Is Budapest the bellwether?
Two Hungary scenarios with major implications for the United States
This Sunday, Hungary heads to the polls for a showdown between Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, an elected strongman, and Péter Magyar, a former government insider turned opposition leader. The results will have implications not just for Hungary, but for the global fight against authoritarianism.
On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance flew to Budapest to campaign for Orbán. Behind the seal of the vice presidency, Vance implored Hungarians not to oust their leader for the sake of “western civilization.”
Orbán is a primary architect of the modern playbook for dismantling democracy from within. Since 2010, his ruling Fidesz party has rewritten the constitution, stacked the judiciary, gutted civil society, attacked universities, and co-opted independent media to consolidate power.
After 16 years, these power grabs have left Hungary poorer than most of its neighbors, its standards of living degraded by state-sponsored corruption. Hungary is both the model for the autocracy that Donald Trump aspires to build and the cautionary tale for what our country could look like if he succeeds.
And yet, despite his work to entrench himself in power, Orbán seems likely to lose this election.
For well over a year, public polling has consistently shown the main opposition party, Tisza, leading Fidesz. Right now, polls put Tisza 10 points up — an unprecedented lead for the opposition in the Orbán era. Reports indicate some in Trump’s orbit are already nervous about what an Orbán defeat would mean for their own political futures.
This Sunday’s election, then, is a bellwether for the United States. In the best case scenario, it may show how the voters can dislodge even entrenched authoritarian leaders. More ominously, though, it may instead preview what efforts to deny election results and cling to power could look like here.
Two outcomes to watch for.
Scenario one: The end of the Orbán era
The last truly free and fair election in Hungary was back in 2010.
Since then, Orbán and Fidesz have repeatedly tweaked election laws and doled out government favors to protect their parliamentary supermajority. The opposition and its supporters are under no illusion this weekend will be a fair contest.
But here’s the thing: Those built-in advantages can only take an unpopular leader so far.
Our contacts in Hungary describe the mood on the ground as somewhere between “intense” and “excited.” For the first time in a long time, the opposition has a real shot. Many Hungarians, especially young people, are tuning into politics for the first time — hopeful, but also clear-eyed about what the government might do next to retain its grip on power.
With Péter Magyar at the helm, Tisza has managed to break through the government’s propaganda machine and electoral chicanery. Unlike Orbán’s flailing campaign — bogged down by government corruption and a weak economy — Magyar has barnstormed the country, pulling even disillusioned Fidesz supporters into the Tisza tent. He’s refused to engage in Orbán’s divisive tit-for-tat culture wars, focusing instead on building a grassroots anti-corruption movement that has caught the government off guard and galvanized youth support. Polls show just one in five young people now back Orbán.
This momentum among the youth has sent Fidesz (ironically, a Hungarian acronym for “the Alliance of Young Democrats”) scrambling to respond. Not only are they calling in favors from Vance and Trump, but also from other global far-right figures like France’s Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders.
As Laszlo Gendler writes in The Unpopulist:
Orbán has been reduced to pleading with parents on the campaign trail to drive home the stakes to their adult children. Fidesz is no longer in any meaningful sense an “Alliance of Young Democrats” — and hasn’t been in a long time. In fact, it has become the very political machine it was originally created to dismantle.
[Read Gendler’s whole piece: If Orbán loses Hungary’s election, it will dispel the air of invincibility around strongmen]
If polls — and Orbán’s desperation — are any indication, Magyar has a very real chance of not just winning, but of turning the page in Hungarian politics to a new era. If that happens, Hungary will join Poland and Brazil as a template for democratic revival.
For the United States, this suggests a clear pro-democracy political playbook to emulate:
Build a multigenerational political campaign that leverages grassroots anti-corruption energy and a genuine reform agenda.
Construct a broad-spectrum opposition singularly focused on voter discontent with the regime and refuse to engage in the autocrat’s culture-war narratives.
Unite behind a singular, charismatic leader with credibility to bridge disparate opposition factions.
Scenario two: Hungarian autocracy refuses to go quietly
There are already signs, however, that Fidesz has no plans to lose gracefully.
Last weekend, Orbán claimed that explosives were found near a pipeline carrying Russian natural gas through Serbia into Hungary, alluding to Ukraine’s alleged involvement. In response, Magyar criticized the government for fomenting a “false flag” intended to incite paranoia ahead of the election. Orbán has already deployed the military to energy facilities he baselessly claims are under Ukrainian threat, with additional domestic deployments or even an “emergency” election declaration still possible. On election day, voter intimidation, vote buying, and other irregularities are all plausible as Fidesz throws everything at the wall.
(Any of that sound familiar?)
Plus, as Americans have learned all too well in recent elections, the race isn’t likely to be over on election night.
If the results are neck-and-neck, hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots could determine the final results, and Tisza is likely to gain when those ballots are counted. But absentee ballots won’t be counted until later next week — opening a window for the government to preemptively declare victory or cry fraud, setting off a legal battle that could drag on for months.
