Sixteen years is enough for most democratic publics. Sovereignty and democracy are built upon your people and the resources they command.
Just some thoughts on the remarkable weekend in which, as many anticipated, Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party were handily defeated by a united opposition under Peter Magyar’s Tisza Party.
Sixteen Years Is Enough for Most Democratic Publics
There seems to be an almost inbuilt tolerance for parties of twelve to 16 years in most Western democracies. In Germany, Angela Merkel lasted sixteen years. Before her time, Helmut Kohl was chancellor for 16 years from 1982 to 1998. The Social Democrat Bruno Kreisky was a beloved chancellor in Austria from 1970 to 1983. Mark Rutte/VVD‑led coalitions lasted from 2010–2024 in the Netherlands.
Fidesz’s run in Hungary is explicable by this alone. In the first two of his recent four terms, Orbán’s Hungary kept pace with the region in growth. And that deft maneuvering kept post-financial crisis Hungary from Greece’s fate — a sovereignty-rending reconstruction imposed from above. In Orbán’s last term, Hungary’s exposure to war-related inflation doomed it, and made other forms of corruption intolerable.
But while many celebrate Tizya’s victory as a huge break from Orbánism, it strikes me as something more like Bill Clinton’s victory to close the Bush era in 1992 or David Cameron’s defeat of Blair-Brown Labor. These victories depended on those who directly opposed the incumbent, but they also depended on those who were basically happy with the policy baseline and wanted to see it continued. Bill Clinton ran as a moderate, and though he lurched left upon taking office, he immediately tacked back for re-election, claiming “the era of big government is over.”
Peter Magyar only broke with Fidesz two years ago, over a scandal that had nothing to do with Orbán’s attempt to create a native Hungarian business elite aligned to his party, or his concentration of media, or the nation’s continued dependence on Russian energy, or his opposition to mass migration. It was a scandal in which justice was subverted merely out of party favoritism. Magyar ran to Orbán’s right on immigration, promising to shut down legal forms of it. And at Unherd, Aris Roussinos documents voters believing and trusting in this promise. Even Germany’s new chancellor is talking about repatriating migrants who came in under Merkel’s welcome. On the question of immigration, Orbán is winning. The next is the question of sovereignty.
What Will the EU Demand?
The question is whether Peter Magyar can keep his promises and unfreeze money withheld from Hungary by the EU to bribe voters into voting for him. Many older conservatives and liberals denounced supposed foreign interference in the Hungarian election in the weeks before it happened (I’m sure they’ll find the Russian agents any time now! The walls are closing in!). But the undemocratic intervention was surely that of the European Union. When states like Hungary and Poland joined the EU, they did so under the Lisbon treaty. Article II of that agreement contains declaratory statements about European values and the rule of law, but these were given no legal definition, nor were they placed in any kind of legal process in the document. Instead, questions about the judiciary, and many other matters not directly touching the European market, were left to the exclusive competence of elected national governments. That was until parties of the national-populist persuasion started gaining traction in Poland and Hungary. Poland’s Law and Justice Party wanted to finish the incomplete lustration of the communist era judiciary. Hungary’s Fidesz wanted to revise its communist-era constitution. In Poland, a massive state-media behemoth was already an electoral spoil. In Hungary, the government stopped subsidizing opposition newspapers with advertising, on which the papers relied. Orbán allies bought up media outlets to curry favor. The constitutional and judicial moves all implicated “culture war” issues, of family, marriage, abortion, and the place of religion in society. But the larger offense was the way each government was disrupting the traditional nexus of progressive power run through academia, media, progressive NGOs, and the judiciary. Orbán went the furthest in trying to almost replicate the progressive nexus, but along conservative lines.
In 2020, the EU responded by inventing a process to withhold transfer funds from member states that somehow “violated” the rule of law, which could be defined in any way. This was an entirely pretextual effort to keep a cordon sainitaire around Central European populists. Poland and Hungary sought relief from the European Court of Justice, arguing persuasively that this violated Article 5 of the Lisbon treaty, but the ECJ has never convicted other EU bodies for such a violation before. It seems impossible. The EU succeeded in withholding funds from Poland, which they almost immediately released upon the election of a more compliant government led by Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform Party. But Civic Platform hasn’t met all the demands set forth by the EU. And it has used the “authoritarian” narrative to create a constitutional crisis of its own, ignoring laws passed by the previous government, or the rulings of certain courts, in an ad hoc and improvisatory way. Brussels is withholding funds from Hungary; now, Peter Magyar has to go to Brussels to negotiate with people who hold all the cards, and to whom he partially owes his success. I’m not sure why conservatives of any stripe want to endorse this kind of anti-democratic politics from the EU. Mostly, those who are happy to see “populism” gone will quietly tolerate this breach of democratic norms.
