It isn’t every day that one is invited to a regime change party. But there it was on my phone on May 8, while I was traveling in Hungary. “Come along,” Péter Magyar, who was about to become the country’s new prime minister, beckoned on social media. “We will step through the gateway of regime change with a huge party.” The next day in Budapest’s Kossuth Square, opposite the Parliament building, tens of thousands of Hungarians, young and old, stared in jubilation and disbelief at the giant screens streaming the inaugural ceremonies taking place inside. Although myriad supporters of Viktor Orbán, the longtime Hungarian strongman, and his Fidesz party were doubtless looking on in anger at the festivities—the high point of which may have been the wild cheers when the flag of the EU, Orbán’s favorite bogeyman, was raised outside Parliament for the first time since 2014—there appeared to be none in sight.

The joyous if relatively restrained gathering was the culmination of the riotous nationwide celebrations that had broken out on the evening of April 12, when the results of the parliamentary elections came in. Magyar’s party, Tisza, won nearly 3.4 million votes, more than any party in the history of post-Communist Hungary, as well as the largest-ever proportion of seats in the National Assembly—141 out of 199. This supermajority will enable Magyar and his allies to undo the changes his authoritarian predecessor made to the constitution and to remove the officials he appointed after he won his first supermajority in 2010. They intend to draw the curtain on the sixteen-year Orbán era.

“I think I will never forget the hopeful atmosphere in the country before the elections and the happiness that everyone felt when Tisza won,” Anna Leonora Molnar, a nineteen-year-old architecture student from Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city, in the east of the country—historically a Fidesz stronghold—told me. She was in Budapest that night. “People were dancing and singing. It really feels like we are living through a historic moment.” Molnar’s mother, a longtime Fidesz supporter, was not celebrating. “She was afraid of the change,” Molnar said. “I think that there were many people like her who couldn’t imagine any other government, because Fidesz had been in power for so long.”

In Debrecen, Fidesz’s share of the vote plummeted from 52 percent in the 2022 election to 34 percent, a pattern that was repeated in dozens of other Hungarian towns and cities. Although the polls had been predicting that the forty-five-year-old Magyar, a Fidesz defector who broke with Orbán after the child abuse scandal that rocked the party in 2024, would win, the size of his victory was a surprise to most. So was the speed with which Orbán calmly acknowledged the “painful but unambiguous” result a few hours after the polls had closed, after approximately half the votes had been counted—and the fact that he conceded at all. “I was sure that Orbán would contest the vote and not acknowledge Tisza’s win,” said Molnar. “Fidesz had repeatedly said that they expected a victory and that the polls predicting otherwise were fake.”

Orbán called his opponent to congratulate him—another surprise. Bálint Fabók, a journalist at Telex, one of the few independent news services that was able to operate during the Orbán era, told me:

Orbán tends to talk in a derogatory way about his political rivals, and he did the same with Magyar, who he liked to call a puppet of Brussels and refused to debate. I did not expect Orbán to congratulate him on the phone, no less before the official results were in, but he did.

A last-minute blitz by Orbán’s well-oiled media machine, including a grisly AI-generated video showing the execution of a squad of captured Hungarian soldiers whom an imagined future Tisza government had sent to fight in Ukraine—part of Fidesz’s four-year campaign to instill fear and paranoia around the purported Ukrainian threat—reportedly alienated many voters.¹ A carpetbag visit by US vice-president J.D. Vance, whom President Donald Trump had dispatched to support his ally, doesn’t seem to have helped the Orbánist cause either. “Will you stand for Western civilization?” Vance asked a crowd of Fidesz supporters at a Budapest sports arena as Orbán nervously stood by.

Will you stand for freedom, for truth, and for the God of our fathers?! Then, my friends, go to the polls in the weekend. Stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you and he stands for all these things.

Hungarians went to the polls in record numbers on April 12—the turnout was nearly 80 percent, the highest ever recorded in a post-Communist Hungarian election. They were tired of Viktor Orbán. In the end, Magyar’s win was too big to deny.

