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THE FORMULA THAT DEFEATED ORBAN COULD DEFEAT TRUMP TOO  
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M. Gessen
May 29, 2026
The New York Times
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_ The person best positioned to break the power of Donald Trump would
not be an anti-Trump Republican but an outsider to the Democratic
establishment, someone who can credibly claim that Trump didn’t
happen on his watch. _

People celebrate as Peter Magyar of the Tisza party defeats Prime
Minister Viktor Orban in the Hungarian parliamentary elections in
Budapest, Hungary,

 

Starting early in the morning on the second Saturday of May, first
hundreds and then thousands of people gathered in the square in front
of Hungary’s majestic Parliament building to celebrate the start of
a new political era. This was the square where tens of thousands
gathered in 1956 and 1989 to demand an end to the Soviet occupation
and in 2006 to protest a discredited government. It was the square on
which Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s regime imposed a major redesign
more than a decade ago — with traffic rerouted away, a large
reflecting pool and raised beds installed, narrow pathways laid down
— apparently to ensure that no such mass gathering could take place
again. Today it was the square where Peter Magyar, a former Orban
loyalist, would be sworn in, promising a rebirth of democracy and
liberty after 16 years of autocratic control.

Squeezing into the available spaces and gradually filling up nearby
cafes and streets, the crowd absorbed people of all ages: young people
who didn’t remember a time before Orban and who had voted in
unprecedented numbers; aging intellectuals who didn’t think they’d
ever celebrate their country again; multigenerational families who had
arrived by bus after seeing Magyar in their hometowns and villages.
During his campaign, Magyar had traveled to an estimated 700
locations, turning many of them into “Tisza islands” — outposts
of support for his party. By the end, Magyar was holding five or more
rallies a day.

It had looked like an impossible quest. Orban and his cronies
dominated the media, persecuted and smeared opposition politicians and
changed election laws to benefit his party, Fidesz. Orban had seemed
to achieve what the Hungarian sociologist and political theorist
Balint Magyar (no relation) calls “autocratic breakthrough” —
the point after which it’s impossible to unseat an autocrat using
elections. Illiberal politicians from other countries made pilgrimages
to Hungary to learn from Orban; CPAC, the gathering for American
national conservatives, started staging an annual convention there;
and Vice President JD Vance visited Budapest in advance of the
election, in a show of support for Orban. And yet Hungarians handed
Tisza not just a victory but a constitutional majority, enough power
to reverse Orban’s changes to Hungarian laws and institutions. The
triumph was stunning — unique in our era of democratic backsliding
— and it holds clear lessons for the United States.

One obvious lesson of Peter Magyar’s success lies in the scale,
reach and relentlessness of his organizing network. “They had 2,000
Tisza islands with between 30,000 and 50,000 volunteers,” Balint
Magyar told me, in evident awe. “Just in their call centers, they
had 3,000 to 4,000 people in the last week of the campaign.” We
talked two days before the swearing-in ceremony, at his office in the
spectacular but largely empty building of Central European University.
In 2018, Orban’s government forced most of the university’s
operations into exile amid an antisemitic scare campaign focused on
the Hungarian American philanthropist George Soros, the C.E.U.’s
founder and principal funder. Some of Orban’s many other scare
campaigns targeted migrants, “the Brussels elites” and L.G.B.T.Q.
people. During the latest election campaign, billboards and
A.I.-generated social media posts warned Hungarians they were in
danger of being overtaken by Ukraine and only Orban could protect
them. It should have seemed absurd — it was absurd — but
outlandish xenophobic and antisemitic propaganda had served Orban well
for years. It didn’t work against Peter Magyar — probably because
so many Hungarians got to see him in person, many of them repeatedly.
This is another lesson of his success: Old-fashioned in-person
politics can be a powerful antidote to media fearmongering.

 

IN HIS INAUGURAL SPEECH to Parliament, broadcast on giant screens set
up around the square, Peter Magyar said that voters had handed him a
mandate “not just to change the government, but to change the
system. To start over.”

