What’s the big deal about Hungary? It’s a central European country with 9.5 million people — slightly less in population and area than the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. But it’s been the subject of more care, attention, and debate in America than any other country in Europe or the Western Hemisphere.
Vice President JD Vance was in Budapest the Tuesday before Hungary’s election last Sunday and, with President Donald Trump chiming in over the phone, gave 16-year incumbent Viktor Orban an endorsement in all but name. Vance praised Orban’s “generous family subsidies” and decried European Union “bureaucrats in Brussels,” who have been fining Hungary 1 million euros a day for declining to admit refugees.
On Monday, after Orban’s Fidesz party was soundly defeated by ex-Fidesz Peter Magyar’s Tisza party, former President Barack Obama called the result “a victory for democracy” and for “fairness, equality, and the rule of law.”
Now diplomats generally favor incumbents in other countries’ elections — no need to adjust to new interlocutors — and American governments have sometimes intervened in European elections. But usually clandestinely, as when the infant CIA thankfully took sides against Stalin’s communists in France and Italy. What prompts the current vice president and a former president to take opposite sides in Hungary’s election?
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To understand that, it helps to go back in time — not just to 2010, when Orban won his first of four elections, but back into the 19th century, when Austria-Hungary was a major power, and perhaps even to the century and a half from 1526 to 1699, when what is now Hungary as part of the Ottoman Empire was Muslim-ruled territory.
Through this turbulence, it held on to its distinctive and famously hard-to-master Hungarian language and fostered artistic and scientific achievement. Josef Haydn composed his hundred-plus symphonies in a Hungarian castle, and Franz Liszt, in his sold-out concert tours, emphasized his Hungarian roots. Budapest, like Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Chicago, was one of the boom cities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — an industrial and political powerhouse and processing point for fertile agricultural plains.
It was the Budapest physician Ignaz Semmelweiss who developed in the 1840s the antiseptic procedures which would likely have saved President James Garfield in 1881, and it was just a few Budapest high schools who produced in the years just before and after World War I the Nobel Prize-winning physicists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Edward Teller — who made essential contributors to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Manhattan Project in the 1940s.
For more than a century, Hungarians have denounced the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which left more ethnic Hungarians than any other European group outside national boundaries. So has Viktor Orban, who was elected in 2010 after the former Communist Party government admitted to lies about budget deficits.
Orban riled European elites when he declared Hungary an “illiberal democracy” in 2014 and refused to follow the lead of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in allowing an influx of hundreds of thousands of young male Muslim “refugees” in 2015. For reasons that are unclear, European elites seem to consider opposition to admitting migrants who feel entitled to assault un-headscarfed women and gay men as morally equivalent to Hitler’s Holocaust.
Orban’s emphasis on Christian values, family formation, and national pride was fiercely criticized by EU elites as somehow fascist. He was also charged with winning through gerrymandering. Actually, Hungary’s parliament is partly chosen, as in much of continental Europe, by proportional representation and partly by elections in single-member districts. Fidesz has been anathema in Budapest, Hungary’s largest city, with almost one-fifth of the national population. But in line with the metropole-versus-countryside pattern that has become common in Europe, Britain, and America, the Fidesz party, in its four election victories against split opposition, carried almost every countryside district beyond the Budapest metropole.
That naturally gave the party, even as it was winning between 45% and 54% of popular votes, the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to make constitutional changes. That system gave Fidesz more than two-thirds of the seats in 2022 when it beat a left-right coalition 54% to 34% in popular votes. But this year it delivered a similar supermajority to the newly formed Tisza party when it led Fidesz by 52% to 39% in the popular vote.
Tisza was led by former Fidesz official Peter Magyar, who split with the party over corruption issues but supported its restrictions on immigration. EU leaders were happy to overlook that, as it became increasingly clear that Merkel, as with her closure of nuclear power plants and her open borders refugee policy, erred grievously. As Rod Dreher, an American resident at Budapest’s Danube Institute blogged, “Orbán’s tragedy is that Europe is finally coming around to his point of view on the importance of strong borders.”
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Orban stood apart from much of Europe on one other issue, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. Like some others on the American Right (Tucker Carlson? Steve Bannon?), he seems to have seen Putin as a paragon of Christian civilization and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a manipulative provocateur. Orban was holding up approval of EU aid to Ukraine. Magyar seems sure to release that veto.
How much the Europeans and the British will actually do to help Ukraine remains unclear. But offloading this responsibility to them seems to be one of the aims of Trump, even in the moments when he is not indulging his unaccountable confidence that Putin genuinely seeks peace. In that respect, Hungarian voters — and Orban, by his prompt and ungrudging concession — have altered European policy, even as on migration Europe seems to have moved toward the path laid out by the Hungarian leader they scorned. Hungary, once again, is something of a big deal.