When Péter Magyar took the stage in Budapest on the night of 12 April, he told the crowd they’d ‘liberated Hungary’. His Tisza Party had won a parliamentary supermajority, with a record vote tally for any party in three decades of democratic competition, and on the highest turnout since Hungary’s first free election in 1990. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán quickly conceded, bringing 16 years of increasingly authoritarian rule to an end.

The result carries significance far beyond Hungary’s borders. It’s a major blow to the global far-right networks that made Orbán their icon, and it shows that democratic regression can be reversed. Orbán took Hungary in an ever more autocratic direction, using the power he won through elections to rewrite the constitution, gerrymander the electoral map, pack the courts, capture the media, systematically restrict civic space and target civil society, LGBTQI+ people and other excluded groups. Despite his government tilting the electoral playing field to give itself every advantage, Hungary has shown that even a heavily skewed contest can be won when enough people mobilise.

The result could also carry big implications for the European Union (EU). For years, Orbán blocked EU action as a way of extracting financial concessions, including by vetoing aid to Ukraine. Within days of the vote, Hungary had lifted its veto on a US$105 billion Ukraine support package while European Commission officials were in Budapest for talks on unfreezing US$20 billion in suspended funds for Hungary.

The road to electoral autocracy

When Orbán won the 2010 election, returning to power after eight years in opposition, his 53 per cent of the vote gave him 68 per cent of parliamentary seats, allowing him to dismantle institutional checks and balances. His playbook has since acquired a name: executive aggrandisement. Within his first term, his Fidesz party used its supermajority to rewrite the constitution, restructure the Constitutional Court and redraw electoral districts in its favour. This meant that in 2014 and 2018, Fidesz won two-thirds of parliamentary seats on under half of the vote.

The government took control of the media. It made the public broadcaster a Fidesz mouthpiece, forced key outlets to close and enabled Orbán-connected oligarchs to take over private media companies. Media takeovers formed part of its system of crony capitalism, in which Orbán loyalists were handed control of vast amounts of public resources, including EU funds, while those outside Orbán’s circle were denied access to state contracts and targeted with regulations. Universities and arts bodies were similarly captured. The government used Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of opponents.

Fidesz systematically targeted migrants and LGBTQI+ people, demonising them as threats to the nation. Orbán changed the constitution to make same-sex marriage impossible and passed a law similar to Russia’s that heavily restricted media content deemed to promote LGBTQI+ identities. In 2025, the government passed another law criminalising participation in Pride events, effectively banning Budapest Pride.

Restriction and vilification of civil society were a key part of the strategy, with Hungary-born funder George Soros the target of ceaseless antisemitic attacks and civil society organisations facing escalating legal restrictions on their ability to receive funding. The 2023 Defence of National Sovereignty Act established a Sovereignty Protection Office, aimed at investigating and harassing civil society organisations and journalists.

While attacking civil society at home, Orbán used state resources to fund think tanks pushing Hungary’s model, which he described as ‘illiberal democracy’, across Europe and beyond. Friends with both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Orbán became a global figurehead of right-wing nationalism and populism, hosting key gatherings such as the Conservative Political Action Conference. His importance was reflected in the active support US Vice President JD Vance gave in the 2026 campaign.

Orbán’s many moves to eliminate the institutions and processes that protect democratic freedoms led the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) index to downgrade Hungary to ‘electoral autocracy’ status, making it the first EU state to receive that designation.

The EU’s response was fragmented and insufficient. In 2018, the European Parliament triggered article 7(1) of the Treaty on European Union, the first step in a procedure that can, in theory, lead to the suspension of a state’s voting rights. In practice, article 7 has never been fully applied, because all other EU states would need to unanimously agree on suspension, and there are always states unwilling to go that far. Some, including Poland for much of Orbán’s rule, and currently the Czech Republic and Slovakia, have shared some ideological common ground with him.

The Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation, which came into force in 2022, allowed the EU to freeze funding on rule-of-law grounds. At its peak, the Commission suspended around US$32 billion due to Hungary. But the mechanism’s practical effect was constrained by political calculations. In December 2023, the Commission released around US$12 billion in cohesion funds, citing satisfactory judicial reforms. The timing strongly suggested a political trade, with rule-of-law conditionality exchanged for Hungary’s agreement to lift its veto on funding for Ukraine. Because Orbán could exploit the linkage between Ukraine aid and frozen funds, sanctions only produced partial compliance.

The underlying problem was the unanimity requirement in EU foreign and security policy decisions. Other EU states expressed mounting frustration, but no coalition for decisive action emerged. The EU’s enforcement framework proved either politically unusable or effective only at the margins. The EU didn’t resolve its Orbán problem; Hungarian voters did. That suggests structural reforms are still needed to prevent a repeat.

