{"id":44432,"date":"2026-04-26T08:05:37","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T08:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/44432\/"},"modified":"2026-04-26T08:05:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T08:05:37","slug":"hungary-election-results-viktor-orban-concedes-defeat-and-congratulates-peter-magyar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/44432\/","title":{"rendered":"Hungary Election Results: Viktor Orban Concedes Defeat and Congratulates Peter Magyar"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, a lodestar for MAGA culture warriors and right-wing populists in Europe, conceded defeat on Sunday in a general election, breaking the momentum of a global nationalist revival promoted by President Trump.<\/p>\n

In a surprisingly early and gracious concession speech in Budapest, Mr. Orban congratulated the opposition saying, \u201cThe responsibility and opportunity to govern were not given to us.\u201d But, he also made a vow: \u201cWe are not giving up. Never, never, never.\u201d<\/p>\n

His defeat paves the way for Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist and the leader of the main opposition party, to take over as Hungary\u2019s prime minister once the newly elected Parliament meets.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have done it,\u201d Mr. Magyar told a cheering crowd gathered with flags on the bank of the River Danube. \u201cWe have liberated Hungary and have taken back our country.\u201d <\/p>\n

Sunday\u2019s vote was widely seen as showdown between friends and foes of liberal democracy, a cause that Mr. Orban has battled against for years to applause from his fans in the United States, Europe and Latin America. The race was closely watched by the Trump administration and the Kremlin, both of which wanted Mr. Orban to win and both of which offered support in his campaign.<\/p>\n

The implications of the outcome extend far beyond Hungary\u2019s borders. The next prime minister may help alter the course of the war in Ukraine, a neighbor that Mr. Orban has cast as an enemy of Hungary, and affect European security. And the results will be looked at by populists around the world who view the Hungarian leader as a model of success and of pugnacious defiance of the mainstream.<\/p>\n

After the results, large crowds of mostly young people thronged the banks of the River Danube in front of the Parliament Building, cheering and waving Hungarian flags. Many were stunned by the speed and scale of the defeat of Mr. Orban, whose party won the four previous elections easily.<\/p>\n

With 66 percent of votes counted, Mr. Magyar\u2019s opposition party was on course to win 137 seats \u2014 more than a two-thirds majority. Mr. Orban\u2019s party, Fidesz, was expected to win just 55.<\/p>\n

Shortly before polls closed, the electoral authorities said that more than 77 percent of registered voters had cast ballots, the highest turnout in a Hungarian election since the collapse of Communism in 1989 and the start of democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThank You Hungary!\u201d Mr. Magyar said in a brief message on Facebook, reporting that Mr. Orban had called to congratulate him.<\/p>\n

During his 16 years in power, Mr. Orban remade Hungary in his own image, eliminating many checks and balances by stacking the judicial system and nominally independent agencies with Fidesz loyalists, and taking control of most news media outlets. He also worked to export his model of \u201cilliberal democracy,\u201d promoting himself as an invincible guru for followers across Europe and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Sunday\u2019s election results are likely to disappoint Mr. Trump, who sent Vice President JD Vance to Budapest<\/a>, the Hungarian capital, last week to rally support for Mr. Orban in the final stretch of the campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love Viktor,\u201d said Mr. Trump, speaking by telephone from Washington to a gathering of Fidesz supporters in Budapest on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

But Mr. Orban\u2019s defeat will delight liberals and the European Union, which had increasingly come to view him as a disruptive menace. Before the results were known, Mr. Magyar noted that Election Day was the anniversary of a 2003 vote in favor of joining the European Union, a signal that he may move to end the Orban government\u2019s antagonism toward the bloc.<\/p>\n

Long a thorn in the side of E.U. officials in Brussels, Mr. Orban has consistently blocked European assistance to Ukraine, worked to water down sanctions on Russia and presented Ukraine, not Russia, as the principal threat to Europe\u2019s security.<\/p>\n

Those positions made him an invaluable ally for the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Putin, hoping to help Mr. Orban\u2019s chances in the election, assured him last month that Hungary could rely on steady deliveries of Russian oil and gas despite disruptions to global energy supplies caused by the war in Iran.<\/p>\n

Despite his country\u2019s small size and population of fewer than 10 million people, Mr. Orban, 62, has played an outsize role on the world stage<\/a>, inspiring and, in some cases, funding like-minded political forces abroad. He became the standard-bearer for right-wing politicians committed to \u201cfamily values\u201d and \u201cWestern civilization\u201d against what he has denounced as degenerate, multicultural liberals.<\/p>\n

