{"id":71798,"date":"2026-05-15T01:43:37","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T01:43:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/71798\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T01:43:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T01:43:37","slug":"orbans-defeat-punctures-europes-far-right-but-also-offers-it-a-road-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/71798\/","title":{"rendered":"Orban\u2019s Defeat Punctures Europe\u2019s Far Right, but Also Offers It a Road Map"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vice President JD Vance wasn\u2019t the only right-wing ally whose last-minute pitch for Prime Minister Viktor Orban fell flat. In the weeks before Mr. Orban lost power in a landslide election on Sunday<\/a>, Hungary\u2019s faltering populist was also flanked on the campaign trail by far-right leaders from France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.<\/p>\n

Now, those politicians must reckon with the bruising defeat<\/a> of a man who was at once their leadership model, intellectual godfather and, in some cases, long-distance financier. What lessons they draw from his defeat could foretell whether the populist, far-right wave keeps rolling across Europe.<\/p>\n

With far-right parties in France, Britain and Germany all within striking distance of power<\/a>, Hungary offers a road map for how populist movements can go astray, said Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the Jean Jaur\u00e8s Foundation, a left-leaning think tank in Paris.<\/p>\n

Mr. Orban, he said, was brought down after 16 years in power by voters fed up with his government\u2019s corruption, inattention to the economy and ceaseless battles with the European Union. His coziness with President Trump, embodied by Mr. Vance\u2019s visit, did nothing to help and may have added to the backlash because of the unpopularity of the American-Israeli war on Iran and the resulting spike in energy costs.<\/p>\n

On that last point, there are signs that leaders are taking the lesson to heart. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, whose far-right pedigree and assiduous cultivation of Mr. Trump had earned her the reputation of \u201cTrump whisperer,\u201d broke openly with him this week, calling his criticism of Pope Leo XIV over the war \u201cunacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Meloni has also edged away from Mr. Trump on the war. She has joined more centrist European leaders, like President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, in preventing American war planes from using air bases on European soil as a springboard for offensive strikes on Iran.<\/p>\n

Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain\u2019s far-right party, Reform U.K., stumped for Mr. Trump during his three presidential campaigns and was a regular visitor to his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, hoping for a return endorsement.<\/p>\n

As it became clear how unpopular Mr. Trump has become in Britain, even among some Reform voters, Mr. Farage has gone, by his own description, from fast friend to chance acquaintance. \u201cI happen to know him,\u201d he told The Financial Times this week, \u201cbut that\u2019s by the by.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, in other ways, analysts said Europe\u2019s far-right parties remain vulnerable to the same failings that brought down Mr. Orban\u2019s Fidesz party.<\/p>\n

Mr. Farage\u2019s deputy leader, Richard Tice, has recently been caught up in allegations that his property company failed to pay adequate taxes (Mr. Tice has said the dispute is over a \u201ctechnicality.\u201d). A former leader of Reform in Wales was jailed last year for taking bribes in return for making favorable statements about Russia while he was a member of the European Parliament.<\/p>\n

\u201cFarage has to be really careful about corruption,\u201d said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, who follows the right. \u201cThat is a kind of Achilles\u2019 heel for him.\u201d<\/p>\n

In France, the leader of the far-right National Rally, Marine Le Pen, is appealing a conviction for embezzling from the European Parliament to fund her party\u2019s operations. Unless her appeal succeeds, she will be barred from running for president of France next year. Jordan Bardella, her prot\u00e9g\u00e9, is expected to run in her place.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would love for my country that they can learn a lesson from this, that they can change their behavior,\u201d Mr. Camus said of the National Rally. \u201cBut I fear they cannot. They do not have the imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Ms. Le Pen, the defeat of Mr. Orban deprives her not only of a stalwart ally but also of a potential source of funding. In 2022, at a time when Ms. Le Pen\u2019s last presidential campaign was in financial trouble, she obtained a loan of 10.7 million euros ($12.5 million) from a Hungarian bank part-owned by a friend of Mr. Orban\u2019s. Mr. Orban supported her after her conviction, and Ms. Le Pen linked arms with him before his defeat at what was billed as a rally of \u201cPatriots of Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Praising Mr. Orban as a \u201cvisionary and above all a pioneer,\u201d Ms. Le Pen said his victory would kick off a string of victories for far-right parties in France, Spain, Italy and Poland. That would deliver a cherished goal of the far right: an effective majority among members of the European Union, bringing a halt to what Ms. Le Pen views as the corrosive overreach of Brussels.<\/p>\n

But with Mr. Orban defeated, the National Rally instead faces growing scrutiny for what critics say is the lack of a credible economic plan, another weakness it shares with Hungary\u2019s Fidesz. At a time when the Iran war is worsening a cost-of-living crisis, economists doubt the party, known in France by its acronym, R.N., has the tools to deal with France\u2019s poor productivity and yawning deficit.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat, essentially, is the daily reality for voters,\u201d said Pascal Perrineau, an expert on the far right at Sciences Po, a university in Paris. \u201cAnd here, they see that the populists\u2019 promises have been for nothing \u2014 that Trump is failing in his fight against inflation, that Orban has failed in his fight against inflation, and that, tomorrow, the R.N. would fail in the fight against inflation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Bardella and Ms. Le Pen have tried to reposition the party to be more business friendly. She met for a private dinner with corporate bosses in Paris last week. A year before the presidential election, Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Bardella still lead all rivals in opinion polls.<\/p>\n

But a far-right victory no longer seems foreordained. A recent poll that pitted Mr. Bardella against the leading center-right candidate, \u00c9douard Philippe, in a runoff, found that Mr. Philippe led by 52 percent to 48 percent, the first time in several months that Mr. Bardella was not the front-runner.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have lost something really important,\u201d said Ben Ansell, a professor of comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford. \u201cThey have lost a sense of inevitability.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet Mr. Ansell noted that in France, Germany and other countries, far-right parties did still retain one conspicuous advantage: They are insurgents, running against entrenched political interests \u2014 the same dynamic that enabled the Hungarian challenger, Peter Magyar,<\/a> to topple Mr. Orban.<\/p>\n

In France, the departing president, Mr. Macron, is in his ninth year in office, the longest-serving current leader of a major European country. In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has cobbled together a familiar, and unwieldy, coalition of his center-right Christian Democratic Union with the center-left Social Democrats \u2014 the same two parties that have dominated German politics for decades.<\/p>\n

That gives the German far-right party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, a rich target for its crusade against politics as usual. Some analysts offered a contrarian take: While the AfD, like its right-wing brethren, allied itself with Mr. Orban, the party could use the defeat of a longstanding incumbent to inspire German voters to vote out their own incumbents. For the AfD\u2019s base, among disaffected voters in eastern Germany, it might even carry an echo of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey will latch on to whatever narrative is convenient,\u201d said Constanze Stelzenm\u00fcller, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington. \u201cIf they have to, they will latch on to the idea of being the last of the Mohicans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ana Castelain contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vice President JD Vance wasn\u2019t the only right-wing ally whose last-minute pitch for Prime Minister Viktor Orban fell…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[41235,307,245,422,41236,30025,41237,3591,25397,350],"class_list":{"0":"post-71798","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-viktor-orban","8":"tag-bardella","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-france","11":"tag-hungary","12":"tag-jordan-1995","13":"tag-le-pen","14":"tag-marine","15":"tag-orban","16":"tag-viktor","17":"tag-viktor-orban"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116576059739744554","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71798","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=71798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}