Hungary's New Leader Ousts Viktor Orbán

Viktor Orbán conceded defeat shortly after midnight on 13 April 2026, ending a 16-year run that had become the template for illiberal democracy in Europe. The man who beat him — Péter Magyar, a 45-year-old former Fidesz functionary and ex-husband of one of Orbán's justice ministers — had not existed in Hungarian politics two years earlier [1][2].

The numbers tell the story bluntly. Magyar's Tisza Party took 53.6 percent of the national vote and 138 of 199 parliamentary seats; Orbán's Fidesz–KDNP alliance was reduced to 37.8 percent and 55 seats, a collapse from the 135 seats it controlled going into the election [3][4]. Tisza crossed the 133-seat threshold required to amend the constitution — the same supermajority Orbán had wielded for most of his time in office. Turnout reached 79.5 percent, the highest in Hungary's post-1990 democratic history [3].

Source: Hungarian National Election Office / Wikipedia

Data as of Apr 13, 2026CSV

Source: Hungarian National Election Office

Data as of Apr 13, 2026CSV

A defeat shaped by personal grievance

Magyar's biography is what makes his victory unusual. He was born in Budapest in March 1981, joined Fidesz as a law student at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, and — by his own telling — kept a poster of Orbán on his bedroom wall as a child, when Orbán was still a liberal anti-communist [5][6]. After Fidesz returned to power in 2010, Magyar took a post at the foreign ministry, moved to Hungary's Permanent Representation to the EU in Brussels in 2011, and in 2018 returned to Hungary to sit on the board of the state road operator and to run the government's student loan agency [5][7].

He was also married to Judit Varga, who served as Orbán's justice minister from 2019 to 2023. The marriage broke down in 2023. The political break came in February 2024, when Hungary's then-president Katalin Novák pardoned a man convicted of helping cover up sexual abuse at a state-run children's home. Novák resigned; so did Varga, who had countersigned the pardon [5][8]. Magyar, leveraging his insider perspective, gave a livestreamed interview on the Partizán YouTube channel that has since been viewed millions of times, accusing the government of corruption and propaganda. From there he built Tisza in roughly 14 months [8][2].

His campaign, including a multi-week walking tour across Hungary, framed the contest as a referendum on graft and stagnation rather than on culture-war issues — a deliberate refusal to fight Orbán on Orbán's chosen battlefield of migration and identity [8][9].

The machine Magyar inherits

Tisza's supermajority gives it the legal authority to rewrite the constitution. The political question is which of Orbán's 15 years of institutional changes can actually be undone, and how quickly.

In 2010, Fidesz won a two-thirds parliamentary majority on roughly 53 percent of the vote and used it to write an entirely new constitution, which took effect on 1 January 2012. Opposition parties were excluded from drafting; there was no referendum [10][11]. The Constitutional Court was expanded from 11 to 15 members, the rule requiring all-party agreement on judicial nominees was scrapped, and the mandatory retirement age for judges was lowered — a measure critics said allowed Fidesz to clear out judges it disliked [10][11]. A new Media Council, headed by a political appointee, was created in the same period, and successive waves of acquisition handed pro-government investors control over most regional newspapers, commercial radio, and significant television capacity [10][12].

Reversing those structural changes is procedurally straightforward with 138 seats but politically harder. Replacing constitutional-court justices, prosecutors, and the heads of "cardinal" institutions like the State Audit Office and the National Bank requires either waiting out fixed terms — many of which run into the 2030s — or amending the laws governing those offices. Human Rights Watch and other monitors have called on the new government to immediately suspend the Sovereignty Protection Office, the 2023 body that investigates foreign-funded NGOs and journalists, and to repeal the law that established it [13][14]. Magyar has said he will pursue Hungary's accession to the European Public Prosecutor's Office, a step Orbán refused, and create a National Office for Asset Recovery and Protection with authority to audit MPs' wealth back 20 years [9].

