Earlier this year, Yonatan Levi left his home country of Israel to observe the Hungarian election. Levi, a scholar at the center-left think tank Molad, had traveled with a group of parliamentarians and activists to study how opposition leader Péter Magyar was running a winning campaign against an authoritarian prime minister.

This was, in their view, a vital mission ahead of their own elections this year. Levi and his colleagues see, in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a kindred spirit to Hungary’s defeated autocrat. Israel “is not the Middle East’s Hungary yet,” Levi says. But, he added, “it’s getting closer and closer.” 

Indeed, opposition parties are bullish on taking down Netanyahu — and defending democracy is central to their campaign.

Americans know, and generally dislike, Netanyahu based on his foreign policy: the brutality in Gaza or more recent lobbying for the ruinous Iran war. But inside Israel, Netanyahu’s opponents are most animated by domestic issues: specifically, a fear that his ultimate aim is to demolish Israel’s remaining democratic institutions and stay in power indefinitely.

This is a reasonable concern. Netanyahu’s government has put cronies in charge of Israel’s security services, demonized the Arab minority, persecuted left-wing activists, and pushed legislation that would put the judiciary under his control. He is currently on trial for corruption — with the most serious charges stemming from a scheme to trade regulatory favors for favorable news coverage from a major Israeli outlet. President Donald Trump is actively pushing Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who holds a more ceremonial position, to grant him a pardon.

Netanyahu’s tactics come directly from the playbook Viktor Orbán used to hold power in Hungary for nearly 20 years — and the two leaders know each other well. So much like in the United States, Orbán’s Hungary has become a major part of Israeli public discourse: a boogeyman for the center-left and an aspirational model for the Netanyahu-aligned right. 

“I’ve never seen a foreign election being covered so closely [in the Israeli press] — except for US elections,” Levi says. 

At present, Israelis expect a similar outcome. Polls consistently show that Netanyahu, who has been prime minister for all but one year since 2009, would lose his governing majority if elections were held now — and they’re required to take place no later than October. If these trends hold, then there is a real chance that he will be the next leader in the Trump-aligned far-right international to fall.

How Netanyahu could lose — and why he might not

Whenever anyone talks about Israeli democracy, there are at least two giant and important asterisks attached.

The first, of course, is the Palestinians. In the West Bank, they live under Israeli military occupation, unable to vote in Israeli elections and yet still subject to the harsh rules imposed on them by IDF leadership. And the situation is even worse in Gaza.  

For Israeli citizens, Jewish and Arab alike, political life is meaningfully democratic: Elections are generally free of fraud and opposition parties compete openly under relatively fair conditions. Netanyahu’s authoritarian impulses have often been limited by his small-and-rickety electoral coalitions; his Likud party has never enjoyed a margin in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) akin to Orbán’s two-thirds majority in the Hungarian legislature.

Yet here’s our second asterisk: Despite Netanyahu’s weakness relative to someone like Orbán, the quality of Israeli democracy has degraded substantially under his watch.

While he has not yet compromised the system to the point where it can be considered a species of “competitive authoritarianism” — the political science term for Hungary under Orbán — his attacks on the judiciary and minority rights protections have damaged its foundations. Dahlia Scheindlin, a prominent Israeli political scientist and pollster, describes the country as only “very partially” democratic for its citizens — though she admits it still remains “nowhere near Hungary” in levels of authoritarian drift.

Delegations like Levi’s reflect the level of alarm among Netanyahu’s opponents: They believe that, with more time in office, Netanyahu could conceivably further entrench himself in power. While Hungary’s opposition might have just dug itself out of the competitive authoritarian hole, their Israeli peers hope to never be in it in the first place.

So what are their odds of beating Bibi?

The short answer is that their chances are reasonable, but far from guaranteed. To understand why, you need to understand the deeper divisions in Israeli politics.

Currently, Netanyahu’s governing coalition controls a majority of seats in the Knesset. The future is not bright: Polls currently show, and have shown for several years, that the five parties in its coalition are collectively likely to lose quite a few seats in the next election. Unless the numbers change substantially, Netanyahu is unlikely to be able to remain prime minister without adding new parties to his alliance.