Why it worked this time

The 2022 election appeared to confirm the strength of Orbán’s system. A broad opposition coalition took 35 per cent of the vote against Fidesz’s 53 per cent, winning only 57 seats compared to Fidesz’s 133. The coalition struggled for unity and coherence and, like attempts before it, proved susceptible to the regime’s primary weapon: being stigmatised as representatives of a foreign-funded, Brussels-serving, liberal-cosmopolitan elite detached from Hungarian values.

But Magyar, a former Fidesz insider, was immune to that weapon. He broke with Fidesz in February 2024, following the president’s decision to pardon a man convicted of covering up child sexual abuse at a state institution, sparking a scandal that resulted in the president’s resignation. His release of a recorded conversation in which his wife at the time, Fidesz’s former justice minister, discussed government interference in a corruption case gave his pledge to clean up the system credibility. As a moderate conservative and former regime official with detailed knowledge of the system’s workings, he couldn’t be dismissed as a Soros proxy or EU tool.

In 2026, Tisza ran as a single party, with a deliberately post-ideological pitch centred on corruption, crumbling public services and economic stagnation. The economic context was decisive. Hungary experienced the EU’s highest inflation as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. GDP growth for 2025 was projected at just 0.4 per cent, with the government deficit above five per cent of GDP. Many are struggling economically, deepening anger at corruption, yet Orbán ran a fear-based campaign focused on perceived threats from the EU and the war in Ukraine.

In the end, the electoral architecture Orbán built to entrench his power worked in reverse, converting Tisza’s support – 55.26 per cent of constituency votes and 53.18 per cent of party list votes – into a constitutional supermajority that gives it 141 of 199 seats.

Orbán’s decision to concede promptly and without qualification confirmed that the Hungarian regime was still an electoral autocracy, in which elections are structurally distorted but voters can still make political choices. It hadn’t yet become a hardened authoritarian regime, such as Belarus and Russia.

The limits of liberation

Magyar’s victory offers an opportunity to reform, but it isn’t going to mean a progressive transformation of Hungary’s political landscape. He’s a conservative politician leading a centre-right party.

Most significantly, Magyar has promised to restore democratic institutions and the rule of law. Civil society will hope to see improvements in civic space, judicial independence and media freedom, and genuine action to combat corruption. Magyar has pledged to invite the European Public Prosecutor’s Office to examine alleged misuses of EU funds, dismantle the Sovereignty Protection Office and drop the proposed Transparency of Public Life bill, which would have extended powers to restrict civil society even further.

Regime change, however, is a long process. Orbán is out of the picture; he’s responded to defeat by quitting as a member of parliament to, he says, focus on rebuilding his movement, although an extended stay in the USA may be on the cards. Several of his associates are reportedly moving fortunes obtained through corruption abroad. But Fidesz appointees remain in place at all levels of government, and unravelling 16 years of institutional capture will require much political will.

For LGBTQI+ Hungarians, the picture is ambiguous. Tisza’s electoral platform made no explicit commitment on LGBTQI+ rights, and Magyar largely avoided the issue during the campaign. This was a deliberate choice to avoid giving Fidesz grounds to paint Tisza as out of step with conservative Hungarian values. Magyar criticised the Budapest Pride ban as a distraction rather than a rights violation, committing only to protecting freedom of assembly more broadly.

In his victory speech Magyar said Hungary should be a country ‘where no one is stigmatised for loving someone differently than the majority’, marking a shift in tone, but no policy commitment. LGBTQI+ rights are unlikely to regress further under his government, but it will fall to civil society to keep up the pressure for improvement. The restoration of freedom of assembly would be a meaningful practical gain, allowing events such as Budapest Pride to mobilise freely.

Hungarian civil society faces a period of opportunity, but 16 years of attrition have taken their toll. The new government and the EU must take action to support civil society as part of efforts to restore civic space.

Lessons learned

Hungary’s election result carries lessons for both civil society and European institutions. One is that autocratisation can be reversed through elections, but perhaps only when several factors coincide. In Hungary, these included a credible former insider candidate immune to regime stigmatisation, an economic crisis that discredited the government’s external threat narrative and an electoral system designed to disproportionately reward the party that comes first. Hungary, having gained an outsized global influence under Orbán, now has an opportunity to use its international profile to show that authoritarian structures can be dismantled.

For the EU, Magyar’s victory opens an opportunity to fix a decision-making structure that allows a single member state to hold the bloc’s foreign policy hostage. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s call for qualified majority voting for foreign policy decisions may now gain traction. But the broader question of how the EU enforces its democratic standards against a member state determined to flout them remains open. For the first time in 16 years, there’s a chance to find an answer before the next challenge arises.

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