The economy Orbán leaves behind

The economic backdrop helps explain the swing. Hungary recorded inflation of 14.6 percent in 2022 and 17.1 percent in 2023 — the worst in the European Union [15]. GDP contracted by 0.8 percent in 2023 and grew only 0.6 percent in 2024, well below regional peers [15].

Source: World Bank Open Data

Data as of Dec 31, 2024CSV

Source: World Bank Open Data

Data as of Dec 31, 2024CSV

The cost-of-living shock collided with a long-running demographic problem. Approximately 367,000 Hungarians permanently emigrated between 2010 and 2025 according to Hungary's Statistical Office, though estimates from receiving countries put the real number closer to 546,000 living in other EU states, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Norway as of 2024 [16]. About 80 percent of those who leave are under 40, and roughly a third hold university degrees — nearly twice the share of degree-holders in the population at large [16]. In 2024 alone, 41,300 Hungarians emigrated, the highest single-year figure on record [16].

That diaspora translated into a measurable electoral force. More than 90,000 Hungarians registered to vote at embassies and consulates abroad in 2026, a 28 percent jump over the previous cycle, with a 93.4 percent turnout at diplomatic missions [17]. London alone had 9,500 registered voters and Munich 5,542 — both sites where Tisza had already taken more than 50 percent of the diaspora vote in the 2024 European Parliament elections, against under 19 percent for Fidesz [17].

Oligarchs, contracts, and the question of clawback

The corruption case Magyar built his campaign on rests on a relatively small group of business figures whose fortunes tracked Orbán's tenure. The most prominent is Lőrinc Mészáros, a former gas-fitter from Orbán's home village of Felcsút, whose net worth Forbes Hungary estimated at 1,241 billion forints (about $3.2 billion) in December 2024, making him the richest man in the country [18]. Mészáros's companies recorded 225 billion forints in public-procurement revenue in 2016 and 259 billion forints in 2018, of which roughly 93 percent was financed by EU funds [18]. Mészáros himself attributed his fortune to "God, luck, and Viktor Orbán" in 2017 [18].

Magyar's Tisza has pledged criminal referrals and asset recovery, but the prosecutorial picture is complicated. The Chief Prosecutor's Office, headed by a Fidesz appointee whose nine-year mandate runs into the next decade, has historically declined to investigate high-level cases. EU monitors have repeatedly cited that office as one of the principal obstacles to unlocking frozen funds [19][14]. Joining the European Public Prosecutor's Office, which Magyar has promised, would route some EU-funds fraud cases around the domestic prosecutor — but cases predating accession would still depend on Hungarian courts.

Brussels reopens its wallet — slowly

The financial relationship with the EU is the area where Magyar's government is likely to show the fastest results. Approximately €18 billion in cohesion and Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) funds has been frozen since 2022 over judicial-independence, anti-corruption, academic-freedom, LGBTQ-rights and asylum-policy concerns [20][21]. Hungary previously regained access to €10.2 billion after a partial judicial reform but lost €1 billion permanently in 2024 because it failed to spend the money within the two-year window required by EU regulations; another €1 billion was at risk if conditions were not met by the end of 2025 [20][21].

Source: European Commission / Euronews

Data as of Jul 8, 2025CSV

The European Commission concluded in mid-2025 that Hungary had made "no progress" on seven of the eight rule-of-law recommendations, including lobbying rules, high-level corruption, and editorial independence at public broadcasters [20]. Magyar held an introductory call with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in the days after the election; both sides described unlocking the frozen funds as a top priority [22]. The procedural path — meeting the conditionality benchmarks, then a Commission decision, then Council approval — is well understood, but disbursements still require Hungary to have implemented the underlying reforms, not merely promised them.

