John Ivison: The illiberal right’s expansion just suffered a serious setback

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Magyar ran the kind of campaign that will give hope to all parties fighting illiberal populists.

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A former official in Orbàn’s Fidersz party, Magyar is no squishy liberal. He avoided cultural liberal issues and took a tough approach on public safety and migration, even attacking Orbàn for allowing in foreigners on short-term work visas. He has promised to maintain the heavily patrolled border fence that Orbàn built to keep migrants out.

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But he successfully allied disgust at the blatant corruption of the Orbàn years — which saw the prime minister, his family and his cronies enrich themselves — with dissatisfaction at the ailing economy, and anger at the cosiness with Russia and coolness toward the EU.

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Ignatieff said Orban promised to keep Hungary out of the war in Ukraine, and to keep cheap Russian gas flowing.

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“But the public just wouldn’t buy it. The economy is in increasingly difficult shape. Orbàn was in power for 16 years and hadn’t closed the gap between the standard of living in Hungary and the standard of living next door in Austria. Everybody could see it, it’s visceral. You get off the train from Vienna and you’re aware that you’re in a poor Eastern European country just recovering from communism. The gap between what Orbàn promised, in terms of prosperity, just became impossible to hide,” he said.

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Magyar split with Fidesz two years ago, after Orbàn ordered the minister of justice to pardon one of the party’s supporters, who had been convicted of a pedophile offence in a children’s home where he was the manager.

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“That’s important because Magyar made a lot of his critique of the Orbàn regime’s moral corruption; not just its economic corruption but its willingness to bend, and even break the law, to protect its own. That gave him a tremendous head of steam,” Ignatieff said.

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Magyar was aided greatly by other opposition parties ceding the field to avoid fragmentation. This allowed him to campaign more aggressively outside Budapest and other cities, where the vote was already reflexively anti-Orbàn.

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“He got on the back of a small truck and toured every single village in Hungary in two years. He just out-campaigned Orbàn from the grassroots up. And when you look at the results, he didn’t just win in the big cities, he won everywhere,” Ignatieff said. “Last week he was doing seven stops a day. As an ex-politico myself, I couldn’t do more than four. He was indefatigable.”

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Ignatieff said it was important for Magyar’s campaign that he broke through the mainstream media control that Orbàn had established. “He would appear in front of 75 people in a small village inn and it would be broadcast to a growing network of people on social media. Orbàn misjudged how much his dominance of broadcast and print media would count,” he said.

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A man wears a shirt with the lettering ‘Friendship matters – leaders of the free world’ and the images of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn and U.S. President Donald Trump during an election rally for Orbàn in Budapest on April 7, 2026. Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

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He also clearly misunderstood the impact of becoming a junior partner to both Trump and Putin. Interventions by the president, his vice-president JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio appear to have backfired.

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Vance visited last week and condemned foreign election interference by “the bureaucrats in Brussels” as the worst he’d ever seen, which was ironic.

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Meanwhile, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., posted on social media that “only one leader in Europe has a direct line to the White House.”

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America remains indispensable to Europe, particularly those countries in the East. But politicians across the continent will have taken note that an association with Trump is no longer viewed as a political asset by voters.