“I was very surprised at Tisza’s victory,” said Luis García Prado, the author of Budapest Twilight: Hungary in the Time of Orbán (2022), a memoir of the first dozen years of Orbán’s so-called soft autocracy, “and even more at the size of the victory.” Prado, a Spaniard who moved to Budapest in 2016, told me:

I had become convinced that Orbán would not let it happen, because he had the tools to do so, including a clear path to staying in power in the case of a narrow Tisza victory, either “legally” via the electoral system which he had gerrymandered to death over the years, giving Fidesz a parliamentary victory even with fewer votes than Tisza. Or, more likely, I figured that Tisza would get to form a new government but would be prevented from governing because of the obstruction of the institutions Orbán left in place, triggering new elections.

Some of Orbán’s associates reportedly had been planning to contest the results, but Michael Ignatieff, the rector emeritus of Central European University, which was based in Budapest before the regime forced it to relocate to Vienna, pointed out that “Orbán ran an authoritarian populist regime, not a totalitarian police state, so he didn’t have the police resources to control Budapest if he had contested a clear defeat.”

András Körösényi, a political scientist at ELTE university in Budapest and a coauthor of The Orbán Regime: Plebiscitary Leader Democracy in the Making (2020), was also surprised:

Based on the opinion polls and the changing mood of the country, a victory for the Tisza Party had been expected. I expected it as well. The main uncertainty concerned the scale of the anticipated victory. However, Tisza Party’s constitutional supermajority, far exceeding the two-thirds threshold, was greater than most anticipated. It was a landslide victory for Péter Magyar.

One of those savoring the end of the Orbán era was Zoltán Bretter, a professor of philosophy at the University of Pécs. Bretter served in the first post-Communist Hungarian Parliament from 1990 to 1998, a period that spans the fall of the Communist regime and the introduction of liberal democracy, including free elections, the Constitutional Court, and freedom of the press, under a shaky center-right coalition led by József Antall, and the failure of its mixed market policies; the Ostalgie-powered return to government of the Hungarian Socialist Party under Gyula Horn four years later in 1994 and the mixed success of his “reformed socialist” policies; then the election in 1998 of Orbán, who was ousted in 2002. “This revolution,” Bretter emphasized when we met, referring to this spring’s uprising, “is the continuation of the first revolution.”

“2026 is the real 1989,” is the way Ignatieff put it.

You can’t have democracy without democrats, and Hungary had too few of them before 1989. Victory this time will create a lot of democrats, people who feel that for the first time the future of the country is in their hands.

The new revolution is also a young people’s revolution, Bretter emphasized. He showed me a photo of three of the estimated 100,000 Hungarians who gathered at Budapest’s Heroes’ Square on March 15, the anniversary of the 1848 revolution, to hear Magyar’s final campaign speech. They were excitedly waving large Hungarian flags. “You see that fellow?” Bretter asked, pointing at the photo. That, he proudly said, was his twenty-two-year-old son, Erik, a student at ELTE university.

No doubt Hungary is going through a historic moment, as Anna Molnar put it. But is it accurate to call it a revolution? After all, Orbán was toppled in a democratic election, which he respected, however reluctantly. “Absolutely,” responds Bretter’s colleague István Tarrósy, a professor of political science at the University of Pécs.

I taught the core course on political culture in the political science program for twenty years, and I always underscored that there is an important element in any regime change: the psychological dimension, how people live the change and how they participate in it. Participation is crucial here. In 1989 the majority of society passively participated, as it had been doing during the era of ‘Daddy’ János Kádár.

Kádár was the Hungarian Communist official who was selected to replace Imre Nagy after the abortive 1956 revolt and who governed the country for thirty-two years in a relatively moderate way, compared to the other Warsaw Pact countries—after he ordered Nagy’s execution. “Goulash communism,” Kádár’s rule was called, because of its mix of orthodox communism, capitalist practices, and consumer freedoms.

“The 1989 revolution was a top-down revolution,” Tarrósy continued.

People didn’t feel that they changed the system. It was negotiated over their heads. However, with the April 12 election and the events leading up to it, all things point in the direction that people actively participated in the change. They feel it. They enjoy it. They can see that this is, finally, democracy.

“Magyar’s electoral victory was overwhelming,” agrees András Körösényi,

not only because of the number of votes he got, but in its political impact. The public mood changed immediately and the power pillars supporting the Orbán regime have already begun to erode. Orbán’s fall as a political leader now appears final.

Orbán seemed to acknowledge this himself by not taking his seat in Parliament.