The opposition is in better shape. As in Hungary, a broad coalition of Jewish factions ranging from the center-left to the right have come to see Netanyahu as a threat to the very survival of Israeli democracy — campaigning against him and his coalition in existential terms. Polls show these parties as, collectively, right on the cusp of winning a majority (61 seats) in the Knesset.

“It is now Zionist, nationalist liberals against people who believe Israel shouldn’t be a democracy, and we are the majority,” Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid faction, told the Times of Israel. “The elections are going to be about this, and the next government is going to reflect this majority.”

Netanyahu has sought to position himself as an irreplaceable wartime leader who can defend the country and navigate complicated international politics, especially the relationship with Trump’s Washington. His critics have countered, often attacking him from the right, that he failed to stop the October 7 attacks and has not decisively dealt with Iran.

However, it is not clear whether this anti-Netanyahu alliance is capable of delivering meaningful change on the issues Americans tend to care about most in Israeli politics: The government’s treatment of Palestinians and its military conflicts with regional neighbors. 

The country’s center of gravity is well to the right. The best-polling party is led by Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister who began his career by outflanking Netanyahu to the right on both the Palestinian conflict and judicial independence. While it seems Bennett’s commitments have shifted somewhat with the political wind, he is still the same person — and a coalition dependent on him would be profoundly shaped by his influence.

The opposition’s ideological makeup is not just a substantive problem in the event of an opposition victory, but in some way a barrier to them winning in the first place.

There is a third grouping beyond these two major Jewish party blocs: the Arab parties, who are projected to control around 11 or 12 Knesset seats. These factions are staunchly anti-Netanyahu; an alliance between the Arab party Ra’am and anti-Bibi Jewish factions briefly ousted Netanyahu in 2021 (and made Bennett prime minister).

Yet at the same time, there is resistance from the rightward flank of the opposition from forming a government with Arab support. Bennett has explicitly ruled out doing so. It’s a decision rooted in the political cost he paid for that last partnership among his right-wing base, and a sense that growing anti-Arab sentiment after October 7 would make that cost even higher in the future.

“There are many Israelis — I say this with great regret — who believe that a government should not be constrained in national security decisions by a party [primarily made up of Arabs],” said Natan Sachs, an expert on Israeli politics at the Middle East Institute.

This short-term political problem reflects, at its core, the deeper foundational problem in Israeli democracy.

Without Arab party support, the opposition might very well lack an outright majority. If that happens, and Bennett or other prospective coalition members still refuse to cut a deal with the Arabs, the most likely result is that Netanyahu stays prime minister. So there could be either a deadlock — in which Netanyahu remains in office until another election — or else a fracturing of the anti-Netanyahu bloc, in which one of the right-leaning factions defects to a prime minister they had previously described as an authoritarian menace.

This short-term political problem reflects, at its core, the deeper foundational problem in Israeli democracy.

The majority of Israeli Jews want to live in a democracy, but they also (at present) want it to see Arab Israelis marginalized and Palestinians repressed. But this is not a tenable balance. Eventually, Israeli Jews will have to seek accommodation with Palestinians or else abandon democracy entirely. The Netanyahu-aligned right has moved toward the latter solution, while his leading Jewish opponents have (for the most part) either rejected the former or refused to seriously pursue it.

The next election, then, is shaping up to be a double test of Israeli democracy: how it has weathered the immediate threat from Netanyahu’s Orbánism, and whether it is capable of confronting the structural contradiction that produced it.

As part of the shrunken pro-peace camp in Israel, Levi, the Molad scholar, is hopeful for a revival. He thought Hungary’s opposition leader Magyar won in part because he refused to let Orbán set the term of debate and pressed his own argument — in that case, the economy and corruption. With more confidence, perhaps the Israeli left could one day defeat the “little Bibi inside every Israeli politician’s head” and change the terms of the conversation themselves.

