organization, sitting on a red-leather armchair in her second-floor office in the Central European University’s main building. “It’s not inventing the wheel—it’s implementing practices from elsewhere and enforcing existing Hungarian legislation.”

The new government also quickly axed the advertising subsidies to the Fidesz-aligned press and put the state media outlets on notice that the old ways of doing business no longer applied. One after another, the components of the propaganda machine disintegrated, with many outlets folding and others firing their editors and reinventing their newsrooms. The pro-Fidesz oligarchs’ grip on the media was broken—and in a remarkably short period of time. Just one month after the transfer of power, Hungary’s media landscape had been upended, with the restoration of a freedom of the press and a marketplace of ideas that were starting to resemble those of other EU countries once again.

But the reforms went well beyond simply reestablishing a competitive media environment. Faced with a Fidesz-era president who refused to resign and the upper echelons of a court system still dominated by Orbán’s appointees and loyalists, Tisza announced legislation to amend the Constitution and allow the new government to dismiss the president. Party leaders also teased the notion of one day moving to a system of direct election for the ceremonial head of state. And they unveiled a campaign, “Cleansing Fire,” to remove the top echelons of the judiciary and permit lower-level judges to elect the president of the National Office of Judges. This included legislation to enforce age limits on the judiciary as a way to clear out the old guard of pro-Fidesz judges who would otherwise seek to block many of Tisza’s reforms. Additional legislation imposes term limits on members of parliament—including the prime minister—so as to prevent the accumulation of power that Orbán had achieved over 16 years of continuous rule. The party has also floated the idea of a referendum on a broader revision of the constitutional framework to clear out two decades of amendments, regulations, and legislation that Fidesz had pushed through as it remade the country in its own image. (The Tisza press office did not reply to repeated requests for comment from ministers and government advisers.)

Other changes were aimed at keeping the Tisza coalition intact after its initial job of defeating Fidesz at the ballot box had been accomplished. For young people concerned with their education, the government quickly began integrating the country’s universities into the continent-wide Erasmus system, which would allow Hungarian students to study at institutions all over the EU. And for parents, it embraced a center-left proposal to double child-benefit payments.

This was an ambitious agenda, and one that not every analyst was convinced Tisza could fully implement. “You have to convert from a Trabant to a Porsche while it is on the move,” says Endre Sik of the Center for Social Sciences, who’s old enough to remember when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956, crushing an earlier moment of potential reform. Magyar was promising a clean break with the past, something that Sik felt was well-nigh impossible. “When you rebuild a house,” he says, “you use the scaffolding of the previous one simply because it was there.” Purge the entire elite, and you’re left with no expertise, no scaffolding; retain too many of the old elite, and you ultimately risk preserving the previous government’s structures of cronyism and corruption. And even if you can thread that particular needle, he adds, you may not completely eliminate the temptation to revive Orbánism.

“To win the election, it took two years of hard work and a few months of campaigning,” Sik tells me. “To change the political environment, it’s relatively simple. But to change the value system of the society, there is no way to do it in months or even in years.”

A similar refrain—that of optimism tempered by skepticism—is frequently heard in Hungary’s political circles these days. There’s a surging desire for reform, but also a nagging sense that things could still head south. For Eszter Kováts, a political scientist at the CEU Democracy Institute and a fellow at the University of Vienna, Tisza faced a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario: If the party didn’t quickly take advantage of its parliamentary supermajority, it would risk squandering a unique chance to undo Orbánism. But if it did move full-speed ahead, it would risk trampling important constitutional protections and eviscerating deliberative processes—and might even acquire a taste for a bulldozer approach to politics that could persist beyond the current de-Orbánization moment. “It’s hard to believe, on the basis of what we see, that Tisza will stop—that it will do this only for restoring the rule of law,” Kováts says. “What is the basis for trust? That is why we like liberal democracy: because you can’t trust politicians to be the good kings.”

Whether Magyar succeeds in his efforts to de-Orbánize the Hungarian political system—and whether he can do so without replicating at least some of the authoritarian tendencies of the Fidesz era—will have huge global ramifications. In the United States, the forces opposing Donald Trump responded with glee to Orbán’s downfall. And Democrats hoping to take back Congress in the midterms and use that victory as a springboard for the 2028 presidential election clearly see Magyar’s big-tent, pro-democracy strategy as one to emulate over the coming months. The night of Hungary’s elections, Democratic Senate minority leader Charles Schumer issued a warning, as quoted by Reuters: “Pay attention, Donald Trump. ​Wannabe dictators wear out their welcome.” If the Democrats win Congress this November—as well as the White House two years later—on the back of popular revulsion with Trump’s corruption and autocratic behavior, the party will likely be closely studying the early months of Magyar’s new government.

Dávid Bedő, the former member of the Hungarian parliament, is optimistic. “It looks liberating,” he says. “After the election, the crumbling of the old system began. The superficial power, [Fidesz] already lost; the propaganda machine already fell apart. Most of the propaganda outlets are closing up shop.”

For Márton Gulyás, however—despite his elation at Orbán’s defeat and the country’s rapid reimagining of its politics—it’s crucial that the defenders of democracy remain vigilant, even with Tisza’s popularity continuing to increase during the first months of the new government. The YouTube journalist, whose 2024 interview with Magyar kick-started this improbable journey, is slightly more ambivalent than Bedő about the early months of Magyar’s prime ministership. “I’m deeply moved by the beliefs of the people and the willingness of the people to be part of the change,” he says, speaking slowly as he sorts through his feelings. “I really enjoy the times right now in Hungary, because most of the people are really optimistic. But managing the perception is one thing, and democratizing a country in a substantive way is different. I need more proofs and signs of that happening in order to give [Magyar] my green light.” He stops, takes another bite of his croissant, and then continues: “When it comes to politics, suspicion is always necessary and always a good strategy, because the stakes are so high. If we are not suspicious, we are not doing our job.”