Now that Magyar has won, will he and his team manage to build a stable, functioning republic and pull Hungary out of Russia’s orbit and back into the European democratic community? And what will become of all the apparatchiks who toiled for Orbán, including the droves of media workers who promoted the messianic, nationalist, xenophobic Fidesz message?

Orbán set out to methodically destroy Hungary’s nascent free press when he returned to power with a vengeance in 2010 after his first term in 1998–2002, much as Trump did when he returned to the White House last year. He gradually replaced it with perhaps the most important pillar of his rule: a state-controlled media empire. Yet Gábor Polyák, a professor of media theory and history at ELTE, says that he is hesitant to use the Hungarian case as a possible model for how another authoritarian-minded leader could smother a country’s free press.

“Orbán’s system emerged under highly specific circumstances at the height of the 2008 global fiscal crisis, which hit the Hungarian economy harder than most,” he points out.

In the media market this triggered a mass exodus of foreign investors not just from Hungary. This vacated immense space in the market, laying the groundwork for various media outlets that were previously foreign owned, like the regional newspapers, to be vacuumed up by Orbán allies. At the same time, Orbán used his constitution-amending supermajority, not only to reshape the media landscape but also to overhaul the Constitutional Court, the judiciary, the prosecutor’s office, and the entire state apparatus that was meant to protect media freedom.

Polyák enumerated four turning points in Orbán’s corrosion of the free press. The first was the passage of the infamous 2010 media laws, which articulated Orbán’s vision of a tightly controlled media apparatus intolerant of dissent. The next, a period that extended from 2010 through 2015, began with Orbán’s decision to entrust the consolidation of the Fidesz media apparatus to a single oligarch, Lajos Simicska. “It was Simicska who pioneered the channeling of state funds into ostensibly private media outlets to enable the dissemination of Fidesz’s political message,” said Polyák.

This transitional period ended in 2014, after Orbán won his second consecutive term, when he and Simicska had a bitter and public falling-out, forcing the Hungarian leader to devise an entirely new ownership structure with a new set of compliant owners, which proved that the system was resilient and no longer dependent on any individual—except him.

The next turning point in the construction of Orbán’s media empire occurred in 2018, after his third consecutive electoral victory: the creation of the monolithic Central European Press Foundation (KESMA), to which the owners of nearly five hundred media outlets surrendered them. Now Orbán no longer had to worry about interference from his oligarch friends. After he set up KESMA, they all depended on him personally, allowing him to merge the entire media empire into a single entity. “This move, which coincided with the consolidation of 70 percent of Hungarian colleges and universities into a network of foundations, also run by his cronies, was the highwater mark of the Orbán regime’s confidence,” said Polyák.

The cherry on Orbán’s media cake, so to speak, came two years later in 2020, with the launch of the aptly named Megafon, a network of political influencers financed by vast sums of taxpayer money to spread the Fidesz message via social media. Orbán had effectively consolidated most of the legacy and social media outlets into a federal Ministry of Truth, paving the way for Fidesz’s fourth and largest electoral victory in the spring 2022 parliamentary elections. What could go wrong?

Budapest Twilight, Luis Prado’s downbeat chronicle of the first dozen years of the Orbán era, could well be subtitled Requiem for a Democracy. The introduction to a sequel covering his final, scandal-ridden term after his “resounding victory over the opposition in the 2022 general election,” Prado said, might begin something like this:

Orbán enjoyed untrammeled power, basking in his success and achieving a true feat of political black magic when he oversaw the fall of Hungary’s stagnant economy into a deep recession while succeeding in keeping his personal popularity intact. But with success comes pride, and with pride the fall. The Orbán regime became complacent and began making a series of blatant unforced errors.

The first was the pardons issued by President Katalin Novák, an Orbán ally, in the spring of 2023, including of a far-right terrorist, György Budaházy, who had been convicted of a number of violent offenses and was allowed to flamboyantly leave prison on horseback. Another, and the final turning point in the rise and fall of Orbán’s media machine, said Polyák, was the drafting in 2024 of a “transparency” act that was designed to completely cripple independent media and any critical voices or groups labeled agents of foreign interests by cutting off all their revenue streams, much as Orbán’s friend Vladimir Putin and his flunkies have done in Russia. The act was shelved after a public outcry, but it confirmed the Putinist direction in which Orbán wanted to take Hungary if he won again.

