The Current - Hungarian voters reject its far-right government

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

After 16 years, Hungary has a new Prime Minister. Voters have decisively ousted far right leader Viktor Orbán in favour of center right leader Peter Magyar. Nick Thorpe is BBC’s Central Europe correspondent, based in Budapest. He talks about what this could mean for the country's relationship with the European Union, and the future of the far-right movement.

In a nearly unprecedented set of circumstances, Mark Carney has won his majority government. I'm Jamie Poisson, host of the Daily News podcast, Frontburner, which is really worth a follow this week because the political drama is far from over. How durable is this majority government? Does it spell the end of Pierre Polyev's conservative leadership? Follow Frontburner so you can stay on top of this fast-moving story. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Victory was not in the cards this time for Victor Orban.

Hungarian voters delivered an historic verdict, ending the Prime Minister's 16-year rule of that country, a champion of what he called illiberal democracy. Victor Orban was considered one of Europe's most defiant nationalist leaders. Instead, Hungarians chose Peter Magyar, the leader of the center-right Tissah party. Nick Thorpe is the BBC's centralist. Central Europe correspondent. He's based in Budapest, and that's where he joins us from this morning. Nick, hi. Hello, Matt. For people who do not follow this as closely as you and I, just explain who Victor Orban was and how he changed his country. In a nutshell, Matt, he's a 62-year-old, extremely experienced, extremely successful right-wing politician who began on the liberal side of the political spectrum in the late 1980s when I first met him.

He set up his Fidesz party, which was initially a liberal, actually a youth movement before it became a party. He then moved it steadily to the right. Basically, largely opportunistic reasons in the 1990s, a sort of gap opened on the right in Hungarian politics on the center right. He became prime minister for the first time at the age of 35, I think in 1998. He ruled then for four years as the head of a coalition government. He lost in 2002. He rebuilt his party in eight years, effectively, in the political wilderness. And then he bounced back in 2010 with a big two-thirds majority with a much more right-wing outfit,

a much sort of more streamlined party, a much more ideological party. And he's ruled with a pretty strong hand for the last 16 years, pushing his party further and further to the right, to the extent. that it's left the centre-right group of parties in the European Parliament, the EPP, the European People's Party, and has set up its own group called Patriots for Europe, which gathers right-wing parties, not all of them, but a lot of significant right-wing parties from across Europe. So effectively, he's a very skilled, experienced political operator running a party which turned Budapest, where I'm speaking to you from into the capital of the right wing in Europe,

and indeed one of the capitals in the world, because he built from 2018 onwards really a very close relationship, a growing friendship, sort of cross-vertilisation of ideas with the Maga Republicans in the United States, to the extent that J.D. Vance, the US Vice President, was here in Budapest only last week to add his support to Mr. Orban's campaign efforts. Voter turnout in this election was something like 80%, or close to 80%.

Why did he lose? I think he lost for several reasons. One would be that he believed his own message and his own mathematics. He genuinely believed that this very, very simple message he had, that this election was a choice between peace and war. He portrayed himself and his allies, including Donald Trump, as men of peace, who were the only people who could prevent Hungary and, for that matter, the rest of the European Union being dragged into war, the war with neighboring, well, with Russia into the Ukraine-Russia war. He portrayed himself as a man of peace, keeping Hungary out of the war in neighboring Ukraine and accusing. The organization that Hungary has been a member of since 2004, the European Union, he called them the Brussels bureaucrats, warmongers, who through their support for Ukraine, were basically prolonging the war in Ukraine and not facing up to the reality, which is basically that Russia has won.

So that was one thing. He focused much too much on foreign policy in this election, whereas his rival, Peter Madhya, of this very new central. to right party, Tissa, he focused almost exclusively on domestic messages. The fact that Hungarians feel that inflation, that the stagnation of the economy, all the global and domestic economic problems have really come to haunt them, that they're poorer than they were four years ago. And as in any election, I think the electorate first and foremost vote on, you know, they're strongly influenced by their pockets. And that was an important factor in all this. There are lots of other factors, but I think that was the single biggest one, really, a sort of arrogance of power,

in power for 16 years. You can't imagine the country without you, and you think that the electorate can't imagine the country ruling, being ruled by anyone except you. Is your sense that voters turned against his politics, the nationalism that was at the heart of that, the way that he talked about immigration and immigrants, for example, the way that he fought against the EU, Did the voters turn against it? Did they reject that politics? I would say no, interestingly, because his rival, Peter Madhya, is also a national figure. Until two years ago, he was a pretty loyal member of Victor Orban's own party.

