How did insurgent candidate Péter Magyar come from nowhere to defeat Hungarian strongman Victor Orbán, winning 53% of the vote and a supermajority in the country’s parliament in last week’s national elections? This despite Orbán having rewritten Hungary’s constitution to favor his ruling Fidesz party, stacked the courts, tilted the electoral system heavily in his favor, taken over nearly all the media, and shut down or bought off most other sources of opposition? What lessons can the pro-democracy movement here in the United States learn from his win?
While we can draw inspiration from Magyar’s defeat of Orbán, we should also recognize the limits of comparing Hungary’s experience to America’s. It’s a small, landlocked country of a bit less than 10 million people. After World War II, it was a repressed but also rebellious member of the Eastern Bloc until the revolutions of 1989. Orbán’s loss came after sixteen years of increasingly corrupt one-party rule and amidst a serious economic downturn. And the ins-and-outs of the election campaign were unique to Hungary and can’t be transposed elsewhere. These included a honey trap of Magyar by Orbán’s intelligence services, a potential fake assassination of Orbán by Russian allies hoping to boost his chances, dirty tricks meant to fool voters into thinking Ukraine was plotting against Orbán, allegations of vote-buying in Orbán strongholds, and lots of exposes of regime corruption by independent media. So take what follows with a big grain of salt.
At the same time, I think there are enough parallels between what we’re facing here and what Hungarians have been dealing with for us to ponder further. There’s been a rapid consolidation of authoritarian power here (albeit with some rising pushback); very troubling trends in both legacy and digital media; and a hyper-polarized electorate that has made it hard for opposition forces here to pry Trump fans away from him. Yes, Trump’s approval ratings have dropped significantly, but the Democratic Party is also quite unpopular – which doesn’t bode well for getting out of the doom loop we’re stuck in. A blue wave in 2026 that gives Democrats control of the House and maybe the Senate could also tee up a very unhappy electorate in 2028, or 2030, when the stakes will be even higher (as my friend Lee Drutman cogently argues). And Magyar’s meteoric rise may offer some clues about how much can change in volatile times.
So, with all that said, here are nine lessons that I’ve gleaned from mulling the news and listening to experts on Hungary.
One: Magyar, who was a top diplomat married to a Fidesz Justice Minister, left the ruling party just two years ago, after its president pardoned a felon who had covered up child abuse at a state-run children’s home. This is when he went public, going after his own side and breaking with his own social cohort, including his then ex-wife. This made his crusade for change all the more authentic. His first, breakout interview with the independent YouTube news site Partizan about this decision garnered more than 2.4 million views. In an instant, he transformed Hungary’s political landscape.
LESSON: Insiders who run on their experience or credentials won’t excite voters; when the status quo is intensely unpopular you want leaders who will genuinely break with the past.
Two: Coming from inside the belly of the ruling party gave Magyar a reach that no other opposition politician before him had. He could appeal to other disillusioned Fidesz voters, who could see in his break permission to make their own. Plus, his new, adopted party, Tisza, didn’t carry the baggage of the other opposition parties, whose leaders and adherents could make such former Orbán supporters feel judged for their past votes for the regime. And by all accounts, Magyar didn’t make his own switch into a big deal that could also have scared off potential supporters. On top of that, he shamelessly appealed to the same patriotic symbols that Orbán had used to consolidate his reign. The flag was up for grabs and he grabbed it.
LESSON: The pro-democracy side must make it easy for former Trump voters to join the opposition and not judge them for past mistakes or incomplete conversions. It also can’t be afraid to speak in patriotic language.
Three: At the same time, Magyar was well positioned to also draw progressive and other anti-Orbán voters who had lost enthusiasm for the old opposition parties after their failure to make headway in Hungary’s 2022 national election. He didn’t promise them all the things they wanted, instead acknowledging that as a conservative himself, some voters didn’t share all his values. But they could still support him because he alone represented change and wanted to restore the rule of law. And while he isn’t about to turn Hungary to the left, he has promised to reorient it back towards the European Union and away from Russia. Plus, his singular focus on corruption and how it has hurt public services suggests he will bring many Orbán cronies to account and try to rebuild the public sector. And parts of his platform sound pretty progressive to me, like a call for wealth tax, home energy modernization, and big subsidies for public health.
LESSON: If we want to really crush Trumpism and MAGA, we may have to lower some of our expectations for what comes next. This is not because goals like universal health care are unrealistic; it’s because aggressive ideological agendas generate strong responses both from supporters and opponents. That said, I have a feeling a lot of hard-core anti-Trumpers would rather win 51-49 than 67-33 in 2028—or maybe they just haven’t thought this whole thing through. Maybe we will feel differently after sixteen years of this shit, the way Hungarians must have felt.