Magyar enumerated the ways in which Orban had damaged Hungary: a
stalled economy in which a third of the population lives in poverty,
inadequate health care, low-quality schools, child welfare
institutions plagued by abuse, an atmosphere of hatred and fear.
Orban’s regime had “stolen from the common good of the Hungarian
nation — from the pockets of the Hungarian people, and from the
tables of Hungarian children and the elderly,” Magyar said, “an
estimated 20 trillion Hungarian forints,” or some $65 billion, over
the last decade and a half.

Previous opposition politicians had described Orban’s regime as
“corrupt,” a relatively mild term suggesting some aberration from
the government’s intended function. Peter Magyar made no such
accommodation. Borrowing a term coined by Balint Magyar, he has called
it a mafia state — a fundamentally criminal enterprise. Third
lesson: Don’t mince words.

Instead of shrinking away from direct confrontation, he fortified
himself against it. By getting elected to the European Parliament, in
2024, he secured immunity from prosecution in Hungary. When rumors
circulated of an intimate video that would be used to blackmail him,
he went on the offensive, accusing Orban of using “Russian-style
kompromat” (no video was released). Knowing that he would probably
be blocked from registering a new political party, he took over one
that had become dormant. Even more important, instead of trying to
build coalitions among other parties, he focused on conscripting as
many actual people as possible, from across the political spectrum,
ultimately building a giant organization capable of taking down
Orban’s political monopoly.

One could say — and some have — that Magyar won at least in part
because he was a former insider of Orban’s Fidesz party. But my
interlocutors in Hungary emphasized that Magyar’s credibility lay in
the fact that he was not a member of the old opposition, whose
policies had led to the discontent that made Orban’s rise possible
and whose timidity had helped perpetuate Orban’s power. That’s a
lesson, too: The person best positioned to break the power of Donald
Trump would not be an anti-Trump Republican but an outsider to the
Democratic establishment, someone who can credibly claim that Trump
didn’t happen on his watch — a Graham Platner rather than a Thomas
Massie.

For all his tireless work over the last two years, Magyar did not
create his political machine from scratch. Like Zohran Mamdani, Magyar
excelled at converting potential supporters into campaign volunteers.
An existing news distribution service provided an initial skeleton of
the organizing network. A panoply of grass-roots protest movements
joined, too. On the day of Magyar’s inauguration, a parallel,
smaller commemoration organized by the city of Budapest celebrated
those organizations. One by one, people took the microphone to give a
short speech about their cause and their part in the electoral
victory: teachers who had organized against a unified state-dictated
curriculum; a young man who spoke up against abuses in the child care
system; a high school student persecuted for reciting an anti-Orban
poem; organizers of Budapest’s L.G.B.T.Q. Pride celebration. The
speakers stayed onstage, gradually forming a crowd of the kind — the
many kinds — of ordinary Hungarians who had ended the Orban era.

That’s a fifth lesson: Grass-roots organizations that have little or
no connection to electoral politics — in the United States, that
might be the networks formed by the No Kings rallies, ICE-resistance
groups and so on — can matter as much as or more than those already
focused on winning votes.

ANOTHER LESSON LIES IN THE ISSUES that motivated Magyar’s voters.
Hungary’s economy is a mess, but post-election polling by Median, an
organization that had predicted election results with uncanny
accuracy, shows that voters saw corruption as the most important issue
by far. Asked why they thought Orban had lost, 49 percent cited
corruption, and only 18 percent thought it was the “worsening
economic situation, rising cost of living.” The next three reasons
cited were “lies” (15 percent); “fearmongering, war rhetoric”
(11 percent); and “people got fed up” (10 percent). In other
words, Hungarians seemed to see the damage that Orbanism had done to
the nation as more important than any harm they felt they had suffered
as individuals. They were united by a sense of moral outrage —
“value choices,” as one person close to the incoming government
described it to me.

Polls have consistently shown that even Fidesz voters generally want
Hungary to stay in the European Union. Some surely just want the ease
of travel and residency, but others probably have in mind the loftier
ideals of the E.U., such as the rule of law, human rights and the
essential purpose of the E.U., which is peace.