The conservative counter-narrative

The steelman case against Magyar's victory comes mostly from the Hungarian and international right, and it is worth setting out plainly. Critics including Elon Musk and the Hungarian Conservative magazine have argued that the Open Society Foundations, which spent close to $90 million on Hungarian civic groups, independent media, and governance projects between 2016 and 2023, helped build the institutional ecosystem from which Tisza emerged [23][24]. They point out that Tisza dominated diaspora voting in cities — London, Munich, Brussels — where Hungarian expatriates are disproportionately exposed to EU-funded NGOs and to Western media frames [17][24].

A second strand of the conservative critique focuses on procedural symmetry: that Magyar's two-thirds majority gives him exactly the constitution-rewriting power for which Orbán was condemned, and that the Hungarian right will now be subject to the same lustration tools — asset audits, prosecutorial referrals, NGO scrutiny — that Orbán's critics found objectionable when used against them [24][25]. The European Conservative has also questioned whether Magyar's coalition of former Fidesz members, ex-socialists, and centrist technocrats represents a coherent democratic mandate or a marriage of convenience held together by anti-Orbán sentiment [24].

These arguments do not change the underlying election numbers, and Hungarian human-rights monitors have rejected the equivalence on the grounds that Tisza's institutional reforms are aimed at restoring independent referees rather than capturing them [13][14]. But they will shape the political climate in which the new government operates, particularly because Orbán himself remains an MP and Fidesz still controls a substantial bloc of local councils and party-aligned media outlets.

What becomes of Orbán

Orbán has said he will lead Fidesz from opposition. The Polish parallel he and his critics both invoke is informative. After Law and Justice (PiS) lost power in October 2023, Donald Tusk's coalition spent more than two years attempting to dismantle that party's media and judicial appointments, and major reforms remain incomplete; PiS retained the presidency until June 2025 and has used legal challenges and street politics to slow the restoration project [26][27]. Tusk's government has also drifted rightward on migration and rhetoric, a pattern some Polish analysts argue shows the durability of illiberal framing even after electoral defeat [27].

Orbán's own history offers another precedent. He served one term as prime minister from 1998 to 2002, lost narrowly, spent eight years rebuilding Fidesz from opposition, and returned in 2010 with the supermajority that defined the next 16 years [25][1]. He is 62, controls a disciplined party machine, retains personal popularity in rural eastern Hungary, and is unlikely to face immediate criminal exposure: the chief prosecutor remains a Fidesz appointee, and the European Public Prosecutor's Office cannot act on cases predating Hungary's eventual accession. EU institutional sanctions — Article 7 proceedings, infringement actions — target the Hungarian state rather than individuals.

The likeliest near-term legal pressure runs through the asset-recovery office Magyar has promised. Audits of MPs and ministers going back 20 years would cover Orbán's entire second tenure and could produce administrative findings even if criminal cases stall. International accountability mechanisms — sanctions, travel restrictions, civil suits in EU jurisdictions — remain available but politically costly to invoke against a former head of government from a member state.

What changes immediately, and what does not

Hungary's foreign-policy posture will shift fastest. Magyar has said he will end Orbán's vetoes of EU sanctions on Russia and EU support for Ukraine, restore engagement with NATO planning, and rebuild ties with Brussels and Berlin [22][1]. He has also signalled continuity on some Orbán-era positions: skepticism of mass migration, opposition to ending Hungary's exemption from the Russian-oil sanctions regime, and a cautious distance from EU social policy [9].

Domestically, the harder work is institutional. Public-broadcaster boards, prosecutorial offices, the Constitutional Court, the Media Council, and the leadership of state-owned enterprises will require either negotiated departures, term expirations, or constitutional amendments that themselves invite legal challenge. The Polish experience suggests that even an ambitious government with a parliamentary majority cannot fully reverse a decade and a half of state capture in a single term.

What Magyar has, that Tusk did not, is a constitutional supermajority — and a defeated opponent who, for all his organisational depth, just lost an election by 16 percentage points on the highest turnout in Hungarian democratic history.