Yet it was the long-running child abuse scandal that ultimately broke the regime. In February 2024 it emerged that Novák had also pardoned a man convicted of covering up serial child abuse at the Bicske state children’s home. Orbán tried to avoid becoming tainted by the scandal by hastily promulgating a constitutional amendment forbidding the government from granting pardons to criminals whose victims were minors, but as soon as the embattled prime minister saw that this was not enough to mollify the public, he pressured the top female members of his government, Novák and Judit Varga, the former justice minister—who is Magyar’s ex-wife and was set to head the Fidesz list for the 2024 elections for the European Parliament—to humiliatingly resign, creating more furor. The scandal also opened the door, finally, to a credible challenger.

“Péter Magyar was a black swan,” said András Körösényi. Magyar is the scion of a prominent Hungarian family. His grandfather Pál Erőss was a judge who presided over a popular television program. His great-uncle and great-aunt Ferenc and Dalma Mádl, who were also his godparents, served as president and first lady of Hungary from 2000 to 2005, a period that overlapped with Orbán’s first term as prime minister. Magyar, who is said to have hung a poster of Orbán in his bedroom as a high school student, first emerged on the political scene when he offered legal assistance to Fidesz activists during the 2006 protests, which were sparked by the leak of a private speech in which then prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány confessed that his government had lied to win that year’s election.

Those protests followed Orbán’s shocking loss and ejection from power in the 2002 election, which prompted his turn to the right before his triumphant return to power in 2010. Magyar was rewarded for his loyalty with a series of midlevel posts, including manager of the EU Legal Directorate of the state-owned MBH Bank in 2018 and ultimately CEO of the Student Loan Center. In this last position, Magyar claimed in February 2024, in his first widely watched interview with the independent online channel Partizán, that he had been pressured to sign grossly inflated contracts with companies tied to Orbán’s cronies. The following month, he elaborated on his break from Fidesz on Facebook, declaring that the past few years had convinced him that his former hero’s professed vision of a “nationalist sovereign bourgeois Hungary” was in fact a fraud and that “a few families own the country.”

Next the new rebel set his sights on the forthcoming 2024 elections for the European Parliament. His first move was to join Tisza, then a minor party. That turned out to be an inspired choice because of the many associations the name evokes for Hungarians. The Tisza, Hungary’s second most important river after the Danube, bypasses Budapest, the home of the liberal elite Orbán was fond of attacking, and crosses the entire country. It is celebrated in a famous poem by Sándor Petőfi, Hungary’s national poet and one of the major figures of the 1848 revolution, whose most famous line is “The flood, the flood is coming!” During the European Parliament campaign Magyar held a series of demonstrations and marches in which he revealed his oratorical talents and his gift for connecting with people. “The flood, the flood is coming!” his listeners chanted.

Observers were surprised when the upstart party won 30 percent of the vote and Magyar, now its leader, took his seat in Brussels. So was Viktor Orbán, who reluctantly shook the apostate’s hand at the European Parliament. Suddenly forward-looking Hungarians, who had lost faith in the main liberal/left opposition parties, had a serious alternative. Next Tisza and Magyar set their sights on the 2026 Hungarian parliamentary elections.

“In 2015,” recalled Ignatieff,

I was asked what it would take to defeat Orbán and replied that a leader would have to get out of Budapest and its cafés and go out on a rainy Thursday night to a small hotel or sports hall in the countryside and take the villages and small towns away from Orbán simply by showing up over and over again for two years. And that’s what he did.

The malignant Fidesz media machine kept firing away at Magyar, but he was able to preempt its blows. In February he learned that Fidesz was planning to blackmail him by releasing a video of an “intimate moment with my then-girlfriend,” which it had secretly recorded. “Yes, I am a 45-year-old man; I have a sex life. With an adult partner,” he declared on X. “Dear Fidesz cowards, go ahead and bring out everything.” The video, if it existed, was never released. While Orbán’s campaign revolved around foreign policy and his growing stature as a transatlantic populist avatar, Magyar’s was rigidly focused on domestic issues, particularly the country’s stagnant economy and declining public services, while emphasizing traditional conservative values, thereby co-opting the Fidesz platform.