Hungary is one of the poorer countries in the union, and in the early
years of his regime, Orban was able to use E.U. membership to secure
funding, and thereby power, even as he railed against the Brussels
bureaucracy. But in 2022, the European Union started withholding
funding, citing corruption. And in 2024, after Hungary ignored a
European Court of Justice ruling that compelled it to process asylum
applications, the court ordered Hungary to pay 200 million euros _and_
imposed a daily fine of 1 million euros. (When Orban refused to pay,
Brussels deducted
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the money from E.U. funds earmarked for Hungary.) These actions
didn’t just hurt the Hungarian economy — they also allowed Magyar
to draw a causal connection between Orban’s policies and the
well-being of ordinary voters. One of his major campaign promises was
to unlock E.U. funding.

Hungary joined the European Union in 2004. The E.U. flag — 12 gold
stars on a blue background — adorned the facade of the Hungarian
Parliament building alongside the nation’s red, white and green
standard. But Orban’s politics, like the politics of most autocrats,
was the politics of grievance. Under his regime, the E.U. flag was
removed and replaced with the flag of the Szekelys, a Hungarian
minority that found itself living in Romania when World War I’s
victors redrew the region’s borders. Orban’s symbolic gesture
helped fan resentment against the E.U. and what he claimed were a new
generation of attacks on Hungarian sovereignty.

Peter Magyar scheduled his inauguration for Europe Day — the 76th
anniversary of the declaration that created the road map for a united
continent. Before he was sworn in, the European flag was raised again.
But the Szekely flag remained, signaling that Magyar seeks to
represent all Hungarian citizens, including those who supported Orban.
In some U.S. coverage, Magyar has been labeled centrist or
right-of-center. What his politics actually are — and this is
another lesson of his victory — is pluralist.

 

PETER MAGYAR’S RISE BEGAN in February 2024, when he gave an
interview to the independent media outlet Partizan. He blasted Orban
for corruption and failure to represent Hungarians, but most
explosively, for a different issue altogether: covering up the sexual
abuse of children in state care. A case involving more than four dozen
defendants had made its way through the courts, but Orban apparently
instructed his justice department to pardon several of them. Two women
who had signed off on them at the time — President Katalin Novak and
Justice Minister Judit Varga, who was then Magyar’s wife — ended
up resigning. Magyar accused Orban’s regime of hiding “behind
women’s skirts.” Remarkably, in nearby Poland, the only other
European country to have unseated an autocratic government, a child
sexual abuse scandal and a cover-up also appear to have played a
significant role. Perhaps this is because such stories can shed a
particularly harsh light
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on networks of power, and the abuses of power. This, too, is a lesson
that can prove useful in the United States. Perhaps it already has.

Now, speaking in Parliament, the new Hungarian prime minister offered
an extensive and detailed apology to the victims of abuse and those
who sought justice on their behalf. And he announced that to reckon
with the crimes of the Orban regime, he was submitting legislation to
create the National Asset Recovery and Protection Office, which he
promised would “be one of the pillars of the 2026 regime change.”
Everyone I interviewed in Hungary insisted that regime change would
not be complete until a full accounting of the abuses of the Orban
regime had occurred and those guilty of crimes were punished —
though no one, including the people whose job it will be to ensure
that justice is served, seemed to have a clear idea of how this
process could be organized. It’s evident, however, that its goal
will be not only to satisfy the desire for retribution but also to
separate those who became rich through their connections to the Orban
regime from the millions of ordinary voters who enabled it — an
essential step toward healing a society that has been ruled by
politics of hatred, anger and suspicion. There’s a lesson in that,
too.

 

LIKE MANY OTHER AUTOCRATS and aspiring autocrats — Vladimir Putin,
Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump — Orban had been apparently
desperate to maintain power because if he lost his office, he could
face criminal charges. For this reason, even as Peter Magyar surged in
the polls, and even on Election Day, as early returns pointed to
Tisza’s overwhelming victory, many Hungarians assumed Orban would
find a way to cling to power. Would he refuse to acknowledge election
results? Would he declare martial law? But even after he authorized
lump-sum payments of six months’ salary to members of the uniformed
services, military personnel were said to overwhelmingly favor regime
change. Orban must have known he could not count on them.