While sharing some of Mr. Orban\u2019s views on the importance of national sovereignty and the dangers of \u201cwoke ideology,\u201d the opposition leader, Mr. Magyar, a lawmaker in the European Parliament and divorced father of three, won votes for Tisza by promising drastic change, though he was often vague on the specifics.<\/p>\n

On one issue he has been unequivocal. Mr. Magyar, 45, promised voters a clean break with the endemic corruption that has enriched the prime minister\u2019s family and friends and helped saddle Hungary with the slowest-growing economy in the region. Hungary, according to an annual ranking by Transparency International, is the most corrupt country in the European Union.<\/p>\n

Eager to reach beyond Budapest liberals, who have loathed Mr. Orban for years, Mr. Magyar stayed far away from issues dear to progressives like L.G.B.T. rights. He campaigned mainly on his biggest asset: he is not Viktor Orban. The prospect of change, no matter in what direction, underpinned much of his support.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want a change, I think we deserve a change,\u201d said Eva Kepesne Fekete, 51, who works at a McDonald\u2019s restaurant in Budapest. On her way to a polling station, she said she was tilting toward Tisza but was worried by reports in the media about a coming war if Mr. Orban lost.<\/p>\n

Fears of war, stoked relentlessly by television and other new media outlets controlled by Fidesz, loomed large for those who said they had voted for Mr. Orban\u2019s party.<\/p>\n

\u201cMagyar would drag Hungary into war,\u201d said a Roma woman who would give only her first name, Eniko, 67. \u201cI have two sons, and I don\u2019t want them to become soldiers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Orban grew increasingly strident during the campaign in his attacks on Ukraine\u2019s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Mr. Magyar tried to tap into nationalist sentiment by recalling Hungary\u2019s bitter history of bullying by Russia, which helped crush a liberal revolution in 1848 and an anti-Communist uprising in 1956.<\/p>\n

Kremlin propaganda amplified and in some cases inspired Fidesz campaign talking points, particularly the message that Mr. Zelensky posed a serious threat to Hungary, and that a loss for Mr. Orban in the election would bring conflict and sharply higher energy prices for Hungarian households.<\/p>\n

The outcome this weekend vindicated the credibility of pollsters, most of which had given Tisza a wide lead over Fidesz and predicted a crushing defeat for the governing party.<\/p>\n

The election also delivered a major blow to Europe\u2019s longest-serving government leader, and to those who look to him for inspiration and funding.<\/p>\n

Despite pressure from the European Union, whose rules he has persistently defied, Mr. Orban has been dogged in pursuing the goal he set in 2014 of \u201cconstructing in Hungary an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since then, Hungary has slid steadily down global rankings for personal and economic liberty, corruption and press freedom, becoming the first member of the European Union to drop from \u201cfree\u201d to \u201cpartly free\u201d in a 2019 ranking compiled by Freedom House.<\/p>\n

Hungary, under Fidesz, established a host of research centers and other bodies offering well-paid work to American and other foreign conservatives who say they have been discriminated against in their home countries because of their views. It also hosted an annual conference in Budapest of the U.S. Conservative Political Action Committee, a fiesta of \u201canti-woke\u201d speeches by right-wing politicians and pundits from around the world.<\/p>\n

Mr. Magyar, speaking in Budapest soon after polls closed, declared himself \u201ccautiously optimistic,\u201d despite what he said had been \u201cthousands of reports\u201d of election tampering.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven in the smallest township,\u201d he said, \u201cpeople have seen that this cruel, inhumane power is finished and Hungary will once again become a free country.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, a lodestar for MAGA culture warriors and right-wing populists in Europe, conceded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16416],"tags":[1065,307,939,18608,422,2783,14660,3591,11947,934,6938,13621,26371,329,25396,25397],"class_list":{"0":"post-44432","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-peter-magyar","8":"tag-elections","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european-union","11":"tag-fidesz-party","12":"tag-hungary","13":"tag-international-relations","14":"tag-magyar","15":"tag-orban","16":"tag-peter","17":"tag-peter-magyar","18":"tag-politics-and-government","19":"tag-polls-and-public-opinion","20":"tag-populism-theory-and-philosophy","21":"tag-russia","22":"tag-tisza-hungarian-political-party","23":"tag-viktor"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116469977857050876","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}