Hungary offers lessons in defeating right-wing populists.
The victory of Péter Magyar's Tisza Party over authoritarian Viktor Orbán was several years in the making. And like any successful coalition, it required its components to accommodate each other.
We in the US should examine Tisza's victory and determine which aspects of its campaign can be applied to our own struggle against authoritarianism.
After resoundingly losing national elections held on April 12, Orbán has become a parable for how populism can be defeated. His political demise was hardly inevitable. It had to be shrewdly engineered by politicians and voters who put aside their ideological differences to defeat him. In politics, there is no natural law of self-correction. [ ... ] Péter Magyar, the presumptive next prime minister, triumphed against a tilted electoral system—gerrymandered districts, government influence over traditional media and even over the country’s billboards—designed to keep Fidesz in power. Magyar understood that such a regime does not simply collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and mismanagement.
Yep, régimes do not fall on their own, it require work, cooperation, patience, and a unifying message to undo the authoritarian grip on power.
One of Tisza’s most illuminating campaign slogans was “Not left, not right, only Hungarians”—which promised an ideologically diverse movement to roll back Orbán’s corruption and cronyism. Emmanuel Macron’s party deployed a similar slogan, “Neither left nor right,” in 2017, when it also quickly went from nowhere to complete power in France. In the United States, the party duopoly is more entrenched, but you could argue that Barack Obama executed the trick in 2008 when he convincingly pitched himself as president for neither red America nor blue America.
Not conceding any part of the country or any community was key to Tisza's success.
Magyar directly campaigned all throughout Hungary, including in rural constituencies that tended to go unvisited because they were considered Fidesz’s heartland. Benjamin Novak, a former journalist and an analyst of Hungarian politics, told me that after years of scandal and inflation and slow growth in the country, Magyar’s indictment of the Orbán regime resonated widely. “The lived experience of Hungarians was that Hungary is falling apart,” Novak said. “And these guys are so corrupt that they have no idea what they’re doing.” Magyar’s momentum persuaded other opposition parties across the political spectrum to stand down to avoid splitting the anti-Fidesz vote. Factionalism was effectively suspended. In American terms, the rallying behind Magyar (whose name is the Hungarian word for “Hungarian”) would be like an ex-MAGA Republican named Peter American winning the Democratic nomination with the endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
While US politics doesn't happen like that, there are stupid third parties which insist on running hopeless candidates for president. And there are clueless voters (claiming to be progressive) who support them who end up indirectly electing disastrous Republicans. Without Ralph Nader in 2000 there would not have been a President George W. Bush; without Jill Stein in 2016, there would not have been a President Donald Trump. BTW, Bush and Trump account for 5 of the 9 appointees to the US Supreme Court.
In Hungary, Orbán demonized people and institutions he didn't like. But his corruption, incompetence, and economic mismanagement made him an easy target for demonization himself.
Until now, Orbán had succeeded through us-versus-them politics—Budapest against Brussels, Hungarians against Ukrainians, citizens against globalists. But instead of taking the opposite of Orbán’s side on the wisdom of EU bureaucracy, trans rights, or the Russia-Ukraine war, Magyar constructed an entirely different debate focused on the ruling party’s corruption, inflation, and neglect of public services. (In political-science terms, Magyar succeeded because his party achieved “transformative repolarization” rather than “reciprocal polarization.”)
Politicians in the West simply don't win by supporting wide open migration.
The parties that have had the most success against the populist right have shown similar messaging discipline. In Poland, the nationalist, conservative Law and Justice Party lost in 2023 to a broad coalition led by Donald Tusk—a centrist former president of the European Council who nevertheless opposes current EU migration policy and makes statements such as “If we are open to all forms of migration without any control, our world will collapse.” In Denmark, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the leader of the center-left Social Democrats, has maintained power for seven years in part by championing strict laws on asylum and assimilation that might exceed even the imagination of Stephen Miller (for example: tearing down homes in neighborhoods that had too many “non-Western” residents). In each case, mainstream parties learned to adapt in ways that made them more competitive against radical ones.
Like it or not, voters just don't want mass migration these days. However, measured and regulated immigration is fine with a majority of Americans.
Wide open borders paved the way for Trump's return. For all practical purposes, those high visibility migrant caravans were free advertising for MAGA.
In the US, many liberals don't understand the difference between patriotism (good) and nationalism (bad). Péter Magyar literally waved the Hungarian flag at rallies which were vast seas of Hungarian colors. We need to make this comment by the late über-liberal Bill Moyers a fundamental part of our thinking:
The flag belongs to the country, not to the government.
And it certainly doesn't belong to Republicans. By conceding the flag and other national symbols, you concede America.
In the United States, many of Donald Trump’s most fervent critics do something rather different: When the president and Fox News criticize an idea, Democrats declare themselves to be for it. This dynamic not only allows MAGA Republicans to set the terms of the American political debate but also boxes Democrats into backing unpopular policy positions: defunding the police; limiting immigration enforcement, even for criminals; insisting upon allowing the participation of trans women in women’s sports. Roger Scruton, the late British conservative philosopher, brought to prominence the idea of “oikophobia”—that is, a feeling of embarrassment about one’s home country and of affection for foreign societies that arises as a reaction to xenophobia. This affliction is not uncommon among American Democrats, and it concedes the field of patriotism to Republicans. This is an error that successful anti-populists such as Magyar and Tusk do not fall into.
Social media has done a lot to box Democratic politicians into maximalist positions which are not popular with the majority of voters.
In 2019 Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy at the New York Times did a study of Democrats on Twitter. They concluded that Democrats who were particularly active on (then) Twitter were not all that representative of Democrats in real life.
Today’s Democratic Party is increasingly perceived as dominated by its “woke” left wing. But the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate. The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online, according to data from the Hidden Tribes Project. This latter group has the numbers to decide the Democratic presidential nomination in favor of a relatively moderate establishment favorite, as it has often done in the past. [ ... ] But it would also be a mistake to assume that outrage on social media means outrage throughout the broader electorate. And it would be a mistake to assume that more moderate Democrats are out of step with the party’s electorate.
Get a better idea of what your Democratic neighbors are thinking. A great way is to actually talk with them and listen to their concerns. The vast majority do not spend 16 hours a day doom scrolling or posting hyperbolic outrage directed at any Democratic politician who does not agree with them 250% of the time.
NYC is not majority socialist. Yet Zohran Mamdani won a decisive victory in his race for mayor. He had volunteers knock on doors and listen to voters across the city. Affordability and accountability by officials counted way more than culture war issues. Democrats who wish to be successful this year should do local or statewide adaptations of his campaign with heavy emphasis on person-to-person contact with voters.
Viktor Orbán had been in office since 2010. He was already deeply entrenched by the time Trump took his famous escalator ride. You could say that the road to MAGA went through Budapest. Péter Magyar shows us that the road out of MAGA also runs through Budapest.
