Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary was for years Europe\u2019s pre-eminent political wizard, a leader endowed with uncanny insight into his people\u2019s desires and fears and the ability to steer political tides.<\/p>\n
He won four thumping election victories in a row \u2014 more than any other current European Union leader \u2014 and declared liberal democracy pass\u00e9 long before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia pronounced it finished<\/a>, in 2019, or President Trump first won the White House<\/a>, in 2016.<\/p>\n On Sunday, it became clear that Mr. Orban had lost his magic<\/a>.<\/p>\n Peter Magyar, the opposition leader whose Tisza party scored a crushing victory in Hungary\u2019s general election, told cheering crowds that they had ushered in \u201cregime change.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou have worked a miracle,\u201d he said. \u201cHungary has written history.\u201d<\/p>\n What had really happened, however, was that Mr. Orban had failed to rewrite a basic rule of politics, particularly for populists: You have to be popular to win elections.<\/p>\n The result on Sunday did not represent an ideological earthquake or a sudden swerve among Hungarians from right to left, but rather something highly personal. Voters toppled a strongman leader who, increasingly cocooned in the flattery of sycophants and the praise of a sprawling propaganda machine<\/a>, had lost his touch.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fall of the Orban regime feels as sudden and cataclysmic as the collapse of communism in 1989,\u201d said Imre Karacs, a veteran journalist who covered the unraveling of communist governments at that time.<\/p>\n \u201cBut both events seemed inevitable to people who dared to believe,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Mr. Orban\u2019s spell was broken by Mr. Magyar, a conservative former Orban loyalist who shares many of the departing prime minister\u2019s views on matters like immigration. But Mr. Magyar offered a less pugnacious, less divisive style, promising a \u201chumane\u201d Hungary at peace with itself and the European Union.<\/p>\n Tisza won 138 seats in Parliament \u2014 more than two-thirds of the total \u2014 and left Mr. Orban\u2019s Fidesz party a shellshocked rump with just 55. The win delivered a slap in the face to President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and right-wing Europeans like Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, all of whom had enthusiastically endorsed Mr. Orban and jumped into Hungary\u2019s election campaign on his behalf.<\/p>\n In the end, Hungary\u2019s pioneer of right-wing populism stopped being popular. The same had happened earlier to Janez Jansa, a three-time prime minister in Slovenia and a fervent admirer of Mr. Orban who in 2022 lost a parliamentary election<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mr. Orban and other right-wing populists who have floundered in office ignored the Russian maxim that politics always involves tension between \u201cthe television\u201d \u2014 propaganda \u2014 and \u201cthe refrigerator\u201d \u2014 people\u2019s lived reality.<\/p>\n It was a message reinforced on Monday by Mr. Magyar, who said \u201cfor years, Viktor Orban has paid no attention to the problems affecting Hungarians.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe have never heard him speak about health care, education or cost-of-living issues,\u201d he said. \u201cHe was playing a kind of five-dimensional chess game. And this, among other things, was likely one of the reasons for his defeat.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Orban put all his chips on the television, deploying a vast apparatus of Fidesz-friendly media outlets to vilify his opponents. Mr. Magyar was variously presented as a crook, as a Ukrainian puppet, as a sex maniac with a taste for teenagers and as an abusive husband, while President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was demonized as an existential menace who would bring war to Hungary if Mr. Magyar won.<\/p>\n After Mr. Orban\u2019s landslide election victory in 2022, he promised a \u201cgolden age\u201d for Hungary\u2019s economy. But, deformed by corruption,<\/a> the country tipped into recession. Although slightly less sickly now, Hungary still has the slowest growth in the region. Unemployment is at a 10-year high.<\/p>\n \u201cThe gap between the television and the fridge becomes unbridgeable,\u201d said David Pressman, a former U.S. ambassador to Hungary under the Biden administration and a frequent target for Mr. Orban\u2019s propaganda machine.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is only so much propaganda can do when a citizen cannot get medical care in a hospital but knows their prime minister has exotic animals roaming a palatial countryside estate,\u201d he said. That was a reference to opposition accusations<\/a> that Mr. Orban\u2019s family had stocked a vast country estate it owns west of Budapest with zebras.<\/p>\n Even some of those sympathetic to Mr. Orban had voiced dismay before the election that he was paying so little attention to the economic woes of ordinary Hungarians, including dilapidated schools and hospitals without toilet paper. At a panel discussion last week organized by the Danube Institute, one of a galaxy of government-funded think tanks set up to sing Mr. Orban\u2019s praises, premonitions of the approaching defeat filled the room.<\/p>\n John Fund, a writer for National Review, complained that Mr. Orban was \u201cfighting the last war,\u201d referring to the 2022 election campaign, which Fidesz won by stoking fears that Hungary would be dragged into the Ukraine war if Mr. Orban was not in charge.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not what most people will be voting on. They will be voting on whether their lives will get better,\u201d Mr. Fund said. \u201cThe average Hungarian has been standing still.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Orban blamed Hungary\u2019s economic troubles on Ukraine and the European Union, as did Mr. Vance, who visited Budapest last week<\/a> in a last-ditch effort to lift the Hungarian leader\u2019s fortunes. \u201cBrussels bureaucrats,\u201d Mr. Vance said, standing next to Mr. Orban, had \u201ctried to destroy the Hungarian economy\u201d to sway the election on Sunday \u201cbecause they hate this guy.\u201d<\/p>\n Most officials in Brussels and European leaders didn\u2019t like Mr. Orban, but the bigger problem was that neither did many Hungarian voters, including onetime supporters who tired of his fear mongering about Ukraine and who grew frustrated by the country\u2019s grandiose corruption \u2014 the worst in the European Union, according to Transparency International<\/a> \u2014 and by his claims that life was getting ever better.<\/p>\n For many voters, Mr. Magyar\u2019s biggest asset was not his policies on education, health care or the European Union, which he never elaborated on in any detail, but that he was not Mr. Orban.<\/p>\n Referring to Mr. Orban, Benedek Szabo, 39, a musician, said, \u201cI can\u2019t believe he\u2019s going. Sixteen years! I thought it would never end but everything happened so suddenly.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOrban grabbed all the power but everything fell apart,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Mr. Orban even had what some called a \u201cCeausescu moment,\u201d a reference to December 1989, when the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu realized in disbelief that a crowd gathered to cheer him was actually booing. Opposition-friendly news media published photographs and videos of Mr. Orban looking stunned \u2014 and then very angry \u2014 when people started booing him at a campaign rally in the western city of Gyor.<\/p>\n Mr. Orban was never a dictator \u2014 he conceded defeat on Sunday with grace and dignity \u2014 but he did undermine democratic norms.<\/p>\n During his 16 years in power, he 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 outlets. In 2014, he gave this construct a name: \u201can illiberal state, a non-liberal state.\u201d<\/p>\n