Peter Magyar’s landslide election victory in Hungary has brought down Viktor Orban after 16 years in power. It’s a defeat for Moscow and Beijing, both of which counted Orban as a partner. But it’s also a defeat for the Trump administration, which openly and enthusiastically endorsed Orban.
This American endorsement and Trump’s regard for Orban were always odd.
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Orban’s governance sat uneasily with American interests. He built his foreign policy on maintaining near-total dependence on Russian energy supplies, cultivating Vladimir Putin as a personal partner, using Hungary’s European Union veto to block aid to Ukraine, acting as a pet for Xi Jinping’s interests in the EU. He did so all while enjoying NATO’s security guarantees and the benefits of EU membership.
In the end, however, Orban failed in his attempt to make the election a referendum of fear concerning the risks of an escalated Ukraine war. Designating his opponents as the “party of war,” Orban blamed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for Hungary’s troubles. Instead, Magyar focused on the economy and anti-corruption measures.
Yes, Orban won American admiration in certain conservative circles for his pro-family policies, anti-woke rhetoric, anti-immigration stance, and opposition to EU overreach. But the actual substance of his rule looked familiar to anyone from the post-Soviet world: centralized power, patronage, corruption, and a permanent external enemy. The pedophilia pardon scandal that launched Magyar’s political career exposed the distance between the veil and the real conduct of the regime.
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There’s a lesson here for American conservatives. The United States needs allies who act with moral clarity and strength of conviction, not demagogues who strengthen anti-Western forces. America needs allies who actually believe in the things Americans believe in: freedom at home, and the right of democratic peoples to live free from the thumb of foreign aggressors.
Magyar, 45, a centrist conservative who promises clean governance and condemns Moscow’s war, might end up being the ally that Orban only pretended to be.
