On Feb. 25, Hungary’s most reliable pollster delivered devastating news to Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Fidesz, the ruling party, was trailing opposition leader Peter Magyar’s Tisza party by 20 points—a seemingly insurmountable deficit only six weeks ahead of the general election on April 12.

Orban’s reaction was swift and extensive—and directed not at Magyar, but another political enemy. Almost immediately, he accused Ukraine of plotting an attack on Hungarian energy infrastructure and ramped up his publicly funded billboard campaign against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Slogans include “Don’t let Zelensky have the last laugh” and “Our message to Brussels: We won’t pay!”

The day before, on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, his government blocked the European Union’s $105 billion aid package to Ukraine, as well as new European sanctions against Russia. On March 6, he halted Hungarian fuel exports to Ukraine until it restores the full function of the Druzhba pipeline, which brings Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia via Ukrainian territory, although Kyiv argues Russia is responsible for damaging it.

On March 4, Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, directly negotiated with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the release of two dual-national Hungarian-Ukrainian prisoners of war, which Ukraine deemed “a gross violation of international humanitarian law” that undermines Ukraine’s own prisoner negotiations. Hungarian authorities also temporarily detained seven Ukrainian citizens and two armored cars that were carrying cash between the state banks of Austria and Ukraine, a routine procedure that Hungary, without evidence, portrayed as money laundering.

Taken together, it marked a clear escalation of Orban’s already rampant hate campaign against Ukraine and Zelensky. But if Magyar is indeed leading, why is Orban fighting Ukraine instead of him? Amid a brutal campaign against his most popular opponent yet, Orban’s answer may be simple: to steal the limelight from Magyar and recast the election as an existential threat from which he’s saving the nation—not a contest between a failing government and its ambitious challenger.

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Over his current 16-year tenure as prime minister, Orban has mastered the art of shadowboxing. Despite enjoying four consecutive supermajorities and therefore no substantial political opposition in parliament, Fidesz has been on a perpetual counterattack against an array of make-believe enemies. Undocumented immigrants, George Soros, the EU, the Democratic Party in the United States, LGBTQ+ activists, globalism, liberalism, “gender ideology,” and wokeness have allegedly all been out to destroy Hungarian families, if it weren’t for Orban’s heroism. Through public media, government billboards, and taxpayer-funded online mouthpieces, the Orban government has framed domestic political opposition as a puppet of these foreign forces, and electoral landslides followed.

This strategy reached its latest iteration four years ago, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine coincided with an intense general election campaign in Hungary. Fidesz was facing the joined forces of the liberal opposition, which appeared stronger in the polls than any singular party before. Through their extensive voter database and in-house pollsters, which have consistently kept Fidesz’s finger on the country’s pulse, Orban and his team found the message that people wanted to hear: Hungarians will not go to war for Ukraine.

In one respect, the message gelled with Hungarian historical sensibilities. In a nation that’s been on the losing end of practically every military conflict since the 17th century, peace and stability are powerful messages. It also played into the country’s quiet but widespread anti-Ukrainian sentiment, largely owed to the perception of mistreatment of the ethnic Hungarian population in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia oblast and pervasive cultural stereotypes about Ukrainian involvement in organized crime and smuggling. And it played perfectly into Orban’s foreign-policy long game: painting Russia as a favorable antipode to the West.

It turned out to be Fidesz’s most potent message to date. Portraying Fidesz as the peace party and the opposition as warmongers, Orban cruised to his largest election victory ever. In his victory speech, Orban called out both Brussels and Kyiv as among the conspiring forces that Hungary’s voters had bravely spurned.

But as the campaign ended, Fidesz’s bogeyman strategy could no longer hide the fact that Orban’s Hungary was collapsing. The war strained Europe’s already COVID-torn economies. It became clear that Hungary’s years of steady economic growth were propelled by the single market’s performance in the 2010s. By 2023, real wage growth stopped for the first time in a decade, energy and food prices skyrocketed, and public investments halted. Pre-election tax breaks, pension bonuses, minimum wage hikes, and price caps only worsened the inflation crisis. Of all EU countries, Hungary was hit the hardest, at a staggering 25 percent. At the same time, teachers went on strike for a pay raise, hospital wards closed due to understaffing, and railway services teetered on the brink of collapse, all thanks to decades of negligence. And as Hungarians were, for the first time under Orban’s reign, becoming increasingly worse off, they could no longer ignore the blatant enrichment of the prime minister’s family and business circles.

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A few months prior to the 2024 European and municipal elections, Magyar, a former Fidesz insider, turned his back on Orban, following public outrage that erupted after then-President (and Orban’s former minister for family affairs) Katalin Novak pardoned the deputy director of an orphanage, who was convicted of helping cover up child sexual abuse.