But, for now, what unites the most voters is stopping Netanyahu. A victory now only sets the stage for more fights to come. 

This past week has been a disaster for Vice President JD Vance. He embarked on two foreign adventures — campaigning for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and leading peace negotiations with Iran — that ended in total failure. Orbán lost by an enormous margin; Iran quit the talks, and President Donald Trump announced a new blockade on the Strait of Hormuz.

These events are not just humiliating for Vance, but reflect a deeper failure of his vision for the world — one that he hoped to advance as vice president, but appears to be crumbling just as he tries to take the MAGA mantle. 

When it came to US foreign policy, Vance has had two overarching goals: to turn the United States into a patron of Europe’s far-right parties, and to move away from the kind of military adventurism that had long defined the Republican Party.

In both areas, he is failing spectacularly. European far-right parties across the continent are increasingly distancing themselves from Washington; Trump’s foreign policy has been militaristic since pretty much day one, and has only escalated over time. 

And these failures are related. Trump’s foreign policy aggression, on issues ranging from Greenland to Iran, has alienated Europeans en masse. Rather than see him as a kindred spirit, populists increasingly see his nationalist ambitions as in conflict with their own. 

“The Trump administration is currently toxic for most far-right parties in Europe,” said Cas Mudde, an expert on the European right at the University of Georgia.

The stakes here are big — not just for Vance’s personally, but the future of the broader right.

Vance, like other would-be successors to Trump, has tried to stake out a distinctive vision for the MAGA movement and its future after the president. His ambitions for a stronger global right are part of that package. But as vice president, Vance has been forced by necessity to defend Trump’s record even when it betrays his own purported core principles. The weekend’s twin disasters showed just how politically and practically untenable this marriage is turning out to be.

It’s a tough spot for him to be in, but ultimately a problem of Vance’s own making. He thought Trumpism could be a vehicle for his own ideology — when in fact it was always defined by to Trump’s own impulses. Vance, and his ideological fellow travelers, will have to live with the consequences of his error.

Vance’s postliberal foreign policy

Like many on the right, Vance saw Trump as an ideological opportunity.

Vance is the highest-profile avatar of the right-wing tendency termed “postliberalism:” a distinctive group of mostly Catholic intellectuals united by a particular critique of the pre-Trump political order. Postliberals believe that the greatest problems of modernity are, at heart, the fault of liberalism. 

The liberal preoccupation with individual rights, markets, and social “progress” has, in their view, produced a world stripped of meaning — one in which people feel depressed and impoverished because they lack the spiritual sustenance to feel otherwise. In their view, liberalism should be replaced by a vaguely defined postliberal alternative: one in which the state, guided by religious logic, is much more involved in shaping the moral character of its citizens. Carrying out this project would require not just winning elections, but a kind of “regime change” in America that would force liberal intellectuals and activists from their positions shaping public discourse and morals. 

There is a reason that postliberals like Vance openly admired Viktor Orbán’s regime: They saw his state as a model for what the United States should become.

If this all sounds a bit like an authoritarian scheme for asserting a kind of socially conservative control over a diverse and fractious country — well, it kind of is. There is a reason that postliberals like Vance openly admired Viktor Orbán’s regime: They saw his state as a model for what the United States should become. And they regarded Trump as the best vehicle for their ambitions to smash the liberal institutions in the US and Europe that they both despised. 

Vance, a self-described postliberal, was supposed to drive that vehicle. He focused much of his energy on building a distinctively postliberal foreign policy: one that turned the United States away from the distraction of massive Middle Eastern wars, and toward the allegedly urgent task of spiritual renewal inside the European continent — which is to say, bolstering the far-right parties that share postliberalism’s ideological preoccupations.

This was evident as early as February 2025, when Vance traveled to the Munich Security Conference to deliver a speech upbraiding Europe’s leaders for their alleged persecution of far-right factions. It was most clearly expressed in the 2025 National Security Strategy, written in large part by a Vance aide, that simultaneously calls for a pullback from the Middle East and a policy of soft regime change in Europe.

