“Óvatosan optimista.”

That means “cautious optimism.” It’s a phrase I’ve heard from several Hungarian friends when I ask them about the momentous elections taking place on Sunday, April 12. After 16 years in power, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s rule of “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian liberty,” may be coming to an end, as one of his Fidesz party members, Péter Magyar, has defected and challenged his rule.

With polls suggesting a 10-point lead for Magyar and a possible two-thirds majority for his rival Tisza party in Parliament, Vice President JD Vance flew to Hungary to campaign for Orbán, not to interfere with the free and fair election, he insisted, but “to show that there are actually lots of friends across the world who recognize that Viktor and his government are doing a good job and they’re important partners for peace.” It is unlikely that this would impress an electorate that has witnessed remarkable political corruption, a significant brain drain among young people, the lowest standard of living in the EU, and high unemployment. Not to mention the simple phenomenon of Fidesz fatigue after so many years. Indeed, polling suggested that Vance’s visit may have backfired.

Love to see this: A new poll conducted in Hungary has shown that JD Vance’s visit to Budapest caused Putin puppet Viktor Orbán’s party to LOSE 3% of its support.

— Jon Cooper (@joncooper-us.bsky.social) 2026-04-09T03:03:52.947Z

The rise of Magyar and potential fall of Orbán has led at least some Hungarians, who are not known for their sunny optimism, to feel some bat squeaks of hope. At the same time, their almost genetic national pessimism makes many receptive to the paranoid and apocalyptic messaging from their prime minister.

But why the outsized attention to an election in a Central European country of fewer than 10 million people? Well, because Orbán’s singular brand of pugnacious Christian nationalism and the implications of his rule have extended far beyond the fate of this nation and its 62-year-old leader. Orban is one of the most successful populist strongmen of the 21st century. He has successfully curried favor with both President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has antagonized the EU by systematically undermining civil society in Hungary, channelling some of its generous largesse to enrich himself and his cronies, and blocking essential funding for Ukraine. With no evidence whatsoever, he insists that “Brussels is pushing us into war,” accusing the EU and anyone within earshot of attempting to drag Hungary into the conflict in Ukraine and, perforce, with Russia.

Whatever the geopolitical ramifications—or implications for right-wing populism and America’s MAGA movement—for Hungarians, this election is existential, and exhausting. A pervasive sense of anxiety permeates conversations in social media and within families, and even casual interactions are charged. Hungarians have faced the complete Fidesz takeover of traditional media channels, and turned to Facebook and alternative media channels, which are abuzz with conversation, debate, and sharing of insights—or the latest Fidesz outrage. A friend in Budapest hinted darkly at a national curfew after the election, and one of my Hungarian cousins said her hairstylist was so spent that he planned to take Monday off to recover—as did her husband.

For many Americans, of course, Orbán’s Hungary is a miniature version of Trump’s US—indeed, in some ways, it may have served as a role model for MAGA in its crusade to dismantle democratic institutions and crucial elements of civil society. When Trump first ran for election in 2016, Orbán had already “built the wall”—in his case, an electrified razor wire fence constructed by prisoners—on Hungary’s southern border, attempting to staunch the flow of Syrian refugees who, to be sure, were more likely to use Hungary as a transit point than a final destination. This also allowed Orbán to declare a “state of emergency,” which has not been lifted since. Sound familiar?

In quashing dissent, extravagantly rewarding his allies, enriching himself and his family, despairing over the dilution of the purity of the Hungarian blood line, marginalizing and oppressing the LGBTQ community—well, it’s all there really. The Orbán playbook is channeled in various ways by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for Trump’s second term. So understanding how the Fidesz machine might be defeated could hold some lessons for MAGA’s foes.

Depending, of course, on what happens on Sunday. Because this election might conceivably serve as a blueprint for tampering with a free and fair balloting process, or how an autocrat will challenge its results. Election laws have been altered by Fidesz to gerrymander voting districts and reduce Parliamentary seats, all in their favor. (Sound familiar?)

In cities like Budapest, or even college towns, the level of engagement and rejection of Fidesz is unambivalent, but less-educated and provincial Hungarians in the eastern part of the country remain rock solid on team Orbán. I asked Csaba Pleh, a professor of cognitive science at the Central European University, if he was concerned about election meddling. “I do not agree with those voices that claim that Orbán will create disturbances or postpone the elections,” he said. “To be cynical, I feel that his entourage is too busy securing their money. They do not have the strength or the time to try to disrupt the elections.”