Orban could hardly stand up for his own record at the time, but he had a lot to say about Ukraine. Arguing that Russia could not be defeated, he shifted the blame to Kyiv for not agreeing to a cease-fire and continued to smear his opponents as pro-war Brusselites.

Magyar didn’t take the bait. He promised a shift in foreign policy—including a more cooperative political and economic relationship with the European Union, which has repeatedly threatened Hungary with sanctions during Orban’s tenure—but opposed both weapon deliveries to Ukraine and its fast-tracked entry into the EU and NATO. It was an acknowledgment that striking an unabashedly pro-Ukrainian tone would be unpopular among Hungarians—and yet they also still desired to belong to the West. That positioning rendered Orban’s smear campaign ineffective. Magyar’s fledgling political movement won nearly 30 percent of the vote for the European Parliament and a third of the seats in Budapest’s city assembly, setting up a showdown for this year’s parliamentary elections.

Magyar has risen steadily since, riding waves of public disenchantment about social services, corruption, and the economy. He dominates the news cycle by drawing attention to the shortcomings of a scandal-ridden regime. He has built an enthusiastic network of grassroots activists and stayed immune to Fidesz’s many smear campaigns by sheltering his personal life from politics and refusing to take sides on contentious issues, such as LGBTQ+ rights—much like how he’s sitting on the fence with Ukraine today.

At a glance, Fidesz seems desperate, running its third consecutive election campaign on anti-Ukrainian messaging. It has been the party’s only political product for the last four years. Tisza’s camp, on the other hand, seems firm, cohesive, and fresh. Magyar is excelling on the campaign trail, showing not just ambition, but a detailed political program and a government-in-waiting of Western-friendly technocrats.

Yet Orban’s strategy of demonizing Ukraine and constantly crying out Zelensky’s name—which has inspired an excellent parodic social media account—is proving effective.

Zelensky has long resisted the urge to respond to Orban’s rage-baiting, but in early March, he fell for it. In an interview with Corriere Della Sera, he pushed back on Orban’s claims that the Druzhba pipeline is actually intact and that Kyiv is sabotaging Hungary’s energy security. He added that he believed Orban would lose the election, at which time the two nations could restore relations. At a press briefing later that week, Zelensky said that he hoped that “one person” would not block the military loan to Ukraine. “Otherwise, we will give the address of this person to our armed forces, to our guys. Let them call him and speak with him in their own language,” he added.

Zelensky’s remarks drew ire from the European Commission. Even Magyar called on the Ukrainian president to take back his comments about Orban and reopen the pipeline. But his words had already given Orban long-needed political ammo.

Within just a few days, Fidesz rebuilt its entire campaign on the Ukrainian president’s threats against Orban. Orban posted a video of himself, on the verge of tears, calling his family members to ask if they were safe from “the Ukrainians.” His new strategy paraphrases U.S. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric: “They’re coming after you—and I’m just standing in their way,” as Orban argues that he’d been right about Ukraine all along—that the election was never about Fidesz or Tisza, but the nation’s survival against foreign forces.

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For the first time in what seems like ages in Hungarian politics, Orban is dominating the headlines again. Magyar’s ongoing campaign tour around the country has been overshadowed by Orban’s foreign-policy gamble. While it’s hard to imagine the Ukrainian hate campaign changing hearts in the Tisza base, which sees the election primarily as a referendum on Orban, it could be enough to mobilize Fidesz’s dormant supporters.

In any case, it’s a costly strategy to pursue. Magyar worries that Orban is setting up a Russian-style false-flag attack, making it look like Ukraine has attacked Hungary. The prime minister has ordered troops to 75 critical energy facilities, including Hungary’s only nuclear power plant, and local Fidesz chapters have begun assessing the state of shelters across the country. If there were any truth to a Ukrainian plot, Orban should have invoked NATO’s Article 4; he has not. But causing panic has historically worked well for Fidesz, and there are no lines that Orban won’t cross to stay in power.

Polls in the next few weeks will show if Orban’s master plan has worked. For now, Magyar remains in the lead, but each day Orban spends bashing Ukraine and isolating Europe puts Hungary’s next government in an increasingly difficult foreign-policy position.

If Orban stays in power, Hungary should expect grave challenges to maintain its position in the Western bloc, including challenges to its voting rights—or even membership—in the EU. If Magyar wins, his priority will be fixing problems at home. Doing so would require Hungary to quietly return to foreign-policy irrelevance. He promised that his first three trips as prime minister would be to Warsaw and Vienna to restore regional trust, then to Brussels to unlock Hungary’s frozen EU funds, which are blocked over rule-of-law breaches. While a detente in Hungarian-Ukrainian relations would be certain, building back the image of Hungary as a trustworthy international partner will take much more than a change in government.