On paper, everything Orb\u00e1n did was legal. Because he created the system that made it so. A democrat and liberal when the Soviet armies pulled back from the erstwhile East Europe in 1989, Orb\u00e1n\u2019s first stint as prime minister was from 1998 to 2002 but his return to power in 2010 had begun an era of democratic destruction through democratic institutions by capturing them\u2014from education to state TV to the judiciary to law enforcement, Orb\u00e1n filled nearly every institution and agency with party loyalists or people proclaiming fidelity to him. For example, Orb\u00e1n has staffed Hungary\u2019s Constitutional Court with loyalists with 12-year terms. Those judges and officials are still in office and, along with the presidency, have the power to delay and block new legislation. As academic Alberto Alemanno recently wrote in the\u00a0EU Observer: \u201cThe primary issue that EU leaders consistently overlook is that Orb\u00e1n did not just occupy Hungarian institutions. He legally rebuilt them to entrench his authority beyond the reach of elections. Experts call this \u2018constitutional hardball\u2019: the systematic use of formally legal instruments to make democratic reversal as difficult as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tisza may have won its two-thirds majority, but it won\u2019t be easy to reverse the democratic erasure of 16 years.<\/p>\n
It might actually be easier to restore basic civil rights like freedom of speech and action as well as political criticism, which had increasingly disappeared from the Hungarian public space under Orb\u00e1n. But Magyar is not yet trusted by the whole electorate, even many of those who voted to end Orb\u00e1n\u2019s reign. Magyar might find the two-pronged problem of bureaucratic and judicial obstruction and a re-democratised public sphere too much to handle. Voters would remember why they have voted for him: the corruption and authoritarianism of Fidesz, but more importantly, the economy.<\/p>\n
Russian gas was one of Orb\u00e1n\u2019s purported reasons for breaking with Brussels\u2014and he reneged on a \u20ac90bn loan for Ukraine\u2014even as EU members were trying to end their reliance on Russian energy imports. But Orb\u00e1n still oversaw an economic slowdown, which had stagnated by the time of Magyar\u2019s landslide win on Sunday. Growth was only 0.4 per cent in 2025 while food prices were 43 per cent higher, although the inflation after his friend Vladimir Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine\u2014Hungary had the highest in the EU at 17.1 per cent in 2023\u2014had cooled. Despite Hungarians\u2019 eroded freedoms and constricted lives, it was the economy that, in the end, sped up Orb\u00e1n\u2019s downfall.<\/p>\n
As for a Trump administration already furious with the US\u2019 EU partners and NATO allies, the incongruousness of a US vice president campaigning in a foreign election, asking people to choose sides, was perhaps grounded on another misreading of the situation. This time, it wasn\u2019t about overestimating the potential of public agency but underestimating public anger.<\/p>\n
To return to Brussels, the EU errs in relaxing as soon as an autocrat or a quasi-autocratic system is electorally defeated. In Poland, liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk finds himself gridlocked in a system that did not collapse with his electoral victory in 2023. The EU did not build a\u00a0process\u00a0that would ensure the reversal of privileges and networked institutions that continue to do the bidding of a party no longer in office. Alemanno warns: \u201cMagyar would inherit the full hardball architecture, and a defeated Orb\u00e1n would not be a neutralised Orb\u00e1n. Freed from governing constraints and backed by Russian resources and American political endorsement, Orb\u00e1n would have every incentive to use his deep state of loyalist judges and officials to obstruct a new government. Without external support, a Magyar administration could be paralysed before it can demonstrate that democratic governance works.\u201d<\/p>\n
Magyar has asked the European Commission to unblock \u20ac17 billion of funds frozen for corruption and lack of judicial independence. But the EU cannot make the mistake of releasing the money and sitting back. It must provide Magyar with the tools, an architectural framework, to reconstruct democracy in Hungary and to politically realign and morally reintegrate it with the EU.<\/p>\n
Failure to do that or a return to complacency would let Putin still have the last laugh. And JD Vance might get the idea that his trip to Budapest was not wasted after all.<\/p>\n
There was historical symbolism and irony in Magyar\u2019s camp celebrating in Batthy\u00e1ny Square in Buda\u2014the hillier, quieter, bourgeois half of the capital with its royal castle and all its history\u2014and Orb\u00e1n gathering his lot at the B\u00e1lna centre in Pest\u2014the cosmopolitan heart of modern Hungarian life, boasting 19th-century boulevards, the parliament, and all the nightlife. Tisza must own Pest where the future moved into almost two centuries ago, long before the cities were unified in 1873.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On paper, everything Orb\u00e1n did was legal. Because he created the system that made it so. A democrat…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[1105,1112,64,1108,1111,1115,1106,1110,1107,1103,1113,1104,1109,366,1114,371],"class_list":{"0":"post-1228","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-donald-tusk","8":"tag-constitutional-hardball","9":"tag-democratic-reform","10":"tag-donald-tusk","11":"tag-eu-backsliding","12":"tag-eu-funds","13":"tag-eu-hungary","14":"tag-fidesz","15":"tag-hungary-2026","16":"tag-hungary-democracy","17":"tag-hungary-elections","18":"tag-hungary-populism","19":"tag-illiberal-democracy","20":"tag-orban-system","21":"tag-peter-magyar","22":"tag-russian-influence","23":"tag-viktor-orban"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}