“ORToday we have to win!”. At the polling station, Viktor Orbán could feel it a little yesterday morning: five times prime minister, never below 47% of the vote, yet displaced by his former loyalist Péter Magyar, who has become his fiercest opponent. Orbán took courage, but he understood that he was no longer the king with an absolute majority. He won, not by a landslide as usual. It drops to 44% from the 53 it had, according to almost definitive data, and the real Hungarian novelty is Magyar, a card already ready and to be played for the 2026 elections: its 30% is an astonishing result for a party — Tisza: respect and freedom – which didn’t even exist until a few months ago.
Pax Orbaniana
And now? The prime minister said that “we will interpret these results as the expression of an opinion on war and peace”. If this were the case, the nine points less would mean that more than half of Hungarians are not for Pax Orbaniana, i.e. surrender to Putin, nor against sending aid to Ukraine: Orbán has already blocked 50 billion EU funds in Kiev , Sweden’s entry into NATO has slowed down, but now blaming the “pro-war” politicians in Washington and Brussels for always and only being the no of European decisions, perhaps no longer works.
The lawyer “neither right nor left”
A new Hungary appears on the political landscape. It is too early to say that I see in Magyar a Homo Novus aligned with the EU on Ukraine. But certainly his crowded rallies and his war against the corruption of the Fidesz government, the promise of no longer being «a colony instrument of foreign forces» (Russia and China), «nor the wedge, but rather the link between East and West”, all this gives Hungary a real opposition again. And a push against Orbán’s excessive power. 43-year-old lawyer, social media expert, “neither right nor left”, Magyar had been working for the prime minister for about ten years, was married to his very powerful Minister of Justice, Judit Varga, until he decided to leave both the halls of power and the marriage. Accusing the wife of all the worst. And publicly denouncing the scandal of a pardon granted by Judit to a pedophile, complete with intercepted phone calls between the minister and the prime minister himself.
EU Presidency
If this was supposed to be a referendum on the sovereignist government, as Orbán has always repeated, so it was. A yes-or-no that doesn’t just concern Hungarians: from July, it will be Budapest’s turn to take over the six-month EU presidency. King Viktor takes his seat on the European throne in the guise of a less absolute monarch. He focused his entire electoral campaign on the fear of involvement in the war, on the duties to be imposed on Ukrainian wheat, on the Hungarian minorities living near Kiev. “Wake up, Hungarians!” was the Magyar slogan. Hungary woke up very early – before the rest of Europe: polling stations opened at dawn at 6am – and with a record turnout told Orbán that something had cracked.
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