Of Magyar and MAGA
As usual recent days have had no shortage of appalling news: the Supreme Court’s eviscerating of the Voting Rights Act; federal indictments of former FBI director James Comey, and the Southern Poverty Law Center; Trump’s rejection of Iran’s proposal to end its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz; an apparent attempted attack on administration officials during the White House Correspondents Dinner, leading paradoxically to increased calls to build Trump’s ballroom at the White House.
Earlier this month brought some rare but significant and impactful news, however, as Hungary’s right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban was ousted after sixteen years in power. Orban was defeated by Peter Magyar, a former member of Orban’s Fidesz party who left in 2024 after exposing a pardon scandal involving Magyar’s ex-wife. In an interview with The Conversation website, Fletcher School’s John Shattuck compared the election of someone named Peter Magyar in Hungary to electing someone in the US named “Joe America,” as Peter is one of the top 12 first names in Hungary and Magyar is Hungarian for “Hungary.”
Magyar’s party is usually referred to as TISZA, which is constructed from the Hungarian words for respect (tisztelet) and freedom (szabadság). Poland’s public broadcaster TVPWorld describes TISZA as seeking to “avoid being politically labeled,” but characterizes Magyar as “a staunchly pro-European conservative liberal.” Magyar has maintained a pro-EU and pro-Kyiv position, in contrast to Orban’s alignment with Moscow, but has emphasized humanitarian aid, advocated a ceasefire, and opposed a fast-track to EU membership for Ukraine.
Founded in 2020 the Tisza party is generally seen as representing center-right politics, and is a member of the European People’s Party group in the European Parliament. A key feature of the party has been an anti-corruption emphasis, consistent with Magyar’s active opposition to “insider dealing.” He has labeled Hungary under Orban a “mafia state.”
Orban set out to study political philosophy at Oxford in September 1989, but abandoned that project in 1990 to run for a seat in Hungary’s first post-communist parliament as a member of the Fidesz (aka Civic) party. In 1992 Orban and Fidesz joined the global Liberal International movement. But by the late 1990s, according to political scientist Zoltan Lakner, Orban and Fidesz had begun an anti-liberal, nationalist shift, essentially as a political maneuver to define themselves in opposition to the then prevailing liberal-socialist coalition.
In 1998 the Fidesz party won the most seats in the Hungarian parliamentary election, defeating the Socialists who were then in power. The far-right Truth and Life party also won 14 seats. Fidesz party leader Orban became the youngest prime minister of Hungary, and in 1999 guided Hungary to membership in NATO. In the 2002 election Fidesz won the most seats in parliament but fell short of an absolute majority, enabling the Socialist party to form a coalition government with the Free Democrats – a coalition that continued in power after the 2006 elections.
The Great Recession of 2007-2009 had significant impact on Hungary, which had to borrow $27 billion from the International Monetary fund while the economy shrank and unemployment grew. In the wake of the economic turmoil, in 2010 the Fidesz party won 52.7% of the popular vote, but more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament, and in April of that year Orban became prime minister (again) – an office he would manage to hold until last month.
Orban made his first official visit to Moscow in November 2010. In 2011 the Hungarian government announced its “Eastern Opening” strategy, seeking economic cooperation with China, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Azerbaijan. The initiative fell short of its intended effect, and by 2014 Russia was receiving less than 3% of Hungary’s exports, while nearly 7% of Hungary’s imports were from Russia. (Hungary’s most important trading partner is Germany, receiving roughly 25% of Hungarian exports.)
Although the Russian imports are a small fraction of Hungary’s total, they represent 89% of crude oil and 57% of natural gas consumed in Hungary. Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Hungary in February 2015 amid speculation that the Russians would pressure Hungary to oppose EU sanctions against Russia adopted in 2014 in response to Russian actions in Ukraine. In any case the then existing agreement between Russia and Hungary regarding energy imports was extended; Hungary did not veto EU sanctions against Russia, but, as the German Council on Foreign Relations has noted, even the possibility that an EU member nation might do so “was an effective way of spreading instability….”