The 30th annual Budapest Pride march was scheduled for June 28, 2025. Several months before, Parliament amended the Assembly Act specifically to prohibit any demonstrations or gatherings for LGBTQ rights, and the prohibition would be enforced by facial recognition technology to identify anyone who organized or participated in such gatherings.

Since 2020, when Orbán first announced that despite Hungarians being “tolerant and patient” people, upon seeing a children’s book with LGBTQ themes, he demanded that “gays are to leave our children alone.” There is a “red line,” he said, “that cannot be crossed.” The next year, Fidesz banned the inclusion of any information about homosexuality or transgenderism in school sex ed classes, and depictions of homosexuality or sex reassignment in any media directed at people under 18. Appearing at CPAC in Budapest in 2023—where he received a standing ovation—Orbán announced his priorities, “No migration, no gender, no war.”

Timea Szabó is an opposition MP from Hungary’s Green or Politics Can Be Different (LMP) party, who has represented Budapest’s third district—whose population of 124,000 makes it akin to Hungary’s sixth largest city—since 2018 and has been in Parliament since 2010. She told me the government’s anti-LGBTQ propaganda, alleging that “sex change operations were happening in kindergarten,” was a new low for Fidesz. “I actually asked the president at an open committee hearing, ‘I’d like to hear actual statistics about how many requests you have had from families who wanted to change the sex of their kid,'” she recalled. “And she said, ‘Well, zero.’ I was like, then, why the hell are you doing this? How cynical do you have to be to make [LGBTQ] groups the enemy of the nation?”

Political pressure and police bans preceded the Pride event, even as the non-Fidesz mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony, welcomed the marchers and offered to host it. In response, Bence Tuzson, the minister of justice, warned him that doing so could land him in prison for a year. This was, Tuzson insisted, “in order to protect the rights of children.”

“When the minister of justice is not aware of the laws in force, that is…the Fidesz government.”

Karácsony dismissed the threat: “When the minister of justice is not aware of the laws in force, that is…the Fidesz government.” He went on to note that the last Saturday of June was official Hungarian Freedom Day. “So, of course, we are holding a municipal event on Hungarian Independence Day. This is Budapest Pride, and since there are already over 500 foreign participants—ministers, representatives, mayors—the English name is also justified: Budapest Pride.”

It was a beautiful early summer day, and the rally began at City Hall in Pest, snaked through the city center, and crossed the Elizabeth Bridge over the Danube. The crowd, clearly not intimidated by government threats, was enormous. Organizers estimated 200,000 people participated. Others thought the number was closer to 100,000, but either way, in a country of less than 10 million, the turnout was extraordinary. Small children marched, parents pushed strollers, young people danced, sang, and celebrated the show of solidarity.

Participants in the Pride march cross the Elisabeth Bridge in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, June 28, 2025. Rudolf Karancsi/AP

A poster depicting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the Budapest Pride march.Rudolf Karancsi/AP

Several marchers were pensioners. They had lived through the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Janos Kadar’s more benign 32-year communist rule that began after the Revolution and was crushed by Russian troops. After a period of extreme austerity, they lived in a Hungary that was referred to as the “happiest barracks on the bloc,” for its relatively soft communist oppression, moderate economic pluralism, and careful titration of its relationship with Soviet leadership in Moscow. Life in Hungary was a pleasant contrast with some of its more Stalinist neighbors, such as Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania and Erich Honecker’s East Germany. Many of the marchers had lived through the early days of Fidesz in 1989 and 1990 when decades of communism in Hungary ended, as it did throughout the former Soviet Union, and bright new possibilities seemed endless.

I was in Hungary back then, and Fidesz offered an exhilarating vision of itself as the party of youth and the future. Now, nearly every available lampost is plastered with posters demonizing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the EU: “Don’t Let Zelensky Have the Last Laugh!” said one of them. In Fidesz’s early days, one of its posters showed the image of a “socialist fraternal kiss” between two sclerotic leaders, Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev and East Germany’s Honecker, taken when Brezhnev visited East Berlin to celebrate the GDR’s 30th anniversary in 1979. The poster’s bottom half featured a delightful embrace between a beautiful young Hungarian man and woman. The caption read: “Tessék Választani”—”Make your choice.”