Four: Orbán, who had been quite a wily politician until now, couldn’t run the playbook he had successfully used against all of Hungary’s other opposition parties to stave off Magyar’s rise. In past elections, Orbán always demonized former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, the one-time leader of the Socialist Party who had the misfortune of being in office for the 2008 global financial crisis and who then pushed harsh austerity measures—leading Orbán’s Fidesz party to take power in 2010. As late as Hungary’s 2022 elections, Orbán relentlessly tied his opponent back to Gyurcsány (who also faced personal corruption allegations). Since Magyar came out of Fidesz itself (and also since Gyurcsány had been recently pushed out of politics by a small party he later joined), Orbán couldn’t play this card. He tried to pin Magyar to other potentially unpopular actors, claiming that Ukraine’s Volodymir Zelensky was planning to invade Hungary, but his inability to find a convincing boogeyman to scare voters about was a big factor in his loss.
LESSON FOR 2028: Don’t let Democrats nominate anyone close to former Presidents Biden or Obama or Clinton—unless they run as truth-tellers exposing their side’s failings too. On the other hand, if Democrats consolidate around a party retread, that may open a bigger lane for a Magyar-style independent running as a pox on both houses.
Five: Simply being the opposite of Orbán was not enough to beat him, as more than a decade of past failures by Hungary’s liberal-left parties showed. As Hungarian political theorist and podcaster Nóra Schultz wrote Saturday in The Guardian, “If Orbán took a stand on something, they took a directly opposing view. They tried to win people over by moral superiority, but with little regard for the viability or popularity, for instance, of opposition demands such as the dismantling of the anti-migration border fence.” By contrast, she argued, Magyar avoided emphasizing the core causes of people who were already anti-Orbán. He, she writes, “was never in the business of convincing those who were already politically active and who voted for the opposition throughout the Orbán era. He campaigned almost exclusively in rural areas and talked about issues relevant to the majority of Hungarian people. This meant a rigorous focus on a narrow list of topics: the cost-of-living crisis, the collapse of state-run services such as education, healthcare and transport, and the enrichment of a few Orbán-friendly families while everyone else experienced a decline in their prospects.”
LESSON: Don’t be distracted by rightwing bait. Or left-wing litmus tests.
Six: Some commentators have suggested that Magyar won by “dodging divisive policy questions and preferring to speak about the most universal issues in the broadest possible terms: rooting out corruption, restoring power to the people,” as Andrew Marantz wrote in The New Yorker. “This was,” Marantz added, “of course, an astute political strategy. It also makes him something of a cipher. He has the square jaw and coiffed blond hair of an action figure.” Magyar means Hungarian, after all, leading Marantz to suggest that the US equivalent would be “a strapping guy named Joe America, running as the nominee of the Freedom and Grilled-Meat Party.”
Well, yes, Magyar is the perfect candidate for the moment, straight from central casting. Robert Redford in The Candidate, if you will. But this leaves out another key differentiator that mattered to Magyar’s victory: how he campaigned. Instead of sitting in a TV studio trying to beat Orbán inside a media system he dominated, Magyar spent the last two years campaigning across Hungary, making as many seven or eight campaign stops a day in hundreds of rural settlements.
This past Monday, I tuned into a webinar organized by D-HUB, an international network of anti-authoritarian activists, whose speakers had been in the thick of the fight, to hear their insights. According to Mate Vargo, the founder and executive director of aHang, a leading civic action platform in Hungary, Magyar and Tisza built a huge grassroots network of some 50,000 volunteers centered on small “islands” of citizen activists rather than large organizations. (In a country Hungary’s size, that’s an Obama- or Mamdani-level of grassroots organizing). To become one of Tisza’s parliamentary candidates, contenders had to prove that they had the phone numbers of at least one thousand local constituents, Vargo also noted.
In the face of a biased media system, Magyar himself used social media astutely, growing his Facebook page to half a million followers in the first three months after joined Tisza and led its 2024 campaign in the European Union elections, and ultimately to a million by this month’s election, according to Anita Seprenyi, a local political strategist who spoke on the D-HUB call. Taking a page from Elizabeth Warren and others, he took hundreds of thousands of selfies with fans while out campaigning. And he livestreamed all his local events on Facebook, sometimes to tens of thousands of watchers, Seprenyi related. Circumventing the country’s existing newspapers, Tisza circulated its own broadsheets, getting them into many hands with a “print it yourself” campaign that encouraged people to give copes to their neighbors.
LESSON: Show up everywhere and build up a hyper-local civic army, and especially not just in blue dots.
Seven: While Magyar ran a professionally organized digital and field campaign, there were two big differences to what he did compared to the system here in the US: microtargeting isn’t allowed in Europe thanks to strong privacy laws. And after 2022, when the EU banned political advertising on the big social media platforms, it became harder for Orbán to spread disinformation there. So, unlike in the US, where billions of dollars go to test and deploy a panoply of finely targeted messages, in Hungary Magyar had to stick with a broadly appealing message.