Any protracted legal fight will only benefit the Orbán government, which wields the resources and institutional power of the state. In any event, Tisza probably needs to lead by at least 5% nationwide to win a simple parliamentary majority and overcome the government’s extreme gerrymandering. And even then, winning a narrow majority of seats would likely not be enough for Tisza to form a stable government.
Or Fidesz may attempt other ploys to hold onto power beyond what we can foresee. It’s a long time between now and May 11, when a new parliament must legally be seated (though, in the event of contested results, this new parliament might initially include only those whose elections have been finalized).
If Orbán attempts to deny and overturn a loss at the ballot box, Hungary may instead offer a preview of threats to come in our own elections.
Watch closely for: How government power and emergency declarations can be weaponized against vote counting processes; how Orbán may seek to get allies in the judiciary to disqualify opposition voters; and the role of state-sponsored disinformation about election results.
Also watch the degree to which the United States government is willing to endorse an attempt by Fidesz to steal the election. If Donald Trump and JD Vance throw their weight behind an effort to overturn Hungary’s election results, it would place the U.S. on the same side as the Kremlin and reaffirm Trump’s general antipathy to democracy — both at home and abroad.
For more on what the administration might have planned heading into our own November midterms, read our report: Executive Override: How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it.
Hungary’s most important lesson: Resilience
To be clear: The U.S. isn’t Hungary.
Yes, Trump and his allies will be watching Sunday’s results to see what they might be able to bring stateside, and so we should do the same. But in the United States, democracy still has several key advantages that Hungarian democracy lacks.
Here, courts and laws regularly check the executive branch. Here, our elections are run by the states, not directed by the federal government. Here, our media remains (for the most part) free and independent from the White House. Here, Donald Trump has had less than two years to entrench himself in power, not 16 like Orbán.
On Sunday, the Hungarian people face a far more daunting task than we do in the United States this November (or even in 2028). And yet they remain unbroken. That resilience may be the most important lesson as we look to Budapest as a bellwether.
Hungary has survived autocracy before.
In 2024, after Trump was re-elected, journalist Kati Martin wrote an essay in The New York Times reflecting on the hope that the United States once symbolized for her parents as journalists imprisoned in Soviet-era Budapest.
In his dank Budapest prison cell in the mid-1950s, my father imagined he heard Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. Though no one in my family had ever set foot in the actual New World, just knowing it existed brought my father solace during his nearly two-year incarceration.
Locked up in Soviet-occupied Hungary’s notorious Fo Street fortress, my father was blessedly still unaware that his wife — my mother, a reporter for United Press International — occupied a nearby cell. Nor did he know that his two small children, myself and my older sister, were living with strangers paid to look after them by the American wire services, my parents’ employer. Their crime was reporting on the show trials and jailing of priests, nuns and dissidents that Stalinist satellites of the postwar era used to clamp down on dissent.
The whole essay is marvelous and sobering. Gift link here: Why I’m not giving up on American democracy.
Now it is our turn, in the United States, to look to the Hungarian people as an example. This Sunday, look to Budapest for hope and for solace. And, above all, for resilience.
A party- and candidate-centered approach to proportional representation
As any electoral system nerd knows, there’s an inherent tradeoff between systems that focus on political parties and those that focus on individual candidates. At Protect Democracy, we tend to believe that a lot of the problems in our system come from weaknesses in political parties — but it’s true most Americans are more comfortable with candidate-centric elections.
A new primer by FairVote and Protect Democracy examines one of the electoral systems that bridges the two: Party Preferential Voting.
It’s what Australia calls “above the line” voting, and it’s yet another option for jurisdictions looking for ways to significantly improve our system for translating votes into seats.
Check out the rest of Protect Democracy’s work on proportional representation here.
“On Tuesday, President Trump attacked the soul of the American military.”
Worth a read: David French’s essay on why Trump’s threatening to command the armed forces to commit crimes against humanity is devastating to the institution of the military.
The instant I read Trump’s post, my thoughts turned to a very different quote: “The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being.”
Who do you think said those words? A chaplain? A pope? A woke professor who doesn’t appreciate Pete Hegseth’s constant evocation of “lethality?”
No, they come from one of America’s fiercest warriors, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, speaking after the end of World War II, during the military tribunal he organized to hold Japanese leaders accountable for their own horrific war crimes, including the sack of Manila in 1945.
…
Trump’s post was a declaration by an American president that he intended to commit war crimes so grave that they could, if fully carried out, constitute a crime against humanity. As terrible as that is, Trump’s putative orders also threatened to break the moral backbone of the American military and trigger one of the most serious constitutional crises in American history.
Read the whole thing.
Authoritarian Action Watch updates
The president’s threat to commit war crimes in Iran represents an aggrandizement of his own authority, and is testing the bounds of civil-military relations. Alongside his move to circumvent Congress in paying DHS employees, and Secretary Hegseth’s interference with military appointments, this is a perilous moment for the balance of power in the federal government.
See the Authoritarian Action Watch.
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I tought their elections are not free and fair though? If the results are rigged, how can they get out from under Orban?