In July 2014 Orban had delivered a speech that gained him considerable notoriety, in which he declared that the Hungarian government was seeking to build an “illiberal” state. Using language that could have come from Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard,” Orban declared the need for new forms of political organization in response to what he described as failures of western liberalism. He advocated looking to political systems in “Singapore, China, India, Russia and Turkey…,” systems that “are not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies, and perhaps not even democracies.”
The notion of illiberalism has been criticized by scholars as a vague concept, although George Washington University’s Marlene Laruelle has recently argued that it can to “some degree” be distinguished from populism and conservatism.
- Illiberalism is a new ideological universe that, even if doctrinally fluid and context-based, is to some degree coherent
- It represents a backlash against today’s liberalism in all its varied scripts—political, economic, cultural, geopolitical, civilizational — often in the name of democratic principles and thanks to them (by winning the popular vote);
- It proposes solutions that are majoritarian, nation-centric or sovereigntist, favoring traditional hierarchies and cultural homogeneity;
- It calls for a shift from politics to culture and is post-post-modern in its claims of rootedness in an age of globalization.
On Saturday, May 14, 2022, a white 18-year-old gunman shot and killed 10 people and injured 3 others in Buffalo, NY. The shooter eventually pled guilty to all charges. All 10 people who were murdered were black. The gunman, who live-streamed the shooting, had written a manifesto in which he declared support for the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” which imagines Jews and other Western elites conspiring to “replace white Americans and Europeans with people of non-European descent, particularly Asians and Africans.”
Two days later, in a speech televised nationally in Hungary, then-prime minister Viktor Orban explicitly endorsed the shooter’s belief. “Part of the picture of the decade of war facing us will be recurring waves of suicidal policy in the Western world,” Orban said. “One such suicide attempt that I see is the great European population replacement program, which seeks to replace the missing European Christian children with migrants, with adults arriving from other civilizations.”
The speech landed just ahead of the first CPAC conference1 to be held in Europe, which took place May 19 and 20, 2022, in Budapest. A week later the Heritage Foundation was a sponsor of the conservative Political Network for Values Transatlantic Summit IV, also in Budapest, and in November of that year Orban met with a Heritage Foundationdelegation, including president Kevin Roberts, at Budapest’s Carmelite Monastery. Heritage signed an agreement with the Danube Institute – a division of the Lajos Batthyány Foundation, which is essentially a lobbying group that was funded by the Orban government. The following year the Heritage Foundation hosted a conference in Washington, DC at which Hungarians from the embassy and the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs lobbied Republican members of Congress to end US military support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
In August 2024, investigative journal Pro Publica reported that several people appearing in training videos for what would become the Trump administration agenda – Project 2025 – had worked previously for the Danube Institute or other pro-Orban organizations. For example, in one of the videos, Project 2025 co-director, Spencer Chretien declares that in a conservative administration “loyalty and ideology are more important than professional experience.” Project 2025 had been showcased in Hungary at a Danube Institute event, presented by Troup Hemenway, Senior Advisor to the Foundation and Co-Director of Staff Placement for the 2025 project. And in May 2024 Chretien presented Project 2025 at what was a state-funded Orban government advocacy organization called the Hungarian Center for Fundamental Rights. Other presenters in the training videos include former Trump official Roger Severino, who attended a meeting in Budapest in 2023 about training partisans; Conservative Partnership Institute president Ed Corrigan, whose organization co-hosted an event in Washington, DC, with the Liszt Institute – part of the Hungarian government’s Department of Culture and Innovation – presented a book by Orban cabinet member Balazs Orban, along with the author himself.
