For One Day, the World Revolves Around Hungary

H ungary is a relatively small European nation with an outrageously beautiful parliament building. The ruling party Fidesz, led by Viktor Orbán, has won four consecutive four-year terms. Knowing only that, no one would be surprised if voters had tired of them and tried the opposition. Hungary deserves a normal election.

But it will not get one this Sunday. The polls are all over the place. Those funded by the European Union and die-hard enemies of the current government show absurdly large leads for the opposition, sometimes by as much as 20 points. Those funded by the government’s media in Hungary show the incumbent party with a healthy lead of anything from six to ten points.

Self-appointed guardians of the “liberal world order” have already declared that Orbán’s party will lose this election legitimately, or it will win it by illegitimate means or somehow declare an emergency and try to annul the result. Some have fantasized about bringing Orbán out and publicly executing him like Romania’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. Others invoke the idea of staging something like the Ukrainian Maidan revolution in Budapest if he prevails.

I noticed years ago this pattern at work. Because the Hungarian language is difficult, and knowledge of Hungarian politics and history is pretty sparse in Western media, supposedly respectable people feel at liberty to say insane things about Hungary, and even if those things prove to be ludicrously untrue, they still get to write major feature articles as if they are experts on the topic. When the Orbán government responded to Covid by declaring a state of emergency, Anne Applebaum declared it the first European dictatorship and spread rumors that the parliament had been suspended and elections canceled. This weekend’s will be the second election since that claim. The American Enterprise Institute’s Dalibor Rohac called it a “power grab without parallel” in modern European history. Hungary ended its state of emergency 82 days later, before France did. Orbán did arguably abuse his emergency powers during Covid. Not, as American political consultant Liz Mair predicted, by “putting Gypsies in permanent detention.” Instead he used the opportunity to refurbish a city park in Budapest, a project that had been blocked by a mayor from the opposition party. One person had been arrested under its speech restrictions, but not charged — unlike in the U.K., where hundreds of people have been convicted of criminal tweeting.

What’s so interesting is that there are almost two different election campaigns happening for Hungary at once. There is one in Hungary, in which the opposition leader Péter Magyar is a former member of Fidesz. His story is that he was tired of moral and financial corruption in the party. He is, however, running on Orbánism without Orbán. He opposes mass migration. Like Orbán, he tells the public constantly that he wants the war in Ukraine to end. Like Orbán, he opposes fast-tracking Ukraine’s membership into the EU. Like Orbán’s party, he voted against a 90 million euro loan to Ukraine.

Then there is another campaign against Orbán, run internationally, with all the scandal stories and the thinly sourced reporting about Russian interference. Every headline and tweet seeks to link Orbán to Putin, to the Kremlin, to Russia. Those outside of Hungary have been treated to a series of scandal stories about Hungary that either never happened or involve common knowledge. In February it was reported that Orban’s campaign was going to release a surreptitiously recorded sex tape of opposition leader Magyar; it never did. In March it was reported that Russian intelligence was considered faking an assassination attempt on Orbán to boost his popularity. (No such event took place.) In April it was reported that Hungary had a secret plan in 2022 to invade Ukraine and divide it up with Russia — a western front in the war that was never opened. In the final week, a transcript of a phone call between Orbán and Putin was leaked, in which Orbán compared himself to a mouse helping a lion, in the context of offering Budapest as a forum for negotiating an end of the war in Ukraine.

Budapest’s reliance on Russia is a matter of national interest and not some explosive secret that Hungarians are just discovering. This is why the opposition doesn’t have a different position on it. The country is a landlocked European power dependent on the 20th-century energy infrastructure of the Soviet Union. Just as the United States has made Social Security into a kind of social compact that is politically untouchable, in Hungary, cheap energy prices function in a similar way. Hungary goes to enormous lengths to find cheap energy, or control its prices when inflation threatens to make it more expensive. Hungary is far from the only European consumer of Russian energy. France surpassed Hungary’s purchases in euro terms last fall, importing Russian liquefied natural gas, which it resells around the continent.

The context for constantly leaking to the international press that Orbán is supported by, backed by, and backs the Kremlin himself, is to justify extraordinary foreign intervention by the EU into the election. Brussels has already enacted its “rapid response” mechanism to the European Digital Services Act, which allows it to monitor the Hungarian internet and use nongovernment organizations to flag content for removal from social media.

The EU has already intervened in the Hungarian election by withholding transfer funds under its novel interpretation of the “rule of law” clause in European treaties. This was flagrantly done in Poland to the Law and Justice party, another populist nationalist party that won elections fairly and conceded defeat the same way. As soon as the new, more EU-compliant national government came to power in Poland, billions were released.

The real context of the Hungarian election is whether the EU can, with local proxies or other international allies, do what it already did in Romania. In 2024, the first round of Romania’s national elections was annulled by its courts under accusations of Russian influence over social media. Why? Because it produced a candidate whose foreign policy was not maximally hostile to Russia. He was banned from running in the do-over. European and American investigations later found no proof of Russian meddling but in fact lots of evidence for a plot from a liberal party to make the election look dirty. This playbook had already been used in America in 2016, when Russian meddling was used to try to discredit Trump’s first term, and then the substance of it turned out to be a few Facebook memes that hardly any Americans had actually seen. Similarly, during Ireland’s 2017 abortion referendum, a rumor of “foreign meddling” was used to justify canceling all online advertising during the final weeks, effectively canceling the pro-life campaign, which had found itself relying on the internet because it had less access to broadcast media than the pro-legalization side had.

In a way it is a pity. Hungary’s elections should be about Hungary itself. Viktor Orbán’s economic program, of using EU transfer funds to build up Hungarian-owned businesses, and occasionally privatizing state resources into the hands of aligned elites, and his attempt to build a conservative-nationalist network across a variety of sectors of social life deserve a verdict. In many ways, it was the obvious project for someone like Orbán, who was tutored by institutions like the German Marshall Fund and scholarships by George Soros — but who rejected some of their political prerequisites such as mass immigration and top-down secularization.

Instead, Hungary has Orbán running against an Orbán-lite. Instead of debating Hungary’s future, and policies set in that beautiful capitol building, the background issue is sovereignty itself. The real issue in Hungary is whether, in an era of globalized institutions — the EU, NATO — democratic peoples have a right to choose a government that is ideologically at odds with the “world order” that pretends to govern them from above.