As a fresh, youthful face, Magyar also ignited hopes among Hungary’s young people, who were frustrated by the country’s stagnation but also cynical about the chances of any of the old opposition parties managing to beat Orbán. There was a TikTok trend of young people lip-syncing along to his speeches, for example, which was by all signs organic – not something you can make happen via a paid influencer program.
Finally, though Magyar was a former Fidesz insider, the people Tisza chose to run for the assembly were almost all newcomers to politics. They had to build up a base from afresh. From some accounts I’ve heard, Magyar was quite critical of the legacy opposition parties and even people who had bravely gotten involved in fighting Orban starting in 2010 were shunted aside by Tisza.
LESSON: Hope someone not cobbled together by and overmanaged by consultants catches fire; don’t settle for fake passion. To attract less likely voters and young people, be demonstrably from outside the whole political establishment.
Eight: Hungary’s electoral system chooses about half the members of the national assembly from single-member districts and the other half from nationwide party lists, producing a flexible multiparty system that made it harder for the several competing parties in the anti-Orbán opposition to unify in prior elections. Two things helped Magyar avoid this problem. First, by launching with his bombshell break from Fidesz in early 2024 and then steering his followers into his new party, Tisza, in time for the upcoming European Parliament elections, he was able to steal oxygen from the legacy parties. Then, when Tisza scored 30% of the vote in those elections in June 2024, it proved that it was not a marginal new player but a real phenomenon. And then, by refusing to cut deals with those older parties, Magyar cemented his standing as an independent force. By the time Hungary’s parliamentary elections rolled around, the legacy parties had decided to either dissolve or stand aside—creating a clear path for the center-right Magyar to tackle the fascist Orban head on.
LESSON: Well, that would be a nice dream, right? Our rigid two-party system makes the possibility of a Magyar-type breakout unlikely. There are too many ambitious Democrats who think 2028 is going to be “their” year to stand aside in the interests of completely clobbering MAGA. Unlike Hungary’s legacy opposition parties, in most if not all the states, the Democratic Party isn’t going to wither away even if a popular independent somehow emerges and captures the public’s attention.
Nine: When it came to election protection, the opposition movement was ready in Hungary. A consortium of independent journalists put out a documentary called The Price of a Vote a few weeks before the election to focus attention on allegations of vote-buying and voter intimidation in rural areas, and they reportedly built a 2,400-person strong observer network in more than 100 locations prepared to document fraud. Tisza and Fidesz both made their own preparations, both for bottom-up reporting and to call foul, and in one case a top Fidesz official warned darkly about the opposition planning to storm the prime minister’s residence if the results were unfavorable to it. But Magyar’s huge win meant that Hungary avoided the kind of post-election chaos that other countries have gone through when a crucial election is hotly contested.
LESSON: A huge opposition turnout is the best guarantee of a democratic resurgence. Magyar’s win was too big to rig against, and Orban conceded quickly. If there’s any single reason to push for a Magyar-style candidate and campaign in 2028 against whomever succeeds Trump, this is the best one.
Further reading:
—Justin Florence at Protect Democracy’s If You Can Keep It Substack explains why it’s so important to prepare for threats to voting in the midterms, in the context of Hungary.
—Daniel Hunter in Waging Nonviolence also sets Magyar’s victory in the context of democracy defense.
—Laszlo Gendler writes in The UnPopulist about how Hungarians drew on their own history of fighting Soviet oppression and identification with Europe to overcome fear of challenging the Orban regime.
—Kim Lane Scheppele’s conversation with Paul Krugman is the single best discussion I’ve seen so far about the many contingencies and curlicues that made Magyar’s run so singularly successful.
—Democracy scholar Rachel Kleinfeld writes that Stacey Abrams has a new plan for unleashing the energy and ability of millions of Americans who want to advocate for democracy. Learn more here.
End Times
Can RFK Jr. dance like this?
I appreciate this. I’m just back from Hawaii. At the March 28 demonstration there, I learned the following chant: “no war. No haters. No demented dictators.” Every time I reach for another f-bomb, I substitute this chant instead. Not only does it take me back to Waimea in the rain, but it gives me something positive to focus on. We can do this but it’s going to take a lot of good energy and good strategy.
All good stuff Michael. I especially like the warnings to the Democrats.
I’m pretty sure they’re going to ignore those.
The problem you pointed out about winning in ‘26 & then losing in ‘28 because the voters are frustrated by, well, everything is on the nose. It needs attention as does the warning to not pick anyone close to Clinton, Obama or Biden. You’re right, but it saddens me that Joe is still getting no respect. However, I think your correct n your analysis. Sadly.
Whatever, thanks for a clear analysis & good suggestions.