Francis Fukuyama has held up Péter Magyar’s landslide defeat of Viktor Orbán as a model for Americans seeking to rebuke Donald Trump in November’s midterm elections, describing Hungary’s April vote as a ‘very great repudiation of Orbánism’.
Speaking to Ezra Klein on The Ezra Klein Show on 11 September, the Stanford political scientist said ‘the model for this was really the Hungarian election last April’, arguing that Magyar had shown the political skill to organize a ‘very broad coalition’ and turn opposition to a long-entrenched government into a ‘massive victory’.
Fukuyama added that America had ‘a chance of doing something similar’, although probably not as decisively, and could send ‘a very powerful message’ in the midterms.
The scale of Magyar’s victory is not in dispute. Tisza won 141 of 199 seats, against 52 for Fidesz–KDNP and six for Our Homeland, after taking 53.18 per cent of the party-list vote. Orbán’s 16-year premiership ended with the first change of government since 2010.
Fukuyama placed Hungary inside a broader argument about populism running through the interview. Revisiting themes from his work on ‘recognition’, he argued that material prosperity is insufficient if voters believe elites neither respect nor see them. He placed unusually heavy weight on social media as an explanation for the post-2016 populist wave. Trump, in Fukuyama’s account, represents megalothymia—the desire to be recognized as superior—combined with resentment among voters seeking dignity and status.
Yet calling the April election a repudiation of ‘Orbánism’ and a victory of liberal democracy may already be too sweeping. Magyar has indeed broken with Orbán on Russia and repaired relations with the EU, but domestically he often appears closer to right-wing populism than liberalism. His government retained the border fence, extended the ‘state of crisis caused by mass migration’ until 31 December, and continues to reject the EU Migration Pact in its current form. Magyar himself has used the term ‘migrant camp’, while Amnesty International and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee explicitly urged Tisza in June to stop adopting Fidesz’s language on migration.
The resemblance also extends to power politics. Tisza used its two-thirds majority to impose an eight-year premiership limit counting service since 1990, effectively preventing Orbán from returning, then terminated President Tamás Sulyok’s mandate and introduced a retrospective 12-year cap on MPs. Helsinki and Amnesty criticized elements of the constitutional package, including limited consultation and aspects of the removal of office-holders. Restricted or single-bidder public procurements have meanwhile raised early questions about how complete the break with previous practices really is.
‘Calling the April election a repudiation of ‘Orbánism’ and a victory of liberal democracy may already be too sweeping’
Magyar’s communication style complicates Fukuyama’s Trump comparison further. His Facebook account published 1,918 posts over the past year, generating 2.77 billion impressions, with almost no external links, while as prime minister he has continued to spar directly with opponents, commentators, and journalists in social-media comment sections. Aggressive direct-to-voter communication, personalized attacks, bypassing traditional communication channels, and an often adversarial relationship with traditional media are methods much closer to Trump’s communication model than Fukuyama’s liberal-versus-populist distinction would suggest.
That tension cuts to Fukuyama’s larger intellectual legacy. His 1989 essay ‘The End of History?’ and 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man argued that liberal democracy had emerged as the strongest endpoint of ideological development after fascism and communism. Samuel Huntington answered almost immediately with No Exit: The Errors of Endism, warning that traditional cultures and civilizational divisions would persist.
Postliberal criticism goes further. Patrick Deneen argues in Why Liberalism Failed that liberalism is itself an ideology rather than humanity’s natural political destination, and that its success can erode the communal institutions on which it depends. Hungary may therefore have rejected Orbán. Whether it has rejected ‘Orbánism’—or merely recalibrated parts of it under a new leader—is considerably less clear.
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