“We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence,” the strategy declares. “Our broad policy for Europe should prioritize…cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”

Vance’s efforts this past week, both in Hungary and Iran, reflected this overall vision. Their failures were not accidental, but reflective of the most fundamental problem with his strategy: the “vice” in his title.

How Trump blew up Vance’s project

Donald Trump is, like the postliberals, a right-wing authoritarian. Unlike the postliberals, however, he has zero attachment to any kind of abstract principles. He has a set of gut instincts that point in a particular ideological direction, but can manifest in unpredictable and downright bizarre ways. 

In the second term, this has produced a Europe policy that seems laser-targeted to weaken America’s standing on the continent, and a Middle East policy that has grown more and more belligerent over time. 

Leading the European far-right would require, at a bare minimum, remaining on good terms with said far-right parties. This seemed like it would be an easy task, but Trump managed to blow it up. His tariffs, and especially his threats to annex Greenland, have made him toxically unpopular on the European continent — forcing far-right parties to distance themselves from their longtime ally in the name of nationalism.

“Our subjugation would be a historic mistake,” Jordan Bardella, a leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, said in a January 2026 response to Trump’s attempts on Greenland.

On the Middle East and military adventurism, it seems Vance just misread Trump from the jump.

While the vice president claims his boss was a dove, it has been clear for his entire career that Trump has deeply hawkish foreign policy instincts. He called for seizing Iranian oil deposits in the 1970s, supported the invasion of Iraq before he was against it, escalated several US wars during his first term, and then bombed Iran’s nuclear program and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in his second.

Now, these problems are compounding. Few on the European continent support Trump’s Iran war, and NATO allies have refused to provide any formal assistance. That has led Trump to lash out at European countries, which has incited yet another nationalist backlash — forcing a new round of denunciations from the far-right politicians who used to make up his continental fan club. The pushback has included Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, and the Alternative for Germany party that Vance had personally defended in Munich.

“The MAGA’s should really stop campaigning internationally because everyone and everything they support loses the elections,” Theo Francken, the conservative defense minister of Belgium, posted on X. 

Were Vance currently serving as the junior senator from Ohio, he might be able to mount a principled critique of the president’s record. He could accuse Trump of undermining the “nationalist international” bridging the Euro-American right, or pull a Tucker Carlson and accuse Trump of betraying his base on Iran.

But Vance is vice president, and has taken on responsibilities directly related to these areas. He led the charge on outreach to the far-right, and served as a lead negotiator with Iran. In both areas, he was set up for failure — and, going forward, will have a very tough time distancing himself from Trump in these areas (recall Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in 2024).

In effect, the most promising avatar of postliberal politics in America has been saddled with a record that betrays some of his movement’s core principles. And it’s not clear how he’ll ever escape the baggage.

Viktor Orbán, the European Union’s only autocrat, has fallen.

Results from Sunday’s election in Hungary show that the opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has defeated Orbán’s Fidesz party — the first election the party has lost in 20 years. Orbán called Magyar to concede the race within hours of the polls closing.

There is a reason for Fidesz’s longevity: After winning the 2010 election, they had so thoroughly stacked the electoral playing field in their favor that it became nearly impossible for them to lose. That Magyar has beaten them is a testament both to his skills as a politician and the overwhelming frustration of the Hungarian population with life under Fidesz.

His victory also required overcoming an extraordinary last-minute campaign by President Donald Trump to save MAGA’s favorite European leader, which included sending Vice President JD Vance to Hungary to rally with Orbán last week. On the eve of the election, Trump promised to devote the “full economic might” of the US to boosting Hungary’s economy if Orbán asked.

But Magyar didn’t just win the election: He won by a massive margin, potentially enough to secure a two-thirds majority of seats in Hungary’s parliament. This would be a magic number: enough, per Hungarian law, for Tisza to amend the constitution at will.

With such a majority, Magyar would have the power to begin unwinding the authoritarian regime that Orbán has spent his tenure in power building — and potentially restore true democracy to Hungary. 