A measure of the importance the Trump administration placed on an Orban victory in the recent election can be seen in Vice President JD Vance having traveled to Hungary to campaign for Orban in early April, and Trump himself speaking to a rally by phone. “… He didn’t allow people to storm your country and invade your country like other people have, and ruin their country, frankly,” Trump told the rally, highlighting one of the parallels between Orban’s policies and immigration policies contained in Project 2025.
While campaigning for Orban Vance claimed the European Union was interfering in Hungary’s election, and that Brussels had “tried to destroy the economy of Hungary,” driving up costs and making the nation less energy independent. Claiming that Ukrainian intelligence services had tried to “put the thumb” on the scale of US elections, Vance echoed Orban’s efforts to cast Ukraine as the chief threat to Hungary.
In the end, Magyar and his Tisza party won 53.2% of the vote -- something the Budapest Business Journal called “astonishing” – handing them 141 seats, or 70.8% of the Hungarian parliament.
The Independent UK’s James C. Reynolds reported that the Trump-Vance endorsement may in fact have helped defeat Orban. Although not necessarily an indicator of causality, betting markets “showed support for Orban dipped slightly after Vance’s address….” Citing “widespread revulsion” in the EU at the US war in Iran, far-right member of the EU parliament, Diana Sosoaca referred to Vance’s visit to Hungary as a “big mistake.” Similarly, the far-right AfD party in Germany is reportedly reducing contact with the Trump administration, with party co-leader Alice Weidel having told members to limit association with MAGA Republicans, “according to people present at the meeting.”
The AP’s Nicholas Riccardi and Matt Brown underscored Orban’s loss as a “reminder of how the war has diminished Trump’s ability to help allied politicians overseas…” as well as providing yet another example of “the limited ability of leaders to use their power to tilt voting in their direction in an age of worldwide discontent over incumbents of all ideological stripes.” Noting that red MAGA hats and other Trumpian paraphernalia decorated Orban’s campaign The Atlantic’s Isaac Stanley-Becker went so far as to declare the loss a defeat for Trump and Vance, as well.
Viktor Orbán’s loss … is just as much a defeat for Donald Trump and his vice president, J. D. Vance, as it is for the now-toppled Hungarian strongman. Seldom have American leaders intervened so overtly in a foreign election, and seldom has their preferred candidate fared so badly. Trump has a way of distancing himself from people who disappoint him. Last night, when reporters asked him about the outcome in Hungary, he turned and walked away. But having tied himself so tightly to Orbán, he may find it unusually difficult to dissociate himself from the prime minister’s downfall.
In a speech after his party’s election victory, Peter Magyar referred to CPAC as having received financial support from the Hungarian government, calling that “a criminal offense” that “will have to be investigated.” “CPAC is welcome to come to Budapest,” he said, “… but it should not be financed with Hungarian taxpayers’ money.” Over the next days Magyar continued to assert his intent to begin the process of reversing the institutionalization of “illiberalism” that had been implemented under sixteen years of the Orban regime. He vowed to suspend the state television channel’s news service, embark on rebuilding Hungary’s relations with the EU, reclaim government financial assets that had found their way to Orban-related business interests, address widespread poverty in the country, and called for the nation’s president – a largely ceremonial position – and top judges to resign by May 31.
Writing about Magyar’s promised reforms, journalist Steven Beschloss asks “Will America learn from Hungary?”
Will the growing fury toward Donald Trump’s deranged recklessness and sociopathic indifference to the needs of everyday Americans ensure a massive turnout and a massive Democratic win? Will Trump’s exhausting propaganda and lies—amplified by Fox News and its right-wing peers—finally convince voters that democracy, decency and the truth must finally define our future?
1 The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is an annual event sponsored by the American Conservative Union (ACU). Donald Trump spoke at the 2011 conference, which some observers credit with helping start his political career. At the 2025 conference Trump spoke for over an hour about the supposed achievements of his first month in office, but he and VP JD Vance skipped the 2026 event – the first time in a decade neither he nor any members of his family attended.↩︎