The Axis of Evil Suffers a Big Loss

In the universe of far-right politics, the three members of the Axis of Evil are Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Viktor Orban. The first presides over the most powerful country in the world. The second launched the first major land invasion in Europe in over 75 years. The third has done his best to destroy the European Union from within.

On Sunday, the axis lost its littlest member. After 16 consecutive years as the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban—the joint-custody mini-me of Putin and Trump—went down for the count. His party, Fidesz, didn’t just lose the latest election. It lost bigly.

It wasn’t exactly a swing of the political pendulum in Hungary. The winning party, Tisza, is quite conservative in its outlook. It ran not so much on an ideological platform but against Orban’s corruption, authoritarianism, and deep-seated anti-Europeanism. Simply put, Hungarians had grown sick and tired of Orban’s excesses.

Only three political parties made it above the 5 percent threshold in the parliamentary elections. The opposition Tisza party captured a supermajority of parliamentary seats. Orban’s Fidesz came in a distant second. And the Our Homeland Movement, which is even further to the right than Fidesz, just squeaked in.

Significantly, all vaguely progressive or liberal parties have effectively disappeared from the Hungarian political landscape. This is perhaps Orban’s most ominous achievement, in addition to clinging to power for 16 years (which is a long time in any ostensibly democratic society but a veritable eternity in the quicksilver politics of East-Central Europe).

Like so many of his political brethren, Orban is a world-class opportunist. Long before Trump changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and before Putin traded in his communist credentials for nationalist ones, Orban sniffed the air and sensed an opportunity on the right side of the political spectrum. He swapped out the political identity of his liberal party for a nationalist, anti-immigrant, culturally conservative alternative.

In the 1990s, Orban served as the John the Baptist of illiberalism. Now that he has had his head served on a platter, it is tempting to conclude that Orban’s political end also heralds the end of an era. Of course, Orban could be resurrected in a few years, like Trump. Or, more deliciously, he could be jailed for his malfeasance, like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Regardless of Orban’s specific fate, the more important question is: Will Trump and even Putin be next in line for their political comeuppance?

Orban’s Journey to the Right

I came of political age in a world defined by Viktor Orban.

In 1989, when I was living in Poland and trying to launch a career as a freelance journalist, Orban was a newly minted lawyer in Budapest. That year, the young Orban established his bona fides as an opposition leader at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the leader of the doomed Hungarian experiment in reform in 1956. That ceremony took place on June 16, 1989—several days after the Solidarity movement won Poland’s historic semi-free election—and symbolized the cutting edge of the reform process in Hungary. Orban, 26 years old at the time, tested the limits of the new reform by calling for the removal of Warsaw Pact troops from Hungary.

The previous year, Orban and his friends had put together Fidesz, the Alliance of Young Democrats, to combine the three most salient attributes of the anti-communist youth opposition, its liberal, alternative, and radical strands. Ostensibly, Fidesz was the under-35 equivalent of the major liberal party, the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), which was founded by the country’s leading dissidents. But SZDSZ was, by comparison, a bunch of rather predictable intellectuals and proto-politicians. No other country in the region created a party as audacious as Fidesz. One of the famous Fidesz campaign posters of that period showed East German Communist leader Erich Honecker sharing a kiss with Russia’s Leonid Brezhnev. “Make your choice,” ran the tag line separating that photo from another of two young people kissing.

In 1990, I was in Budapest, interviewing Fidesz members and attending one of the party’s summer camps. It was hard not to believe that this cadre of 20-somethings was the future of politics in Eastern Europe. By that point, however, the more alternative and radical members of Fidesz were already complaining quietly about Orban. He was ambitious, thoroughly centrist in orientation, and full of himself. Welcome to the world of real politics, I thought at the time.

Fidesz was not the future of Hungarian politics, at least not that version of the party. Together with SZDSZ, the liberals failed to win Hungary’s first free elections in 1990. Instead, the center-right Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) won the overwhelming number of parliamentary seats because voters responded more positively to the party’s nationalist, Christian-inflected messages. During that election, SZDSZ posters were defaced with anti-Semitic slogans attacking the many Jewish members of the party. That reactionary undercurrent, not the exuberance of Fidesz or the deep dissident experience of SZDSZ, anticipated Hungary’s political future.

Four years later, the liberals again failed to come out on top as the reconstituted Socialist Party roared back to take control of parliament. SZDSZ decided to form a government with the Socialists, which they did again in 2002 and 2006. Tactically, it was a brilliant move. Strategically, by linking liberalism to Hungary’s communist legacy, the decision doomed the party. It was this left-liberal alliance that Viktor Orban challenged when he guided Fidesz to an electoral victory in 1998.

By 1998, Orban had dragged Fidesz solidly to the conservative side. But he governed, at least at first, like a Christian Democrat. Fidesz was, Hungarian sociology Andras Bozoki explained to me a decade ago,

still in this neoliberal framework, but they were already starting to make some populist arguments for an ethno-nationalist understanding of Hungary: not as a political community but as an ethnic community including every Hungarian living outside the boundaries of the country. Suddenly Fidesz discovered the power of nationalism as a constitutive force. Nationalism substituted for this missing link, the spirit of democracy, and this was how people could be mobilized. Even as it remained within the framework of liberal democracy at that time, Fidesz moved from the liberal center to the conservative-nationalist Right for pragmatic reasons. They realized that there was a space for them to occupy and attract a stronger and longer lasting constituency.