Without it, Tisza will hold nominal power but ultimately be limited in how to wield it. Fidesz’s influence over institutions like the court and presidency would constrain their ability to undo much of what Fidesz already did. The most likely scenario: Tisza has four frustrating years in power, accomplishes relatively little, and then hands power back to Fidesz.

So much depends on the exact ways that the votes are tallied. But now, for the first time in a very long time, there is genuine hope for Hungarian democracy.

How to win an authoritarian election

To understand how astonishing Magyar’s victory is, you need to understand just how much Orbán had stacked the deck against him.

After Orbán’s first term in office, from 1998 to 2002, his party claimed they were cheated — and he became dedicated to never losing again. For the next eight years, he and his allies in Fidesz developed a series of complex and precise schemes for changing Hungarian law to build what Orbán termed “a political forcefield” that could hold on to power for decades. 

When they won a two-thirds majority in the 2010 election, they were able to put these ideas into action.

Perhaps Orbán might have held if he were facing a lesser opponent, a less united opposition, or a less impoverished electorate.

Fidesz reworked Hungary’s election system, gerrymandering districts to give its rural base vastly more representation than urban opposition supporters. It turned public media into propaganda, and strong-armed independent media into selling to the government or its private-sector allies. It created ballot access rules that forced the several opposition parties to compete against each other. It imposed unequal campaign finance rules that put Fidesz on a structurally superior footing.

The basic goal was to create a system where the government doesn’t have to formally rig elections, in the sense of stuffing ballot boxes. It could generally rely on the background unfairness of the system, the structural disadvantages opposition parties face, to reliably maintain a constitutional majority. Political scientists call this kind of regime “competitive authoritarianism” — a system in which elections are real, but so unfair that they can’t reasonably be termed democratic contests.

“The state became a party state, in which there is no border between the government, the governing party, [and] state institutions,” says Dániel Döbrentey, the Voting Rights Project Coordinator at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union. “Sources, databases, and everything which should serve the public interest are sometimes not just handled but misused by the governing majority for their campaigning purposes.”

Recent evidence shows the Hungarian regime also employed more classically authoritarian tactics. A new documentary compiled damning evidence of widespread voter blackmail: where local Fidesz officials threaten voters in remote areas, perhaps with job loss or cutting them off from public benefits, if they do not vote for the party. Döbrentey estimates that this has affected somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 Hungarians — a significant number in a country where the number of eligible voters tops out at around 8 million.

The result of all this has been a remarkably durable authoritarian system. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz managed to retain its two-thirds majority in parliament with less than half of the national popular vote. In 2022, the various opposition parties united around a single candidate and party list to try and overcome its structural disadvantages — and Fidesz actually improved its vote share, easily retaining its two-thirds majority.

“The rules are so seriously rigged that Orbán can probably make up a 10-, maybe even 15-point difference” in underlying public opinion, says Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian election law at Princeton University.

And yet Fidesz just lost resoundingly. How?

For one thing, Magyar was an excellent candidate. A regime defector — his ex-wife served as Orbán’s Minister of Justice — he shared many of its conservative views on social policy and immigration, making it difficult for the government to rally its base by painting him as a left-globalist plant. 

Despite this, the entire opposition — including left-wing parties — threw their weight behind his new Tisza party, understanding that the only thing that mattered was ousting Fidesz. This allowed for the creation of a pan-ideological coalition, one united primarily by frustration with the current government and a desire to return to real democracy.

And this frustration ran deep — very deep.

Orbán had badly mismanaged the Hungarian economy, falling well behind other former Communist states like Poland and Czechia to become one of the European Union’s poorest states (if not the poorest). This economic underperformance was inextricably intertwined with his governance model: Fidesz secured its hold on power by empowering a handful of regime-friendly oligarchs to dominate the commercial sector. This system gave Orbán significant power to fend off political challenges and make himself wealthy, but it produced a stagnant and corrupt private sector where connections with the state were more important than having a high-quality business model.

Fidesz’s control over the flow of information, while powerful, simply could not compete with the reality that ordinary Hungarians experienced with their eyes and ears.

