Orbán's Parting Gift to Brussels

Orbán spent 16 years making himself the EU’s biggest problem. His legacy, it turns out, is an opposition equipped with a supermajority to dismantle everything that he built – if they choose to. Last Sunday, Péter Magyar's insurgent Tisza party got the mandate to re-wire the state Viktor Orbán had consolidated around himself. For the EU, the implications of this election are immediate, and for once are in Brussels’ favour.

The most relevant and urgent consequence is that the €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine can finally move, cynically blocked by Budapest in March despite Orbán’s endorsement last December. The €17bn of allocated EU funds for Hungary, nearly 10% of its GDP, which were frozen over rule-of-law concerns, may also be back on the table. Magyar has said that he can unlock them within a month, and Brussels has the incentive to move fast. Hungary needs the money, and Brussels the reforms. 

Beyond the immediate money, the structural consequence will outlast any individual policy. The EU foreign policy unanimity requirement has stifled efforts to sanction Russia and provide Ukraine with aid. Under Fidesz a single Budapest veto was enough to hold the foreign policy of nearly half a billion people to ransom. This asymmetric power has ended, and with this Hungary’s function as a Russian veto within Brussels.

Magyar is not a liberal. This election could be used as a case study for advocates of the median voter theory: take a candidate just to the left of Orbán and watch as the votes follow. While this analysis would be shallow, Hungary will change its structures but not its soul. Tisza focussed its campaign on Fidesz corruption and rebuilding a relationship with Europe, not huge social reforms or hawkish policies on Ukraine. Tisza’s actions in the EU Parliament make this point clear, abstaining on amendments strengthening language on Kyiv. A charitable reading is that it was caution over conviction, but Sunday was a vote against Orbán and his corruption, not a vote for a fundamentally different, liberal, society.

To see what comes next, Poland is the obvious political comparison. Like Hungary, the country rejected the incumbent Law and Justice party in 2023 and the mood was similar: a dominant-party government rejected after years of democratic backsliding and a return to cooperative EU politics. Yet three years on, Poland’s PM, Donald Tusk, is still fighting against PiS controlled institutions. The energy and optimism from his victory has faded fighting against an entrenched state and constitutional court.

However, Hungary has an ace up their sleeve, their supermajority. The same tool Orbán used to gerrymander districts, enrich his allies, and capture the media can be used to reverse them. Such was the magnitude of Magyar’s win – Tisza now holds 137 of the 199 seats in the National Assembly over the two-thirds threshold to make constitutional changes. Despite facing deeper political entrenchment in Hungary Magyar has the tools to reverse the change that Tusk simply does not.

That mandate was not handed to Magyar. It was delivered in spite of everything thrown against him. JD Vance flew into Budapest days before the vote to join Orbán in a rally. Trump posted that he was ready to put the US’s economic might behind his campaign. Meanwhile, Russia was also working for a favourable outcome. The foreign intelligence service was reportedly staging a fake assassination attempt on Orbán to boost his popularity. 

Walking through Budapest in the run-up to the election you would have thought Zelensky or Von der Leyen were the candidates if you looked at the campaign posters, such was the extent of the efforts to link them to Péter Magyar. For the US Orbán was the symbol of right-wing nationalism, for Russia he was the linchpin in preventing substantial EU support for Ukraine. Both sides needed him to win.

He lost by seventeen points.

The assumption in Washington's and Moscow's interventions was that they had the might to overturn Hungarian public opinion. The drift towards right-wing populism is not irreversible despite American endorsements and Russian interference although Fidesz's attempt at state capture did come very close.

Orbán’s mistake, in the end, was the same one autocrats make again and again: confusing the architecture of power with power itself. He built a system so resistant to change that dismantling it required a supermajority. He then governed so badly that he delivered one. The frozen funds, the Russian entanglement, the rampant corruption of Orbán’s best friend, the former gas fitter, becoming the richest man in the country. This was his political project and Hungarians rejected it.

What the EU gets is a cooperative partner and an unblocked veto. What it does not get is a transformed Hungary. Magyar’s limits are genuine, from Ukraine to migration but he has the ability to choose what comes next for Hungary and the EU.

Orbán built the trap. Magyar walked through it. The parting gift – a supermajority never meant to be given.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/© European Union, 1998 - 2026 Licence.

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