Peter Magyar has won the Hungarian elections, defeating Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The victory is seen as a big shock to US President Donald Trump, who recently endorsed Obran along with some top European conservatives. The outgoing Prime Minister is a key opponent of European Union efforts to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion. He lost power after 16 years as Hungarians voted in record numbers for a pro-EU course. A fiery anti-Communist youth leader during the Cold War, Orban, the European Union’s longest-serving leader, is a patriotic hero to supporters, but critics at home and abroad have accused him of taking Hungary on an authoritarian path.
Who is Viktor Orban? The Outgoing Hungarian Prime Minister
Born in 1963 in a village west of Budapest, Orban trained as a lawyer, briefly studied political philosophy at Oxford, and even played semi-professional soccer before becoming prime minister for the first time in 1998 aged just 35.
Hungary joined NATO on Orban’s watch but he lost power in 2002. After eight years in opposition, he won a landslide victory in 2010, enabling him to rewrite Hungary’s constitution and pass major laws aimed at creating an “illiberal democracy”.
His consolidation of executive power, new curbs on NGO activities and media freedoms, and a weakening of judicial independence led to clashes with the European Union over democratic standards, culminating in a decision to suspend billions of euros in funding for Hungary.
Peter Magyar Makes History
But all that came crashing down for Orban on Sunday night as preliminary results put Magyar on course for a parliamentary supermajority, enabling his centre-right party to unwind all of Orban’s controversial reforms.
“What tonight’s election result means for the fate of our country and nation and what the deeper or higher meaning of all this is, remains unclear. We do not know it yet. Time will tell,” Orban told supporters, conceding defeat.
“But however it has turned out, we will keep serving our country and the Hungarian nation from opposition.”
Peter Magyar declared victory on Sunday, saying his Tisza party was poised for a strong two-thirds majority in the election, and would unite all Hungarians.
“We have done it, Tisza and Hungary have won this election,” Magyar told cheering thousands of supporters along the embankment by the river Danube. “In the history of democratic Hungary, this many people have never voted before, and no single party has ever received such a strong mandate as Tisza.”
Who is Peter Magyar?
Magyar’s centre-right, pro-European Union Tisza party beat Orban’s nationalist Fidesz party in Sunday’s parliamentary election. Partial results showed Tisza would win 137 seats, or a two-thirds majority, in the 199-seat parliament.
Only nine years old when communism collapsed, Magyar said he had decorated his walls with photos of leading political figures in his Budapest family home.
Orban, then a young lawyer, had become a hero of Hungary’s pro-democracy movement when he publicly demanded in 1989 that Soviet troops leave the country.
“There was a surge of energy around the regime change that swept me up as a child,” Magyar told the Fokuszcsoport podcast last year.
Magyar, whose family name literally means “Hungarian”, burst into the limelight two years ago after his ex-wife, Orban’s former justice minister Judit Varga, resigned from all political roles after a sex-abuse case pardon that caused public uproar.
Magyar quickly distanced himself from the governing party and accused it of corruption and spreading propaganda, saying he had become disillusioned with Fidesz.
Just four months after emerging from near-total obscurity with an interview at YouTube channel Partizan, Magyar’s new party won 30% in the June 2024 European elections, finishing second to Fidesz and crushing the rest of the opposition.
(With inputs from Reuters)
Zubair Amin is a Senior Journalist at NewsX with over seven years of experience in reporting and editorial work. He has written for leading national and international publications, including Foreign Policy Magazine, Al Jazeera, The Economic Times, The Indian Express, The Wire, Article 14, Mongabay, News9, among others. His primary focus is on international affairs, with a strong interest in US politics and policy. He also writes on West Asia, Indian polity, and constitutional issues. Zubair tweets at zubaiyr.amin