Perhaps Orbán might have held if he were facing a lesser opponent, a less united opposition, or a less impoverished electorate. But the conjunction of all three created a kind of electoral perfect storm, one powerful enough to overcome one of the most potent election-rigging machines in the world.

Can Péter Magyar save Hungarian democracy?

When autocrats lose elections, the immediate fear is that they’ll try to annul or overturn them — à la Trump in 2020. Orbán’s concession suggests Hungary may be avoiding the worst-case scenario.

Yet Orbán could still make use of his remaining time with a two-thirds majority to try and protect the system he built on the way out. There are a number of different ways to do so, most of which involve a rapid convening of parliament to pass new constitutional amendments. Perhaps the most discussed one among Hungary watchers is one in which Fidesz amends the constitution to change Hungary from a parliamentary system to a presidential one.

Hungary already has a president — a Fidesz loyalist with little to do given his party’s control over parliament. But Orbán may attempt to turn the office into Hungary’s chief executive, thus stripping Magyar of key powers before he even has a chance to wield them. Orbán might even figure out a way to appoint himself president, a maneuver pioneered by Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

But even assuming none of that happens, the future of Hungarian democracy will still be precarious — hinging, in significant part, on exactly how many seats Tisza has won in parliament.

For the past 16 years, Orbán has not just corrupted Hungarian elections: He has corrupted everything about the Hungarian state. The judiciary, regulatory agencies, bureaucracy, even seemingly apolitical institutions in areas like the arts — nearly everything has, in one way or another, become part of the Fidesz machine, either a vehicle for political control or a means of Fidesz leaders profiting off of power. 

Restoring Hungarian democracy is thus not a simple matter of redrawing electoral maps. They will need to kick Orbán’s cronies off the courts, break up the government’s near-monopoly on the press, rebuild safeguards against corruption, create a truly nonpartisan tax agency, and on down the line — all while trying to manage the nearby war in Ukraine, rebuild a relationship with the European Union, and deal with a United States that nakedly campaigned on Orbán’s behalf.

This amounts to a need for something like constitutional regime change —  a transformation almost certainly impossible to accomplish without a two-thirds majority in parliament.

Absent the power to amend the constitution, Fidesz’s structural entrenchment in areas like the courts will hamstring the Tisza majority’s ability to make real change. A failed Magyar government, and Fidesz restoration in the next elections, would be the most likely outcome: the authoritarian system reasserting itself even after what might seem, on the outside, like a fatal defeat. For this reason, the size of the Tisza majority may matter as much as the sheer fact of them winning.

But if he does get two-thirds, then Péter Magyar and his allies have accomplished the near-impossible: beating an entrenched autocrat in elections that he had spent nearly two decades attempting to rig.

Under normal circumstances, an election in Hungary — a landlocked Central European country of less than 10 million — would not be a major world event. But for the past 16 years, Hungary has not been a normal country.

After Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won a massive victory in Hungary’s 2010 election, he almost immediately began changing the country’s system of government to ensure he would never lose again. He has rigged the electoral rules to favor his Fidesz party, consolidated control over 80 percent to 90 percent of the country’s media, and packed the courts with yes-men. By the mid-2010s, Hungarian elections were so thoroughly tilted in his favor that it became extraordinarily difficult for the opposition to win.

But this time around, they might just hit the jackpot.

Orbán’s opponents have united around a new party, Tisza, led by a charismatic defector from his regime named Péter Magyar. His message, focused on the regime’s catastrophic economic record and extreme corruption, has resonated with many Hungarians; his deft use of social media and in-person campaigning has helped him escape a severe cash disadvantage and the government’s hammerlock on the media. 

Polls show Tisza leading Fidesz by a considerable margin; there is a very serious chance that Magyar will be Hungary’s next prime minister, though he will need a supermajority in parliament to undo some of the most damaging changes Orbán has made. 

The stakes are enormous: not just for Hungarians, but for the United States and even the world.