Orban decided, as a result of that first taste of power, that he needed more authority to push through his agenda. The same guy who called for the expulsion of Soviet troops in 1989 now enthusiastically embraced Putin’s illiberal project and the Russian leader’s tactics for turning a weak democracy into a strong autocracy.

The Lost 16 Years

When he regained office in 2010, Orban had a supermajority in parliament that he used to push through legislation. If the courts deemed the changes illegal, Orban simply changed the constitution (multiple times). Among other changes, the new constitution insisted that marriage could only be between a man and a woman and that the state only recognized two genders.

One the economic side, Orban decisively broke with his remaining liberal tenets by pushing for a more “sovereign” approach independent of Brussels and the global economy. Ironically, the initial economic success that his government enjoyed was almost entirely dependent on outside factors, “including an influx of foreign capital, massive European Union funds and a booming industrial cycle in Germany, which had made Hungary its subcontracting base,” writes Stephane Lauer.

The boom didn’t last. Burdened by corruption—Hungary was listed as Europe’s most corrupt country for four years in a row by Transparency International—the economy eventually ground to a halt. Living standards stagnated. The EU froze $21 billion in funds because of concerns over the Orban government’s illiberal moves. And while Europe has worked to cut its dependence on Russian energy sources, Hungary actually relied more on Putin over the last five years. In 2021, Hungary imported 61 percent of its oil from Russia; by 2025, that percentage had risen to 93 percent.

Once showcasing a vibrant mix of parties, the Hungarian political spectrum was overwhelmed by nationalism. SZDSZ folded in 2013, and all subsequent left-of-center efforts have withered away. Civil society has contracted as a result of a series of anti-NGO laws. When I returned to Hungary in 2013, several people requested anonymity and even declined to be interviewed for fear of retribution.

It’s unclear how thoroughly Peter Magyar will hit rewind in Hungary. He was once in the top echelons of Fidesz, he touts his conservative beliefs, and his own nationalist appeals served him well in the campaign (as did his last name, which means “Hungarian” in Hungarian). If he does decide to clean out the Augean stables, he will inevitably encounter opposition. Orban’s “deep state” is not going to give up power without a fight.

Global Implications

Hungary is not the only thorn in the side of the European Union. Both Slovakia and the Czech Republic are currently led by nationalist populists.

Slovakia’s Robert Fico comes out of the left, though it took until last October for the European Socialists to finally expel his party from their ranks. Fico, after all, has borrowed illiberally from Orban’s playbook, even to the point of visiting Moscow several times to pay fealty to Vladimir Putin.

Andrij Babis, who won the Czech elections in the fall, is a billionaire populist in the mold of Donald Trump. He, too, is attempting to steer his country Orbanward. Last month, 200,000 people protested in the center of Prague against an anti-NGO law and a media law that both resemble what Orban imposed in Hungary.

But without Orban, who has built up extensive contacts with far-right forces throughout Europe and the world, the Czech-Slovak populists won’t be able to marshal the same kind of anti-EU and pro-Russian sentiment. Euroskepticism lost one of its major proponents when Orban lost the election.

Of course, Europe also could use Orban as a convenient person to blame for all the tensions accumulating within the Union. With him gone, the EU will have to squarely face disagreements over how to help Ukraine, whether to push forward with expansion, and perhaps most importantly, how to deal with the disintegration of transatlantic ties. Creating an independent military force to replace NATO is a big lift both politically and fiscally. It’s the kind of enormous project that will either kill the EU or make it incomparably stronger.

In the meantime, Hungary under Peter Magyar will remain lukewarm on supporting Ukraine. There are still points of contention around the costs of that assistance, the Hungarian minority in Ukraine, and the tens of thousands of Ukrainian migrants, mostly women and children, living in Hungary. Nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment remain strong in the country. At the least, Hungary will stop blocking the current aid package of around $100 billion that will keep Ukraine afloat. But Magyar has also been clear on his opposition to sending arms to Ukraine, and he might not even support future financial assistance either.

Vladimir Putin has shrugged off Orban’s loss. “We were never friends with Orban,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said after the election, a stunning smackdown after all the love (and secret information) Orban sent to the Kremlin. It’s only the latest proof that Putin, like Trump, only likes winners. The Russian leader, meanwhile, will not be worried about a similar electoral scenario happening in some future Russian election. He has gone much further than Orban in suppressing the opposition and eliminating possible challengers.

Donald Trump, however, should be very worried. Unlike the electoral intervention in Poland that perhaps provided a little boost to Karol Nawrocki’s presidential chances last year, JD Vance’s last-ditch effort to save Orban on the eve of the election was a failure, even proving counterproductive by aligning the corrupt Hungarian with the corrupt Americans. It’s an important reminder that autocrats in more-or-less democratic societies, no matter how much they try to steal elections, must ultimately face the will of the disgruntled.

Trump might believe himself more powerful than the Pope. He might even cast himself as a Jesus figure. Ultimately, as in Hungary, the people will decide. And right now, the very same factors that doomed Orban—his autocratic tendencies and his corruption—are pointing to a similar electoral result for Trump and his party come November.