He stepped down
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from Parliament after the election, and on inauguration day he
wasn’t in the building. Neither were several of the most prominent
members of Fidesz, the party he still leads, which won roughly a
fourth of the seats in the legislature. President Tamas Sulyok, an
Orban loyalist, was there, however. Before Magyar took his oath of
office, Sulyok delivered an anodyne speech about the importance of
rule of law and constitutional order.

Magyar refused to play along. “It is ironic to hear him speak of the
rule of law now, after two years of silence,” he said. “Mr.
President, you remained silent when the failed prime minister called
half the country” — those who opposed him — “‘insects to be
exterminated.’ You expressed no concern when the secret services
were sent after the largest opposition party. You failed to speak up
when billions in public funds were used to spread war hatred among
Hungarians, including among our children. After so much cowardice and
turning a blind eye, how could you represent the unity of this nation?
You cannot. It is time to leave with your head held high while you
still have the chance.”

Hungarians think of themselves as a polite and reserved people. They
arrive on time. They observe decorum. They refrain from confrontation.
On election night, however, they had shocked themselves by dancing in
the streets, chanting “It’s over!” And now their new prime
minister was shocking them again. Inside Parliament there was silence,
but the thousands of people watching the speech on the outdoor screens
broke out in screams and applause. And when the camera cut to Sulyok,
his face frozen in an uncomfortable half-smile, the crowd let out a
round of boos that could probably be heard on the other side of the
Danube.

 

EARLIER THAT MORNING, Magyar and Agnes Forsthoffer, the new speaker of
Parliament, had laid wreaths at the statue of Attila Jozsef, an
early-20th-century poet whose poem “By the Danube” is a hymn to
Hungarian diversity. It ends with this stanza, understood as a call
for settling differences:

The battle which our ancestors once foughtThrough recollection is
resolved in peace,And settling at long last the price of thought,This
is our task, and none too short its lease.

Most of Jozsef’s poetry is considered so complex as to be
untranslatable. And so, when the new political leaders laid flowers at
his statue to the accompaniment of a Mozart clarinet concerto, they
were projecting a new-old attitude toward high culture.

Here is another lesson of Magyar’s victory: His politics are
aspirational and inspirational, a tone that is an antidote to the
cynicism and vulgarity of autocracy. It is the opposite of, say, the
approach taken by California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who trolls
Trump by trying to outperform him in the debasement of political
language and political life. Speaking in the Parliament building,
which Magyar called “the most beautiful building in the world” —
and it may well be — he was proclaiming a new era of beauty and
love. Forsthoffer had used the word “love” four times in her own
brief speech.

As Magyar wrapped up his speech to Parliament, he announced that he
had invited an ensemble of Roma children to perform. The person I was
standing with — Zsofia Ban, one of Hungary’s most celebrated
authors, and a person so unaccustomed to participating in exuberant
displays of optimism that she told me it felt like cross-dressing —
teared up. Nothing like this had ever happened in Parliament before.
The Roma people constitute about 8 percent of the Hungarian
population, making them one of Hungary’s largest minority groups —
and, arguably, the poorest and most often discriminated against.
Magyar had spoken extensively about the plight of Roma children, which
he seemed to learn about on the campaign trail.

A dozen and a half preteen boys wearing white shirts and black bow
ties played tamburas and sang a song considered an anthem of Hungarian
Roma people, followed by a Hungarian folk song. Several newly elected
members of Parliament wept openly. But members elected from the
far-right Our Homeland party had left the chamber in protest. The
deputy leader of this faction, Dora Duro, had once held a news
conference to physically rip up one of Ban’s children’s books,
which she labeled “homosexual propaganda.” It had been very good
for book sales, but I know what it’s like to be denounced by people
in your own country. I asked Ban how she felt knowing that Duro was
still a member of Parliament. “They have lost,” she responded.