Under Orbán’s far-right rule, Hungary has been Trump’s most reliable ally in Europe. But for many in the broader MAGA movement, it is more than that: it is a blueprint for the American future, the rough equivalent of what Nordic countries represent to Bernie Sanders. 

Were Orbán to truly fall, their dreams might be shattered — which is why Vice President JD Vance visited Hungary this week to all-but-openly campaign for Orbán’s reelection. On Tuesday, he gave a speech at a Fidesz campaign rally, calling President Donald Trump on the phone from the stage to get his thoughts on Hungary. “Go to the polls in the weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you,” Vance said in closing.

The Hungarian prime minister is also a close Russian ally, recently describing himself as a “mouse” helping the “lion” Putin. Hungary’s membership in the European Union and NATO has allowed Orbán to disrupt the West’s pro-Ukraine efforts from within, including by blocking aid. Were Orbán to be ousted, it would be a considerable boon to the Ukrainian war effort — and a significant blow to the Kremlin.

Hungary’s 2026 election, in short, is not just like any other vote. It is one of the most significant elections of the entire year, and perhaps even the decade. 

How Orbán could actually lose

Under Orbán, Hungary has become a paradigmatic example of a very modern kind of autocracy: one political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism.”

In such a system, voters are (mostly) free to cast ballots for the candidate of their choosing: Hungary isn’t like Russia under Putin. But Hungarian elections are decidedly unfair, in that the system is structured to give the incumbent government so many advantages that the opposition should be almost incapable of winning. It is a system based around plausible deniability: retaining just enough democratic features that Hungary can claim to still be a democracy, while doing its best to give the voters as little meaningful choice as possible.

The government’s advantage begins with the very structure of elections. Hungarian parliamentary elections operate under mixed electoral rules: A little over half of all parliamentarians are elected in US-style single district contests, while the remainder are determined by national proportional votes.

The single districts are gerrymandered beyond all recognition to overweight Fidesz’s rural base and steal seats from the opposition’s heavily urban constituency. Moreover, Orbán put in place rules that allow his party to transfer over excess votes from gerrymandered districts they win to the proportional contest — effectively allowing them to run up the score in an already-rigged game.

But even beyond the formal rules, the background conditions of elections are profoundly unfair. There are a million different ways this is true — ranging from the government’s hammerlock over media to an unfair campaign finance system to a two-tiered voting system for Hungarians abroad that favors government supporters over critics. There are widespread allegations of voter intimidation, like local officials threatening to cut off a poor constituent’s access to health care unless they vote for Fidesz.

Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian electoral law at Princeton University, estimates that the opposition would need to win by roughly 10 to 15 points in the national vote to overcome the structural advantages the government has given itself. 

And currently, Magyar and Tisza are 10 points ahead in Politico EU’s poll of polls.

This is a remarkable accomplishment: a testament to both Magyar’s skills as a politician and to the serial failures of the Fidesz government.

Magyar used to be a high-ranking member of Fidesz: His ex-wife was Orbán’s justice minister. In 2024, he resigned in protest of a child sexual abuse scandal and began attacking the regime as a corrupt “feudalistic” oligarchy. This is largely true: The Orbán system depends on abusing regulatory and fiscal powers to funnel money into a handful of friendly oligarchs, who depend on government largesse and favor to maintain their wealth.

This has made the prime minister and his friends very wealthy men, but also done real damage to Hungary’s economy: the country is currently one of the poorest in the European Union, if not the poorest. As the Fidesz-aligned rich get richer, the quality of public services degrades. Hungary is experiencing population decline thanks to its low birth rate and unusually high levels of outmigration.

These are things ordinary Hungarians can see and feel in their everyday lives. As a socially conservative former regime insider, Magyar is a credible messenger for former Fidesz supporters disenchanted by Orbán’s serial failures. He has criss-crossed the country, using in-person events to overcome the government’s financial advantage and control over information, and become a fixture in the handful of independent media outlets that remain.

This perfect storm is what it takes to give the opposition even a chance to overcome the structural advantages Fidesz has put in place to remain in power. Even then, there is a real chance Orbán tries to cheat: declaring the election null due to alleged fraud, à la Trump in 2020, or installing himself in the country’s presidency (and expanding its powers) rather than leaving.

