Populist touch gone...

Orbán just lost his populist touch

The Hungarian PM misread his electorate by bashing the EU and Ukraine. Instead, people cared more about his cronyism and economic mismanagement.

By Jamie Dettmer

Not even the gaming of the electoral playing field — or state capture rolled out over a decade-and-half in power — could save Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán from a crushing defeat on Sunday. 

Nor did the high-decibel support of Orbán’s MAGA friends, including U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who went all in for their most loyal European ideological ally, breaking the taboo against politicians campaigning in other people’s elections. 

Incumbency has its advantages, especially when brazenly exploited to rig the system, but it can also turn into an albatross. It did for Orbán this election. Voters were restless, and increasingly tired of him and his ruling Fidesz party, which they associated with the cronyism and corruption that is helping sink the economy.

But Orbán had no fresh response to the shifting popular mood. He stuck resolutely to a playbook he used in the previous three elections portraying himself as the only man capable of protecting Hungarian interests, and conjured up external threats. In this campaign, Orbán accused his rival of dragging the country toward war by aligning with two of his eternal bogeymen: the EU and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  

But the geopolitical scaremongering wasn’t working any more. It was a bread-and-butter election.

Orbán’s misreading of the electorate helped compensate his challenger Péter Magyar for the unfair edge the prime minister has engineered through gerrymandered constituencies, a captive media landscape and vote-buying. It gave Magyar’s center-right Tisza party the opening it needed. 

The great populist had mislaid his popular touch and failed to appreciate that he was being undermined by some of the same failures that have weakened strongmen the world over: rampant corruption and cronyism, a kleptocratic ruling class, and deteriorating infrastructure. They all served to strengthen Magyar’s hand and intensify his challenge.

“You could see it and sense it at the campaign rallies, where there was a tangible enthusiasm at the opposition rallies, but not at the government ones,” Orbán’s biographer Pál Dániel Rényi told POLITICO.

It also meant that the outside interference of MAGA and European populists, such as France’s Marine Le Pen, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, who like Vance turned up in Budapest to campaign for Orbán, was just a wasted effort. So too the endorsement by Germany’s Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), who had told Hungarians in a video: “Europe needs Viktor Orbán.”

It’s the economy, stupid

Despite their nativist and sovereigntist principles, and advocacy of countries “taking back control” of their political and cultural destinies, there was absolutely no holding back by global far-right luminaries as they issued ever bleaker and more frantic warnings of what would befall Hungary in the event voters had the temerity to vote for change and end Orbán’s goulash populism.

But these grand appeals and lectures fell flat with a Hungarian electorate that had more parochial concerns about paying bills, getting jobs and receiving decent medical care.

“The foreign meddling just didn’t matter,” said Márton Tompos, an opposition lawmaker with the centrist Momentum party, which stood aside in this election to give Magyar’s Tisza party a clear, unencumbered run against Orbán. 

“Take Vance: He’s absolutely unknown to the Hungarian public, so thinking his presence would change anything was naive at best,” Tompos told POLITICO. The display of transatlantic loyalty was never going to alter the political equation in Hungary, where disapproval of the ruling Fidesz party revolved around the country’s internal rot.

Maybe calling in the American cavalry wasn’t naive, but an act of desperation. Orbán was out of other ideas in his battle with Magyar, a Fidesz defector who unlike previous challengers understood the system Orbán had built and refused to give ground when it came to patriotism and embracing national symbols. Magyar urged his supporters to bring national flags to campaign rallies. He sometimes wore traditional embroidered Hungarian shirts. He turned up as a spectator to soccer matches and, unlike Orbán, shunned the VIP boxes and sat with ordinary fans in the stands.

He was also succinct in dealing with foreign interference, arguing that any meddling whether from Washington, Brussels or Moscow was unwelcome: Hungarians would make up their own minds. It was a strong patriotic line that made Orbán look more like the stooge.

And come what may, Magyar remained laser-focused in his campaigning on bread-and-butter issues while hammering Fidesz over corruption, noting how Orbán’s family, business cronies and inner circle have grown ever richer as ordinary Hungarians have just got poorer. 

What really concerned voters — inflation, economic malaise and endemic corruption — all remained front and center in Magyar’s campaign, according to Mátyás Bódi, an election geographer affiliated with Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University. And they played well for him, explained Bódi, who analyzed raw local polling data from independent pollsters throughout the election campaign.

“What drove Orbán’s defeat was the cost of living, lack of economic opportunities and lack of jobs,” Bódi added. Magyar’s messaging about poor public services also resonated. “A key Magyar message was that the country just isn’t working. And if you look at health care, transportation, the education system, for ordinary people the average experience has been one of disrepair and increasing dysfunction.”

Capitalizing on voter frustration, Magyar’s promises to build a “modern, European Hungary” appealed not only to young voters but also to middle-aged male blue collar workers, an important segment of Fidesz’s own traditional electoral base, Bódi said.

In fact, the 45-year-old Magyar sounded a lot like Orbán did in 2010, when he campaigned with similar fervor on economic issues and pledged to improve the lot of ordinary Hungarians, according to Péter Molnár, a Hungarian academic who was a Fidesz lawmaker but quit in 1994 when Orbán dragged the party over to nativist illiberalism.

Disciplined campaigner

While Orbán campaigned on the risks of being sucked into the conflict in Ukraine and portrayed his challenger as a stooge of both Zelenskyy and the EU, Magyar remained unfazed, defying all efforts to goad him.

“Magyar was very disciplined,” Molnár told POLITICO. “And every time Orbán tried to push him off message, Magyar ignored the bait.” In a conversation he had with Molnár in February, Magyar told him he was conscious he couldn’t afford even one slip. “I am trying to avoid making a mistake,” he said.

But throughout the race, Magyar remained combative and forward-leaning and had no hesitation campaigning at pace in traditionally Fidesz-supporting towns and villages, something Orbán’s previous challengers never did. For every town Orbán visited, Magyar visited a half-dozen to highlight his accessibility. In his early tours of the countryside he carried with him a cardboard cutout of Orbán as a prop to illustrate how the PM was absent. 

Magyar’s highlighting of corruption was also telling, said Timothy Ash of Britain’s Chatham House. “People may go along with a kleptocracy for as long as an economy is doing well, but ultimately, if the economy starts failing, and they see all these guys lining their pockets, then you can expect a reaction.”

Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University and an expert on Hungarian elections, said: “Orbán was able to be continuously reelected as long as the Hungarian economy was strong and Orbán’s corruption remained hidden from the general public.”

“But the economy flatlined. Combine that with many exposés of Orbán’s corruption — the palatial estate nominally in the name of his father, the extraordinary wealth of his closest friends … and the public soured on him in a context in which ordinary Hungarians are finding it hard to make ends meet,” she told POLITICO.

But she noted too that Orbán appeared bewildered by how to handle Magyar, “a junior version of himself — a center-right anticorruption campaigner. That’s how Orbán appeared during the campaign that brought him to power in 2010.”

Those who have observed the Hungarian leader for years, like Rényi, said they felt Orbán sensed early in the election campaign that he would lose — which partly explains his often reckless stoking of tensions with Brussels and Zelenskyy, and his desperate goading of his opponents. He just hoped something would go his way.

“The way he was speaking, the language he used, his gestures, his body language, it all seemed different to me and I’ve been covering him for 16 years. He seemed deflated,” Rényi said.

“I think he knew that nothing lasts forever.”