This is one of many posters used during the 1990 Hungarian election by new political parties to differentiate themselves from the Communist Party. Here, Fidesz asks voters to “choose” between two different types of kisses.Tessek Valasztani/World History Commons

Orban was a young and charismatic leader at the time; Oxford-educated thanks to George Soros, and exhilarated in presenting a new alternative to the communist past. Not the outdated socialism of some communist reformers, or the insulated, conservative nationalism of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) embodied by future prime minister Jozsef Antall, but a bright combination of free markets and social programs, with an emphasis on creating a Hungary poised for integration in a modern European future. The name Fidesz is an acronym that translates to the Federation of Young Democrats. It was considered a moderate liberal party. In the first free elections in 1990, it entered the national assembly with 6 percent of the vote and 22 seats in Parliament. Then Orbán began his rise to power, and Fidesz became unrecognizable to some of its early supporters.

It didn’t take long for Orbán and his party to fragment. In 1993, he was elected party chairman and demonstrated the uncompromising, unforgiving style that has become more extreme over the years. Former members, still idealists, imagined Fidesz could deliver on its promises for this new Hungarian democracy. As one founding member, Zsuzsanna Szelényi wrote in her 2019 essay, “The Generation that Betrayed Hungarian Democracy,”

He was adept at pressuring members to fall into line, building a circle of loyal cronies and followers who responded to his missionary zeal. By 1993, the party suffered deep internal divisions. The final rupture occurred when we learned that Orban and the party’s treasurer had used party funds to reap profits from a luxury car rental company, with money channelled through a crony’s enterprises.

The following year, Szelényi was one of five MPs and “several hundred members who defected,” and the party made a decisive turn to the right**—i**ndeed, the religious right. “Policy was now driven by pure opportunism,” she wrote, “like the way Fidesz leaders suddenly started participating in Catholic masses, to court religious voters.” Orbán’s control now complete, Fidesz nonetheless took some time to gain traction. It lost in 1994, but in 1998, 35-year-old Orbán became Hungary’s—and Europe’s—youngest prime minister, brought Hungary into NATO, and began to position the country to join the EU.

His rise was not without setbacks. He and Fidesz lost in 2002 and 2006, cognitive scientist Pleh told me, and when he returned to power in 2010, he had learned some important and unsparing lessons: “All those intellectual hotshots who were standing with him on the dais and so on, misled him, led him to believe that he was winning,” Pleh explained. “And from that time on, both institutionally and personally, he mistrusted established intellectuals and established institutions.”

The 2025 Pride march was not only an expression of solidarity with the LGBTQ community, but, much like the No Kings marches in the United States, an opportunity to show the government that their capacity for intimidation and bullying may have reached its limit.

Upon returning to power in 2010, the Orbán government has systematically brought Hungarian cultural and intellectual institutions under state control, using two main strategies: centralizing power and replacing leaders with his own supporters, or as Pleh called them,”untainted outsiders.” The party ousted establishment figures and brought in relatively unknown younger figures from elsewhere**—**ethnic Hungarian communities in Transylvania (Romania), Vojvodina (Serbia), and Ukraine. These newcomers had no ties to existing intellectual networks, no debts to the old guard, and they were often very nationalistic. The head of the National Theater came from Ukraine, for instance, and the director of the key literary museum and main cultural funding distributor came from Transylvania. It’s not that they were incompetent but, unlike their predecessors, they were staunch loyalists who owed their professional success entirely to Orbán.

Fidesz remade academic institutions, cultural foundations, the media, and the judiciary. “Orban was smart,” MP Szabo told me, “because I think he understood that people wouldn’t care much about the rule of law because they don’t understand it. So he took very small steps, one step at a time. It’s sort of like two boxers, where one boxer always hits the other one on the same place, but very lightly. And the first 100 blows the opponent doesn’t feel. But after the 101st, he collapses.”

“It’s sort of like two boxers, where one boxer always hits the other one on the same place, but very lightly. And the first 100 blows the opponent doesn’t feel. But after the 101st, he collapses.”

With his nearly absolute power over the last 16 years, Orbán, his family, and his cronies have benefited lavishly from his position, creating what many have described as a “mafia state,” where Fidesz controls and profits from national resources, state institutions, and the media. “Like a mafia boss who decides the fate of the members of his immediate and adopted family,” two Hungarian public intellectuals wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Orbán stands at the top of his own adopted political family to which nearly every sector of Hungarian society must pay tribute.”