Whether he could pull this off is a different question. And right now, observers are bullish on Tisza’s chances: betting markets put Magyar’s odds of becoming prime minister at 66 percent.

What Orbánism’s defeat would mean for the global authoritarian right 

If Magyar does win, restoring democracy will not be easy. Much of the architecture of Orbánism is enshrined in the Hungarian constitution, which requires a two-thirds vote in parliament to amend. A full Tisza victory, then, requires more than merely winning a rigged game — it requires doing so resoundingly.

But even if domestic reform proves hard, Sunday’s results will matter to millions beyond Hungary’s borders.

Under Orbán, Hungary has become more than just a symbol of the far-right’s rising political fortunes: It has become an active player in extending its global reach and an intellectual leader in shaping its agenda. Budapest has spent an enormous amount of money and political effort helping support sister parties across the democratic world. There is a reason why far-right leaders like France’s Marine Le Pen, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu have all visited Budapest to campaign with Orbán during the late stages of the 2026 campaign.

The greatest success, however, has been the Hungarian capture of the American right’s imagination. Beginning around the late 2010s, Trump-aligned intellectuals and political operatives began citing Hungary as a model for what the right should aim to do in the United States. They describe it not as an impoverished authoritarian outpost, but a conservative Christian democracy that took the difficult-but-necessary steps to destroy the pathological influence of cultural leftism on a society. 

Adherents to this view can be found throughout the Trump administration, with Vance himself perhaps the most prominent. In a 2024 interview with Rod Dreher, an American conservative writer who decamped to Budapest to take a job at a government-backed think tank, the future vice president praised Orbán’s crackdown on academic freedom — which included forcing an entire university out of the country — as an example for the American right.

“The closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” Vance said. “I think his way has to be the model for us.”

Top conservative intellectuals share a similar view: Dreher is not the only one who moved to Hungary to work with a government-aligned outfit. Were Hungary’s regime to well and truly fall, it would represent a significant ideological defeat for this movement, one that would raise questions about its political durability in Europe, America, and elsewhere. 

A defeat for Orbán is a defeat for Putin

The contest in Hungary also has huge stakes for the still-brutal war in Ukraine.

Since the 2022 Russian invasion, Orbán has emerged as the country’s greatest opponent in the Western alliance. He has repeatedly blocked European and NATO support for Ukraine — he is currently holding up a roughly $100 million EU loan to the country — and has stoked conflict with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum recently reported that some European leaders no longer talk about the war in front of Orbán, as there is an expectation that anything said will get back to Putin.

This isn’t coming out of nowhere: there is longstanding suspicion of Ukraine in Hungary, owing largely to the treatment of the Hungarian ethnic minority in that country. Orbán’s central reelection argument has been that Magyar would be a pro-Ukraine puppet; he has repurposed against Zelenskyy the same conspiratorial attack lines, at times word-for-word, he once used against Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros (both men are Jewish).

Perhaps for this reason, the nationalistic Magyar has been cool toward Zelenskyy and Ukraine during the campaign — adopting a more adversarial stance than any other center-right party in Europe. But at the same time, he has no love for the Kremlin, which is currently busy trying to get Orbán reelected. So while Hungary under Magyar may not be a pro-Ukrainian nation, it will certainly be far more anti-Russian than it is under Orbán. 

A Magyar victory — even a simple majority — would at very least mean that Russia loses its mole in Europe. At most, it could lead to Ukraine receiving significantly greater amounts of European support. 

You can thus say this for Viktor Orbán: He has made Hungary into an outsize player on the global stage, though far more for ill than for good. His fall would have shockwaves in Brussels, Washington, and Moscow — weakening the financial foundations of the European far-right, the ideological foundations of the MAGA movement, and the political foundations of Putin’s effort to split Europe from Ukraine.

But if Orbán wins, none of this will come to pass. And the fate of Hungarian democracy could be sealed.