 

WHEN MAGYAR EMERGED from the building to address the assembled crowd,
he offered his own lesson of his impossible victory. “Against a
machine of power,” he said, “we don’t need another machine of
power, but real people who — going from mailbox to mailbox, house to
house, in the cold, the frost and the rain — are capable of anything
for their homeland, their neighbors, their relatives and their
community.”

The next task was “to rediscover how to see ourselves as a community
once again,” he said. “Therefore, I ask you to turn toward those
compatriots who are disappointed today, who are afraid, or who
experience this period as a loss. Do not try to defeat them; do not
look down on them. Listen to them and talk to them. Tell them that
this country belongs to them, too; that they are needed, just as
everyone is needed; and that together, we will rebuild Hungary,
because there is no left, there is no right — only Hungarians.”

One of the secrets of Peter Magyar’s success, Balint Magyar had told
me, lay in reclaiming the symbols of the nation: the flag, the
national anthem, the very idea of Hungarian-ness. Now Peter Magyar was
watching over an elaborate national performance: the raising of the
flag, soldiers goose-stepping, cavalry in ornate uniforms.

And then the pageantry was over, but Magyar was still separated from
the crowd by large expanses of empty space, the distance that
Orban’s government had so carefully engineered. Magyar started
motioning to the crowd: Come closer, come closer — but people were
already pressed up against the edge of the reflecting pool. After a
few moments, the excitement and the desire to be fully a part of this
historic moment became too much to resist. Some men hiked up their
pants and ran across the reflecting pool — which, it turned out, was
just a couple of inches deep. Almost immediately, hundreds more
followed. They ran splashing through the water and onto the other
side, filling the space from which they had so long been excluded.
“This is your house now!” Magyar exclaimed.

Everyone I interviewed on this trip to Budapest believes in this new
era. Academics believe that they will be free to teach again. Young
people believe that they will be the first generation in years for
whom staying in Hungary is a desirable option. Civil society activists
believe that they will be able to stop fighting for their own survival
and focus on helping the people they want to help. Marta Pardavi,
co-chair of the only organization in Hungary that provides free legal
representation for people seeking asylum, was even hopeful — despite
the absence of any such promises — that the new government would
resume accepting asylum applications.

Experts I talked to outside of Hungary are more skeptical, concerned
about the “blood and soil” notes they had heard in Magyar’s
speeches, sure that his focus on the plight of the Roma people was
just a calculated overture toward Brussels, made in hopes of unlocking
E.U. funds. On the other hand, isn’t that what the European
government is for — to encourage and enforce humanistic values?
It’s too early to say anything about Magyar’s policies, but his
cabinet choices seem consistent with the inclusive spirit of his
campaign, politically and socially.

Magyar finished speaking, ceding the stage to Ibolya Olah, a pop star
who is ethnically Roma and openly lesbian. She performed
“Magyarorszag” (“Hungary”), a ballad that she had not
performed in many years because, she had said, its patriotic sentiment
had lost its meaning.

Ban, a friend of hers and I sat down at a cafe and ordered Aperol
spritzes. “To the first day of democracy,” Ban said, and we
clinked our glasses. The owner of the cafe, who recognized Ban,
brought us cream-filled muffins. Ban danced in her chair along to
Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” I asked her how she felt about
placing her hopes in a politician who had come from the right wing,
had seemingly never said a word in defense of immigrants and had
barely spoken up for the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people. Could he be a
wolf in revolutionary clothing?

“Maybe he is,” she said, smiling broadly. “Maybe he is.”

And then we danced our way through the square to the Icona Pop song
with the refrain, “I don’t care, I love it.” People of all ages
were dancing in a conga line, taking their hands off one another’s
shoulders to high-five us. The party in the square continued into the
next day.

_M. Gessen, a New York Times Opinion columnist._
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* Hungary
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* Victor Orban
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* Péter Magyar
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* Fascism
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* Anti-Fascism
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* Donald Trump
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