Much of the enrichment comes from the EU, where funds ended up being funneled to his cronies. The poster child is Lorinc Meszaros, a pipe fitter, childhood friend and now Hungary’s richest man, who, it is thought, may also be shielding some of Orbán’s assets.

Not that he would have to. The Hungarian investigative reporting group Direkt36 conducted a thorough investigation of the family corruption and produced a documentary in 2025, The Dynasty: This is how the Orbán family’s economic empire was born. The film shows how each family member, especially the prime minister’s son-in-law, became one of the country’s 50 wealthiest people. The amount of misappropriated funds from the European Union is estimated to reach 30 billion euros. Transparency International noted, as it gave Hungary its worst score ever, “In 2025, Hungary was once again ranked at the bottom of the European Union, sharing last place with Bulgaria this time, according to the annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) compiled by the Secretariat of Transparency International in Berlin.”

And this is small change compared to the Trump family’s enrichment.

There is yet another aspect of Orbán’s rule that will feel familiar to Americans in the Trump era**:** a dividing of friends and family along partisan lines. Pleh told me he has stopped spending time with some old friends because “they have become too much pro-Orban. We have some old boys’ dinners with those who were, like me, critical of the government. And soon a separation in those relationships took place, all along political alliances.”

Former Hungarian government insider Peter Magyar gives a speech next to Kossuth Lajos Square in Budapest, days before the election. Denes Erdos/AP

Péter Magyar was once a member of Fidesz, close with the leadership, and married to Judit Varga, who eventually became a Fidesz justice minister—and the source of Magyar’s fame and departure from his political home. In 2023, he recorded his wife as she described what she alleged to be government interference with a corruption case she was overseeing. She was not aware he had recorded the conversation until he released it as part of a very public attack on the party—whereupon a very public, and very messy, divorce ensued.

But Magyar only finally broke with Fidesz after another scandal, in 2024, that involved the pardon of a pedophile’s accomplice who was close to the Orbán camp. Katalin Novak, Hungary’s first woman president, was forced to resign after she pardoned a man who helped cover up the actions of the former deputy director of a children’s home whose boss had been sexually abusing its children and adolescents. Given the party’s previous attacks on the LGBTQ community in the name of protecting children, it was a seismic scandal and, for Magyar, the last straw.

He left Fidesz and created another center-right party named after Hungary’s second largest river, the Tisza. It’s not as if his politics are liberal. Far from it. He remains a politician with vestigial Fidesz values. Initially, gathering his coalition was difficult since his political comrades were ones he had rejected. In the 2024 European Parliament elections, Tisza secured 29.6 percent of the vote, and Fidesz suffered its lowest count ever at 44.82 percent. Timea Szabó told Politico, “We are not voting for Tisza, we are voting against Fidesz. That’s the whole point. Hungarians would vote for a goat at this point if it was running against Orbán.” As for any election meddling? It is impossible to predict. A friend posted on Facebook, “On Sunday, I will give both of my votes to Tisza, because I believe that those who want change should support the party that has the most chance of winning. I came to this decision slowly, but I’m no longer obligated to my previous party sympathy and loyalty. And I say, come on Tisza, come on Hungary, let’s put an end to 16+ years of economic, legal and moral destruction of Fidesz!!”

Are there any Hungarian lessons to be learned for those who long to see the end of MAGA?

Szabó reflected on some of the mistakes the opposition made. Focusing on the “demolition of democracy,” for instance. “Most voters don’t really know what democracy is. For most people, democracy is that you have elections,” she said. “This is why the Hungarian government still repeats constantly: There are elections every four years. So what do you want? This is a democracy. It’s a hard thing to define. So you have to pick a topic that matters.” One such issue: the man protecting the pedophile who preyed on children in a place that was supposed to be a refuge. That whole affair revealed much more about the way Fidesz worked—the cronyism, the hypocrisy, the conviction that laws and rules don’t apply to the insiders—than any high-minded reflection on the erosion of democratic norms could.

I asked Pleh what it would take, after all these years, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Was it even possible? “By nature. I’m optimistic,” he said—even without the “cautiously” qualifier. “I can’t help it. So yes, I think many things can be put back together again. Hungary is still part of the free world, that’s not going to go away. It will take five or six years to restructure our society, but it will be done, I think.”

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