What Will Happen to MCC Budapest?
Matthias Corvinus Collegium was the academic outpost that the Fidesz government set up, partly as a conservative replacement to George Soros’s Central European University, which was chased out of Budapest due to regulatory issues. The institute was endowed with 10 percent ownership stakes in an oil company and a major pharma concern. Magyar said yesterday that funding these things was a criminal act, and no government money will go toward them henceforward.
It’s been interesting to watch anti-Orbánists of the right cheer the potential shutdown of these, as part of the broader fight against corrupt statism. It’s almost like conservatives in Western nations, so used to swimming in waters conditioned by an enormous and almost universally progressive NGO system that relies on government funding, suddenly encounter a tank in which the PH is set to the right, and freak out.
A Warning
There are certainly warnings for others in Orbán’s defeat. Particularly for Donald Trump. Like Orbán, Trump has offered almost nothing to young voters and even provoked them by saying he wanted to see housing prices go higher. Like Orbán, Trump is lately seen to be ignoring domestic economic concerns and focusing too much on the foreign policy of his own choosing, which may be hurting the domestic economy overall. And finally, like Orbán, there is an unseemly amount of personal enrichment across his sphere of influence.
Sovereignist Politics in the Future: Hungary or Ireland?
But sovereignist politics aren’t going away. Although conservatives committed to a pre-1991 paradigm will deny it, the new conditions of globalization put economic integration, sovereignty, and democracy into direct conflict. And these play out in surprising ways. In recent days, I’ve seen commentators contrast Ireland and Hungary.
Jonah Goldberg wrote:
Hungary’s economic growth in 2025 (0.4 percent) was third to last in the EU, well below the paltry EU average of 1.5 percent. Ireland—which politically has gone in the opposite direction, in good ways and bad—saw real GDP growth at 12.3 percent largely thanks to its embrace of demonic globalism.
Yes, Ireland has insane growth on paper. And contrasting it with Hungary actually gets to some of the real political issues that are obscured by what used to look to us like objective numbers.
In many ways, Ireland has pursued the opposite strategy as Orbán, and for a longer time. Since the 1960s, the Irish policy has been the pursuit of foreign direct investment. American companies (sometimes driven by the misty-connections of Irish Americans) have invested heavily in Ireland as their low-tax entrance into the EU market. But the policy creates incredible distortion. With 12.3 percent growth, you’d think people would be dancing in the streets. Instead, last week, across the length and breadth of the country, fuel protests led to conditions that almost resembled a national strike. Ireland is now incredibly dependent on three American multinationals who together contribute 46 percent of its corporate tax intake. The recorded growth doesn’t really touch the Irish people. It’s made of profits from American consumers of Mounjaro, or European buyers of MacBooks, that are booked there for tax purposes. Ireland just creams the tax revenue.
GDP is the sum of government expenditures, consumer and private consumption, net exports, and investment. The last two components are distorted for a tax shelter like Ireland. Consider that, for accounting purposes, Apple claims iPhones are exported by Ireland into Europe, when they are designed in America and manufactured in China (and receive final packaging in India). The IMF found that two-thirds of investments made in the country are “phantom” — just passing through empty corporate shells.
There’s a political cost to exposing your economy this way. FDI led to near full employment in Ireland by 1995. Now, multinational corporations, particularly tech firms, recruit in Ireland from far beyond. In a single generation, Ireland has gone from being one of the most ethnically homogenous nations on earth to having over 20 percent of the residents born in a foreign country. The foreigners who work at the top tech firms now have the best choice of real estate in a country facing a housing crisis. Who is the Irish government going to look to for guidance on immigration policy? The people whose own entrepreneurialism is stunted by policy, or the progressive global firms that give the state the majority of the tax revenue?
I love Ireland. It’s a great place. But just as fuel protests against the cost of living crisis, and last year’s series of arsons and protests against mass migration, show that the current model isn’t sustainable. Ireland can’t serve Irish interests if the state is primarily a client of Silicon Valley and a handful of pharmaceutical companies.
What Viktor Orbán discovered after his very first term as the prime minister of a small member state of the European Union was that without intervention, Hungary would be a mere pass-through. The EU would transfer funds — to purportedly harmonize the continent — into Hungary, and then immediately yank them back over the border to Germany to the incumbent firms that could sell bread to a country where, by all rights, it should have been cheaper to grow and mill flour. Ireland is destined to learn what Orbán did then: Sovereignty and democracy are built upon your people and the resources they command.