How an election loss by Hungary’s Orban would hit MAGA

OPINION:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has long cultivated the image of a leader who figured out how to game a democratic system for permanence. He has become a model for the populist right worldwide, so his potential loss in the April 12 election is significant.

It would resonate far beyond Hungary and provide a blueprint that the Democrats and others might find useful.

Mr. Orban has managed to make Hungary, a nation of about 10 million people, a focal point of the global populist right, attracting pilgrimages from the likes of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. The country even hosted its own Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022. President Trump has described Mr. Orban as “one of the most respected men.”

Since his current uninterrupted run began in 2010, Mr. Orban has changed the electoral system in his favor, defanged checks on power, captured the courts and media, and scrambled the national discourse via endless threats to national identity that, supposedly, only he can counter.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Orban seemed to capture something in the zeitgeist. He maintained popularity through new rules that artificially inflated his majority while courts and media got out of his way.

Mr. Orban’s crown jewel is a unique electoral feature called “winner’s compensation,” in which votes are cast for districts and a national party list and “surplus votes” — beyond what is needed for victory in districts — are transferred to the list. This inflates the winner’s share of parliament.

During the last election, in 2022, Mr. Orban faced inflation, economic strain and a unified opposition, yet he still won 54%. The system turned that into 70% of parliament.

He managed this, as well as partisan districting, without significant backlash. Tilting the media in his favor was presented as countering leftist bias. Enriching his childhood friends was spun as creating a “national capitalist class.”

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Now, according to polls, Mr. Orban is in trouble. The opposition Tisza party, led by former government insider Peter Magyar, recently had 50% support among decided voters, compared with 38% for Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party, according to Zavecz Research.

If this holds up, this campaign will offer lessons for anyone hoping to defeat populists in the future. The formula that will have worked is based on three elements: a legitimacy crisis, economic unease and a credible challenger in one’s own camp.

The needed puncturing of the regime’s moral authority came in 2024 when Mr. Orban, who trades on family values, made the mistake of engineering the presidential pardon of a man convicted in a child sexual abuse case

By then, Hungary’s economy was faltering as well, having failed to reach even 1% growth in successive years. The trouble also included billions of European Union funds frozen because of corruption within Mr. Orban’s circle.

The most crucial element has been a competent challenger emerging not from the left but from the disillusioned center-right: Peter Magyar, a defector from Mr. Orban’s orbit.

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Mr. Magyar’s rise highlights the futility of rallying masses around a stridently liberal flag. Previous Hungarian opposition movements leaned heavily on the rule of law, institutional checks and press freedom.

Those concerns are real, but Mr. Orban’s emotionally charged narratives about migration, war and national survival swept them aside.

Last year, Mr. Magyar embarked on a countrywide listening tour, visiting more than 300 towns and villages and talking to people about everyday grievances: hospital delays, failing services and rising costs. In some places, he was the first politician to appear in decades.

“We have no money,” lamented one voter. “I’m shaking with anxiety at the end of each month because I can’t afford food for my child. … We need change.”

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Mr. Magyar’s message seems light-years from Mr. Orban’s culture wars: better services, predictable and competent governance, a mended relationship with the EU. In an era saturated with identity battles and apocalyptic rhetoric, this may seem unglamorous, but it is politically potent.

Sidestepping identity politics prevents the populist right from leveraging the overreach of wokeness.

If Mr. Orban loses the April 12 election, it will show that even carefully fortified populist systems are vulnerable. Ironically, Mr. Orban’s “winner’s compensation” scheme could amplify a victorious Tisza’s parliamentary majority.

Even if Mr. Orban manages to hold on to power, his legitimacy is punctured, and broad support for him is crumbling, which could lead him to further escalate his autocracy. That could set this small but important European country on a path toward violent revolt.

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Hungary’s drama delivers a message to right-wing populists everywhere: Even the most talented among them cannot forever outrun the consequences.

• Lili Anna Lempek is a Hungarian journalist.