The big news this week so far is the defeat of Victor Orbán, who has ruled Hungary and been a spiritual leader for the worldwide Christian Nationalism movement that has been so embraced by the American Right Wing and MAGA movements. Orbán was defeated in the Hungarian elections on Sunday April 12, two days ago. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won a landslide two-thirds majority, securing 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament on 53.6% of the vote, while Orbán’s Fidesz took just 55 seats with 37.8%. Hungarian voters turned out in the greatest numbers since the 1990s. The scale of the upset is enormous on many levels. Magyar, a former Orbán loyalist who campaigned against corruption and on everyday issues like healthcare and public transport, rapidly rose to become Orbán’s most serious challenger after breaking with Fidesz in 2024. Orbán had rigged the system significantly in his favor, gerrymandered districts and state media as a party mouthpiece. All this made the margin of defeat all the more striking.
And then there’s the Trump-Vance angle. Vance had made a visit to Hungary just days earlier, meant to help push Orbán over the finish line. Trump called into a rally held by Orbán as well. It didn’t work, and Trump made no public comment on the result. It’s particular significance in Europe is that as Orbán leaves office, Putin loses an ally in the heart of Europe, and Ukraine can hope to see Hungary’s new leader withdraw Budapest’s current veto of 90 billion euros worth of EU financial aid for Kyiv. Analysts noted that even a guy who rigs the system can be defeated when people unite and turn out against him, a point Democrats are already applying explicitly to Trump and the 2026 midterms…not to mention the 2028 presidential elections. So, how did this happen?
Hungary is one of Europe’s oldest continuous states, with a history that punches well above its size. The Hungarians (known as Magyars) are not an Indo-European people. They arrived from the Ural region of western Siberia, speaking a Finno-Ugric language related to Finnish and Estonian but to virtually no other language in Europe. They were a warrior people. For decades they terrorized Europe with cavalry raids reaching France, Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula. Their ultimate defeat forced a reckoning and they converted from Paganism to Christianity on Christmas Day 1000, and founded the Kingdom of Hungary as a Western-oriented Christian monarchy. This was a fundamental civilizational choice, to join Latin Christendom rather than the Byzantine or steppe worlds. Then, for 300 years they were a feudal empire (Arpad) and
became a significant European kingdom, controlling not just the Pannonian Plain but Croatia, Slavonia, and Transylvania. The Golden Bull of 1222, often compared to the Magna Carta, established noble rights against royal power. They fended off a catastrophic Mongol invasion in 1241-42 that killed roughly half the population, recovered, and rebuilt with many German and other settlers. The attacks by the Ottoman Empire, which went on for well over a century was Hungary’s defining trauma. The Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent crushed the Hungarian army and killed King Louis II in a single afternoon. Hungary was shattered into three parts; the Ottomans controlled the central plain, the Habsburgs held a western strip called Royal Hungary, and Transylvania became a semi-independent principality under Ottoman domination. This three-way partition lasted 150 years and drained Hungary of population, wealth, and cohesion. The Ottomans were finally expelled after the Battle of Vienna (1683) and subsequent campaigns, but Hungary emerged devastated and depopulated.
Hungary was reconquered largely by Habsburg armies and came under Vienna’s control, a relationship that was perpetually contentious. Hungarians resented Austrian centralization; the Habsburgs feared Hungarian nationalism. The Compromise of 1867 created the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a dual monarchy in which Hungary gained near-complete internal autonomy while sharing foreign policy, defense, and the emperor with Austria. This was Hungary’s second golden age. Budapest was transformed into a magnificent European capital, industry and culture flourished, and Hungarian nationalism was confident and assertive. The dark side was the aggressive Magyarization of Slovakia, Croatia, and Romania, suppressing minority languages and cultures within Hungarian-controlled territory that would fuel lasting resentments. So, Hungary is another of these crossroads spots like Istanbul and the Balkans, where great civilizing processes took place but where there were equally brutal moments driven by fierce nationalism.
Post-WWI, the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 stripped Hungary of two-thirds of its territory and one-third of ethnic Hungarians, who found themselves in Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Austria overnight. It remains the defining national wound. Trianon is to Hungary what Versailles is to Germany, perhaps more so. The country went from a major imperial power to a small landlocked state. Revising Trianon became the obsession of Hungarian politics for two decades. Desperate to recover lost territories, Hungary allied with Nazi Germany, regaining some lands via the Vienna Awards before the war. Hungary participated in the invasion of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and was complicit in the deportation of Hungarian Jews. Hungary was then both liberated and occupied by the Red Army in 1944-45. Soviet-imposed communism followed until the 1956 Revolution, which was Hungary’s proudest modern moment, a genuine popular uprising that briefly expelled Soviet forces from Budapest before being crushed by massive Soviet military intervention. After 1956 the country had “Goulash Communism”, a relatively pragmatic, consumer-oriented communism that was the most livable in the Eastern Bloc, earning Hungary the nickname “the happiest barracks in the socialist camp.” Hungary had one of the smoothest democratic transitions. It joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004. The 1990s and 2000s were a period of democratic consolidation, market transition, and European integration, though also economic turbulence and political polarization.
And then came Viktor Orbán, who won a supermajority in 2010 and used it to systematically reshape Hungary’s institutions, rewriting the constitution, capturing the judiciary, dominating media, gerrymandering electoral districts, and building what he explicitly called an “illiberal democracy.” He positioned Hungary as a defender of Christian civilization against immigration and globalism, became Putin’s closest EU ally, and provided an ideological model for nationalist movements worldwide including MAGA. His defeat this Sunday ends 16 years of that project — though as analysts note, the institutional structures he built will take years to dismantle. The through-line of Hungarian history is a small nation perpetually caught between great powers. Mongols, Ottomans, Habsburgs, Soviets, and now the gravitational fields of Brussels, Moscow, and Washington while trying to maintain its identity on one of Europe’s most exposed and betwixt and between plains.
I was first in Budapest in 1988 during Glasnost. I remember seeing the old Communist headquarters that had transformed into the stock exchange. Kim and I were last in Hungary, Budapest in particular, ten years ago, when Orban was well into his reform process towards authoritarianism, but not yet the staunch Christian Nationalism that became anti-EU and pro-Russia. We sailed up the Danube from Hungary, through Slovakia, Austria and into Germany. This was the exact area where my mother’s family was from, my grandfather from Malzenice and my grandmother from Binovce (16 miles apart). I am Slavic. During the 8th through 10th centuries, Frankish, Byzantine, and Arab powers conducted massive raids into Slavic territories capturing Slavic peoples in enormous numbers for sale in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern slave markets. The trade was so dominated by Slavic captives that their ethnic name simply became the generic term for the condition. My people are who gave slavery its name.
We truly enjoyed our visit and even planned a return in 2020, traveling from Krakow to Transylvania, until COVID changed those plans. Since then, Orban did his worst and turned the country into the model of the authoritarian nationalistic demagoguery that Trump and MAGA aspire for America…everything I despise about our current state of affairs. I would have no part of Orban’s Hungary. But now Péter Magyar has the chance to change all that and return Hungary to the waiting arms of Europe, where the Magyars belong…in the European Goulash.