We're in a country here. Hungary will be celebrating, or rather marking, 500 years this year, this summer, since the Battle of Mohatch, when Hungary was heavily defeated or Christian armies in Hungary were heavily defeated. defeated by Ottoman Turkish armies, which led to 150 years of occupation, first by the Turks, which was followed by the Habsburgs, by the Austrian rule, and then, of course, a brief flowering in the late 19th century up to the First World War, but then the country was divided, heavily lost huge territories, huge populations after the First World War, and then we had the Soviet occupation from 1945 through to 1990.

So it's a country where the message of peace is important, but the message also of national pride, of wounded national pride, that you can't trust foreigners. All those messages, and those messages of being, to some extent, mildly repeated by the man who's won this election, Peter Madhya. So those policies weren't the ones that lost in this election. I think it was much more about corruption, about the growing wealth of a few percent of the population, the growing poverty, of perhaps up to 30% of the Hungarian population, the erosion of the middle classes, and the fact that Mr. Orban's messages were not the ones that the public wanted to hear or were interested in. They were kind of bored of his message. And so what does that mean then for the relationship between Hungary and the European Union?

Peter Madhya, who's an his Tissipati, who've now won by a landslide this election, they will be much more pro-European. They will maintain a strong voice in European politics. But effectively, because of the isolation, because of the radicalism of Viktor Orban and the Fides party in the past 16 years, Hungary has become the black sheep of the EU. They were hoping Mr. Orban's own strategy was not to leave the EU as a sort of Brexit-type vote

because the EU is still popular here, but he wanted to, as he called it, occupy Brussels. He was hoping for, and he was certainly inspiring, right-wing nationalist parties across Europe. So he wanted to transform the EU from the inside into a union of strong sovereign nation states with very few sort of federal powers or federal influence. And that project, that experiment that Victor Orban was carrying out has now been rejected by the Hungarian voters. And that will have repercussions across Europe

because I think his success as a radical nationalist constantly radicalizing himself, pushing himself and his party to the right, was watched very closely across Europe and he was encouraging the more radical elements in Marine Le Pen's national rally in France, in the AFD in Germany, in Italy, in Spain, in Portugal,

similar parties there to radicalise because it seemed to be successful at the polls. So his defeat here isn't just a personal defeat, but it's a sort of warning sign to those nationalist parties across Europe to become more centralist, to move back to the center, because this is how it can go wrong if you become too radical. 85%, something like 85% of the country's natural gas comes from Russia. And so if he is going to be more pro-European, Peter Majyarez, how does he do that without risking and alienating Vladimir Putin.

The way he has to do it and the way he's already talking about doing is diversifying. Not completely, not overnight. It took the Czech Republic four years to do this after they made a similar political decision in 2022, the then prime minister. Hungary has an alternative pipeline going to the Adriatic Sea in Croatia. There are already tests being done on that pipeline, some oil, some non-Russian oils already flowing through it. The new Prime Minister will have to improve his country's relations with Croatia,

talk with them about the cost of that, because one of the attractions of Russian oil has been, it's a very old pipeline, it's been established, it's a guaranteed quality, he could rely on that. Hungarian refiners could refine it. In a way they were lazy and they were politically motivated not to wean the country off that. I think it'll continue to flow in smaller quantities as Hungary finds alternatives. sources. And of course, you know, the Russians will accept that. They've got plenty of people

queuing up to buy their oil. You mentioned ties with the United States. J.D. Vance, the U.S. Vice President was stumping for Victor Orban just last week. And Donald Trump, of course, has been a close ally of Orban as well. And there are many people who are reading a lot into his defeat, saying that this is a victory for liberal democracy. That's to your point, perhaps those on the far right elsewhere should see this as a warning. What do you see is the meaning of this? When you take a look at this beyond simply what's happening on the streets of the city that you're in right now, more broadly, what is the message of what we've seen over the weekend?

I would quote Michael Ignatyev, a Canadian, back to you here, in his new book, which is not yet published, but I was speaking to Michael this morning. He talks about the liberal revolution after the Second World War. war of human rights, women's rights, gay rights, black rights. And what we've seen since 2010, especially, has been a kind of counter-revolution. And Victor Orban was a key figure in that counter-revolution, which includes the Brexit voters in my own country in Britain, which includes Donald Trump, of course, in the United States, the anti-woke movements against sort of liberal excesses against the liberal elite, if you like, out of touch with the blue collar workers,

out of touch with the white voters in different countries. So you have this revolution effect, this counter-revolution. So in a way, the meaning of this is that Victor Orban is one of the key figures of that counter-revolution. It's run out of steam. His experiment has ended, and now we don't know what comes next. Nick, very good to speak with you about this. Thank you very much. Thank you. is the BBC's Central Europe correspondent. We reached him in Budapest. This has been the current podcast.

You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m. at all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.