The Hungarian elections that marked the defeat of Viktor Orbán and the victory of Péter Magyar were immediately read, especially in the Italian debate, as an ideological turning point.

An oversimplified reading. When one is not really familiar with the political dynamics of central Europe, one often ends up reducing everything to a clash of ideological flags, as if every political contest must necessarily replicate the familiar pattern of the conflict between left and right.

To truly understand these elections, one must analytically separate two phenomena that, although connected, do not coincide: on the one hand, the crisis of the Orbán system, and on the other, the political and communicative construction of Péter Magyar’s candidacy. The first concerns a cycle of power that has gradually worn out. The second concerns the ability of a political actor to intercept that attrition without questioning the country’s dominant ideological framework.

Hungary remains a politically right-wing country. The change is more about trust in the government and the country’s geopolitical posture, not its underlying ideological orientation.

Magyar’s victory and Orbán’s defeat: two dynamics not to be confused

Péter Magyar is not a progressive candidate. He is a conservative-liberal, coming from the same political milieu as Orbán and holding similar positions on many fundamental issues: border control, restrictive migration policies, defence of national identity and pronatalist family policies. Economically, too, he remains in the mainstream of the European right, with a pro-market agenda , in favour of tax cuts and the reduction of state intervention.

This explains a fundamental dynamic: Orbán voters were not forced to change their political identity in order to vote Magyar. They were simply able to replace the leader without abandoning their convictions.

The electoral dynamics clearly confirm this. The Hungarian left has essentially disappeared from the parliament: the Democratic Coalition obtained just over 1% of the vote and the other progressive parties chose to withdraw to support Magyar. The result is that the new Hungarian parliament is probably the most right-wing-oriented in the country’s recent history.

The real key to interpretation, therefore, is not ideological: Orbán has not lost the political debate. He has lost something far more important: the trust of the voters.

Who is Péter Magyar

Rather than the emergence of a new political camp, Péter Magyar‘s candidacy represents an internal fracture in the power system built by Viktor Orbán.

For years, Magyar was part of that political universe. Not an external opponent, but an insider of the Fidesz system, growing up within the institutional and relational network that supported the Hungarian premier’s long political dominance. His break thus takes on a special significance: it is not the contestation of an ideological opponent, but criticism from within the same power circuit.

It is precisely this position that makes his candidacy politically credible for a part of the conservative electorate. Magyar does not present himself as the representative of an ideological alternative to the Orbán system, but as proof that that system can also be challenged from within.

The most significant discontinuity does not so much concern the country’s domestic political orientation – which remains largely conservative – as Hungary’s international posture.

In fact, Magyar proposes a sharper realignment with the EU and NATO, a much more critical stance towards Russia, and an end to the Hungarian veto on European funding for Ukraine. In other words, his leadership aims to reduce the political isolation in which Budapest has progressively found itself in recent years.

From this point of view, his victory does not represent a progressive turn, but rather a reorganisation of the Hungarian right into a form more compatible with the European political balance.

Campaigning: how to build a victory

Péter Magyar’s victory cannot be understood without analysing the communicative structure of his political rise, which represents one of the most interesting cases of recent electoral mobilisation in Central Europe.

The turning point came on 11 February 2024, when Magyar – former husband of former Justice Minister Judit Varga – gave a long interview to the YouTube channel Partizán podcast. The intervention comes at a politically explosive moment: a few hours earlier, the scandal of the pardon granted to a person involved in the cover-up of child abuse had engulfed the state leadership, forcing the resignation of both the President of the Republic Katalin Novák and Varga herself.

The interview quickly became the most viewed political content in Hungary’s recent history, with around three million views – the equivalent of one in three citizens.

In that conversation, Magyar publicly breaks with the system of power built by Viktor Orbán, describing Hungary as a kind of ‘family joint-stock company’, dominated by a network of personal loyalties and concentration of power. He directly attacks Antal Rogán, one of the most influential men in the government and in charge of the communication and propaganda machine, accusing him of embodying a political system based on opacity and control of the flow of information.

At the same time, he takes a position on the presidential pardon scandal, linking it to a broader moral crisis of the institutions and explaining the reasons for his break with the Fidesz political world, within which he had worked for years.

From then on, Magyar built its campaign on an extremely effective communication strategy. Excluded from the traditional media system, which is largely favourable to the Orbán government, he relies on disintermediated communication through social networks and digital media, accompanied by an extremely intense territorial presence. He traverses the entire country holding rallies even in the smallest centres, going so far as to organise up to five public events a day at certain times during the campaign.

Also contributing to the credibility of his candidacy is his particular political position. Coming from the same power environment as Fidesz, Magyar cannot easily be labelled as a candidate of the left or the European establishment. This allows him to present himself not as an ideological alternative to the system, but as its internal correction.

Finally, the campaign deliberately avoids confrontation on identity issues and civil rights, focusing on concrete issues: health, schooling, economic growth and purchasing power. In this way, the confrontation with Orbán is shifted from the terrain of political identity to that of the quality of government. The competition becomes a judgement on the management of power.

The international factor in the decline of the Orbán system

The political system built by Viktor Orbán has dominated Hungary for over sixteen years. A long, stable and deeply rooted domination in the country’s institutions. However, every cycle of power, especially when prolonged over time, inevitably produces political attrition, accumulation of scandals and progressive loss of trust.

Orbán’s defeat stems precisely from this erosion: the widespread perception of corruption, the conflict with the European Union – which has also had concrete economic consequences with the freezing of billions of euros in funds – and, finally, an element that has often been underestimated in the Italian public debate: the geopolitical positioning of the Hungarian government.

On this last point, the privileged relationship with Putin and his openly pro-Russian stance after the invasion of Ukraine have isolated Budapest and, above all, opened the door to continued Russian interference in Hungarian domestic politics.

The result was a political paradox: Orbán retained an ideologically loyal conservative electorate, but gradually lost credibility as a manager of power and as a guarantor of the country’s internal strategic interests.

It is in this context that Péter Magyar’s victory takes on European significance. Not because it represents an ideological turning point in Hungarian politics, but because it opens up the possibility of relocating Budapest within a more cooperative equilibrium with the European Union, reducing one of the main strategic fractures that have crossed the European project in recent years.

The first indications that emerged after the election victory should be read precisely in this key. The announcement of Brussels and Warsaw as the first diplomatic destinations signals the desire to normalise relations with European institutions and at the same time to strengthen the Central European dimension of Hungarian foreign policy, within an area that in recent years has developed a much more pronounced sensitivity to Russian influence.

Obviously, the all-Italian misunderstanding of the magnitude of this victory, reduced to the classic clash of flags, is a habit of the Italian interpretation of international dynamics. We will continue to read about how ‘the friend of’ lost the election, or how the left is celebrating a right-wing victory. And both interpretations will still be wrong in judging an event that should instead be summed up as: “the Hungarian right’s attempt to rebuild its political legitimacy also through a clearer European positioning in the confrontation with Russia and in the issue of defending state sovereignty against external interference.”

In short, it is the end of a political cycle and the opening of a possible European recomposition around the issue of political security and Russian influence in the European space.

A topic that would also deserve to be addressed within some Italian political secretariats, where pro-European victories are celebrated but it is still hard to take a really clear position against those who would like to destroy that pro-Europeanism: Vladimir Putin.