Orban, The Strongman, Lost - And Suddenly They All Look A Bit Less Undefeatable

From Budapest to Westminster to Rome to Paris, Orban’s defeat punctures the myth that the global right is inevitable.

Yesterday I wrote about how I was unable to find the words to analyse a far-right ideologue threatening to completely wipe out a civilisation.

This morning, I’m having no trouble whatsoever finding the words to talk about the fall of a right-wing ideologue - and the first words that come to mind are almost certainly: “fuck yes!”

Because, my friends, today is a rare day for a bit of optimism.

Image: Elekes Andor, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Viktor Orban has lost the Hungarian general election. Properly lost. He didn’t lose while still maintaining a vague “moral victory” where he still gets to strut around and get his shit together for the next round while pretending people really do still love him. No, no - he has had his arse well and fully handed to him and not so politely told to fuck right off.

His Fidesz party this weekend was beaten by Peter Magyar’s Tisza party after an incredible sixteen years in power, having ascended around the same time as Cameron and Clegg stumbled into No 10 all the way back in 2010¹. At the time of writing this column², it looks like the Tisza party will not only have a commanding parliamentary position - but an actual super-majority, with a potential 135 - 138 seats in the 199 seat chamber.

And all pretence of objectivity aside from me, I am positively delighted³.

Not necessarily because Peter Magyar is secretly the second coming of a Hungarian version of Clement Attlee - he most certainly is not that, he is, by any normal measure a centre-right politician.

However, we’re living in such an incredibly deranged political period, with the Overton window having been dragged so far to the right by nationalists, authoritarians, culture warriors and assorted fascist-adjacent gobshites that a pro-EU, anti-corruption, institution-respecting centre-right victory basically arrives with the emotional force of a left-wing win⁴. And frankly, after the few years we’ve all had, I’ll take it.

I will wholeheartedly welcome an election where voters took a look at a man who had spent years turning his country into the international showroom for “illiberal democracy” and decided that they had had enough.

The thing to keep in mind in this situation is that Orban was never just Hungary’s problem - this is the key point in this discussion. He was the prototype - a sort of patron saint of the modern hard right. He was the man who showed the reactionaries around the world that you didn’t need tanks in the streets to hollow out democracy - all you needed were captured institutions, a compliant media eco-system, a rigged electoral framework, a semi-permanent state of cultural panic and enough rhetoric about sovereignty and the threat of civilisational collapse to make cruelty and, at times, outright malice, sound like common sense and policy.

This was Orban’s great contribution to the network of the international right - he made authoritarian drift look administratively tidy, he made democratic erosion look like governance and, above all, this gave his mates a working model. A framework of right-wingery.

Another point to note in this election, and I will be honest that this is the bit that’s making me smile into my coffee this morning, is that the same global right went absolutely all in for Orban.

Donald Trump backed him. JD “Maybe it’s Maybelline” Vance, the actual vice president of the United States, went to Budapest and campaigned for him in the final stretch⁵. The broader MAGA ecosystem has treated Orban’s Hungary as a kind of anti-liberal theme-park for years - where family values are compulsory, the borders are hard, the gays are targeted and the journalists know when to keep their heads down.

Beyond the Americans, Orban wheeled out an absolute clown car of international endorsements. Giorgia Meloni. Marine Le Pen. Alice Weidel. Matteo Salvini. Javier Milei. Benjamin Netanyahu. A whole transnational montage of nationalist grievance and bad energy.

The man had the machine, the model, the backing and the mythology - and still he got utterly annihilated.

Which is exactly what should make every other right-wing strongman sweat through their shirts today.

It should make Trump uneasy because Orban was one of the clearest international proofs of concept for the MAGA project. It should make Meloni nervous because she’s spent years trying very hard to look like the respectable, grown-up face of hard-right politics, and now one of her most public ideological allies has just been rejected hard by voters. It should make Le Pen wonder whether all her nationalist theatre starts looking a bit passé once people have lived through more than a decade and a half of stagnant wages, corruption and managed decline. It should certainly make Netanyahu think a bit harder about how durable these far-right international alliances really are.

Even more locally, it should make Farage shit his brightly coloured trousers. Because, pretty crucially, our very own little burgeoning hard-man here in the UK, like Orban, thrives on the performance of inevitability. His whole schpiel largely depends on this idea that history is moving his direction, that liberal democracy is weak and exhausted, that multiculturalism has failed and that the only viable future is a more brutal, exclusionary politics with him standing front-and-centre waving a little Union Jack and calling it realism.

Orban losing this weekend goes a long way in puncturing that fantasy just a bit more. It serves as a reminder that these hard-men and women are not destiny - they are politicians, and they can be beaten. Their projects can and will eventually fail. Their cults all inevitably fray at the seams, and their very expensive propaganda ecosystems do not, in fact, amount to the divine right to rule that they so firmly believe they have.

Farage will absolutely loathe that - he will loathe the symbolism of the loss, the precedent that it now sets. He will despise the sight of a long-entrenched right-wing demagogue being brought down not by a grand revolution, but by voters who are simply exhausted, disgusted and, above all, gatvol⁶.

And this might almost be the most important part of all this - Orban didn’t just lose because people suddenly became naive about politics. He lost because they had just seen enough. They had seen enough of the corruption, the stagnation, the state that had been bent to the service of one party and one man. They were horrified at the idea of the leader of their country telling Vladimir Putin “I am at your service”. They had seen what happens when a government runs out of answers and starts compensating with paranoia, scapegoating and institutional bullying.

There truly is, today, more than a subtle sense of glee in the air for me - and there is much needed relief too.

Not because Hungary is going to be magically fixed overnight - it almost certainly isn’t. Orban has spent the last decade and a half embedding loyalists throughout the state, the media and the institutions of the country. Peter Magyar now has the chance to undo some of that, but it will be very messy and very difficult work.

Also not because a centre-right victory is the same thing as the broad, humane, egalitarian politics I would actually want to see, it isn’t.

I’m relieved because this is a reminder, and a badly needed one, that the global-right is not invincible. That the men and women who posture as history’s inevitable winners can, and will, be sent packing. That projects that are built on fear, corruption, exclusion and perpetual grievance all eventually collapse under the weight of their own bullshit.

And after the past few years, I’m sorry, but that feels absolutely fucking delightful.

I am going to allow myself a small measure of optimism today. A responsible amount. I’m not going to go running naked through the streets of London waving an EU flag and singing ABBA at the top of my lungs, but I am sitting here thinking that perhaps the first domino really has fallen. And if you’re part of the global right this morning, from Budapest to Westminster to Rome to Washington, you will know it too, and start feeling just a little bit uncertain.

And that, in itself, is enough to brighten the day.

1. And here a small note of admiration for the fact that Hungary has had one leader for 16 years when we in the UK have been changing them about as regularly as Britta filters.

2. Which is very early in the morning indeed, and the only time optimism in politics feels remotely safe, and will likely be ruined by around 15:00 when Washington comes online.

3. Not, of course, that there was a lot of objectivity - I am, after all, not the BBC nor regulated by Ofcom.

4. Politics is relative now. Deeply, deeply relative.

5. Accusing the EU very loudly of election interference. While as an actual non-Hungarian literally interfering in the election. Pot-Kettle-Black does not cover this.

6. Direct translation: arse-full - meaning you are so sick of it you arse is actually filled to capacity and take no more. Afrikaans is a weird language. It’s a pleasure / I’m sorry.