Hungarian Election Results for 2026
Great news!
A former loyalist of Viktor Orbán (Fidesz party), Peter Magyar (Tisza) is seen to put an end to the incumbent's 16-year-old hold on power.
I was very hopeful for this for the most part because in general, Trump is a big supporter of his authoritarian grip on power.
What's interesting about this is the difference between Trump and Orbán in how quick he was to accept defeat. Trump does the exact opposite.
Why trust Peter Magyar, a former loyalist to Orbán? There's at least one reason to consider.
His party is considered center-right, but he has since left the government accusing it of corruption and even releasing a wiretapped recording of his ex-wife — who was serving as Justice Minister — discussing the Schadl-Völner bribery case.
The case is solid, but the stronger cumulative argument is that Magyar's break was costly and specific — he didn't just quietly drift away, he burned his entire life down. He resigned from board positions at state-owned enterprises, torched his marriage publicly, and named names including Antal Rogán (head of the PM's Cabinet Office), claiming he was pressured to rig public tenders in favor of Orbán's inner circle while running the national student loan provider. That's a different quality of defection than ideological drift.
Be sure to set the auto-caption to English. It works.
In regard to why I'm skeptical of Peter Magyar being better than Orbán is more nuanced is that his MEPs voted in alignment with the incumbent Fidesz party on migration, Ukraine, and EU integration more often than the EPP average. So "better" may end up meaning a corruption-lite version of the same nationalist project.
We don't know it yet, but it looks better than what we've already seen.