More and more people appeared at his rallies. The flood was coming. At the March 15 rally, Magyar, dressed in a traditional Bocskai suit, took a symbolic oath together with his supporters, stating that he was ready to lead. One of the enthusiastic attendees was Zoltán Bretter’s flag-waving son, Erik, who told me:

The revolution is real. I was there. I saw and experienced the hundreds of thousands of people who came that day, hoping that after 178 years we can have free media and not government-funded propaganda factories.

Since his election Magyar has moved swiftly to realize his vision of a new, humane, democratic government and society. His inaugural speech, in which he apologized to everyone who had been marginalized or persecuted by his predecessor and promised to rule in the name of all Hungarians, was widely praised. He had already made it clear that he was in no mood to absolve Orbán’s media enforcers. On April 15, three days after the elections, the prime minister–elect took the occasion of his first postelection appearance on Duna, the state television channel, to announce that he was summarily suspending it:

MAGYAR: Hungarian people are financing a propaganda machine with their own taxes.

HOST: Public television operates under media law. Are you saying you would abolish it?

MAGYAR: I am saying that this system cannot continue in its current form.

HOST: Critics say that you are threatening journalists who disagree with you.

MAGYAR: That is false. Journalists should be free.

HOST: Then why speak about shutting institutions [like Duna] down?

MAGYAR: Because institutions captured by party power are not free media.

HOST: Will staff lose their jobs?

MAGYAR: People who knowingly participated in disinformation should not expect consequences to disappear overnight.

HOST: That sounds like political punishment.

MAGYAR: No, political punishment is what exists now.

Magyar vowed that he would replace the state media with a newly created independent broadcasting system, which would be open to the views of the opposition, unlike its predecessor. On June 23 the new Tisza supermajority in Parliament did just that, abolishing Duna and establishing a new public media system by a vote of 145 in favor and 39 of the opposition Fidesz members against.

Meanwhile, he and his cabinet are doing their best to recover the lucre Orbán steered to his cronies and sham foundations and think tanks. One of the new administration’s first moves was to terminate the $846 million state contract the Fidesz regime had signed with the Élvonal Research and Talent Development Foundation, headed by Orbán’s friend Ferenc Krausz, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist, as well as to demand that the $72 million already disbursed to Élvonal be returned. Magyar’s most signal success took place on May 29, when he reached an agreement with the European Commission to release the 16.4 billion euros allocated to Hungary that the EU had frozen because of its concerns about the Orbán regime’s corruption. There have also been a number of arrests of high-level Fidesz officials, including Rádi Feríz, a prominent party leader in Szeged who was detained at the Budapest airport while attempting to flee the country. No doubt there will be more arrests to come.

Magyar underlined the point in a fiery address to Parliament on June 22. “We will free the country from the economic and political mafia,” he declared, and he repeated his vow to remove President Tamás Sulyok as well as the head of the country’s Constitutional Court and several of its other judges. “I consider this my main task.” He also announced that the government would begin drafting a new constitution in September.

The Hungarian leader has made a number of missteps, including the appointment of his brother-in-law as justice minister, which was quickly withdrawn. He also has faced some resistance from a number of Orbán appointees and allies who have refused his demands to step down, most notably the nominally independent Sulyok, whom he called Orban’s “puppet” and ordered to resign by May 31. The standoff between Magyar and Sulyok raises the prospect of a possible constitutional crisis. On June 1 Magyar announced that he was proposing a special amendment to the constitution that would enable him to remove the Orbán holdover. In the meantime, on June 15, Parliament passed a constitutional amendment barring Orbán from running again, which Sulyok reluctantly signed.²

It remains to be seen whether Orbán’s loss has reversed the right-wing European tide, but it certainly has paused it—by any measure a historic accomplishment. At the same time it has cut off a crucial financial lifeline for European and American populist parties, such as the 11 million euro loan to French far-right leader Marine Le Pen for her 2022 presidential campaign from a Hungarian bank partly owned by an Orbán ally, as well as other state-financed subsidies for like-minded parties, think tanks, and other institutions.

The vestiges of the Fidesz media machine spookily lingered online for several weeks after the election. In a story about one of Orbán’s last rallies, the desperate ruler accused his opponent of exploiting Hungarians’ basest emotions. “Fear and Anger Will Not Win an Election” the hit piece was headed, after a line in Orbán’s speech. In the end, it was the fear that his regime aroused and the righteous anger of the Hungarian people that led to his downfall.

—June 25, 2026