The forces of darkness rolled back on Sunday. The mighty combined power of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Donald Trump’s America were defeated in Hungary, as European liberal democratic values triumphed.
The populist-nativist right put their all into keeping Viktor Orbán in power. The US vice-president, JD Vance, mid-war in Iran, took time out to parade his patronage in Budapest, one month after the hard-right US Conservative Political Action Conference took place there. In January, Benjamin Netanyahu appeared in a video endorsing Orbán, with salvoes of support from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen. Herbert Kickl of Austria’s Freedom party declared that “a patriotic wind is blowing across Europe”. Maybe, but not in their direction. Patriotism does not belong to them.
Orbán’s defeat at the hands of the conservative Péter Magyar’s Tisza party weakens them all. Orbán lost despite years of the party-state’s gerrymandering, the constitutional changes, the corruption and the suborning of the media, judiciary and other public offices. Hungarians finally broke free, sending a chill through Europe’s authoritarian right.
Orbán’s Hungary played a key role in the global right. As the investigative climate activists DeSmog put it: “[He] has used a network of state-backed think tanks, media outlets, and conferences to promote his brand of ‘illiberal democracy’ across Europe, including in the UK.”
How perilous the rise of the European hard right has been: it took roughly a quarter of European parliament seats in 2024, held power in Italy, and joined or supported ruling coalitions in Finland, Sweden, Austria, Slovakia and (until recently) the Netherlands. The post-second world war self-image of Europe as global bastion of liberal democracy is under threat. Magyar is no social liberal, but he returns Hungary to the EU mainstream.
The result in Hungary dovetails with the tide turning against Trump and his great blunder: igniting not just war in Iran, but an inflationary spike across the globe. Cycles of power and influence move slowly, but a US president stumbling towards midterm elections with petrol prices up 21% will no longer be a beacon to hard rightists, but a connection to shun.
In 2018, Nigel Farage, an Orbán-backer, posted, “Viktor Orbán is the strongest leader in Europe and the EU’s biggest nightmare.” The Reform UK leader may now feel the effects of any decline in support for hard-right politics. After all, his party rose on the crest of its wave but is already starting to slide, according to the psephologist Peter Kellner. Failure to capture Gorton and Denton was quite a blow, demolishing his star candidate, Matt Goodwin. His cringe-making support for the US president is an embarrassment, when just 16% of UK voters favour Trump. Watch his screeching tyres: on Friday, he would only admit “I happen to know [Trump] but that’s by the by”.
What Farage never mentions is that Brexit made him – and he made Brexit. That’s because 58% of the country now say that leaving the EU was the wrong decision, according to Statista. Nor should he be allowed to forget his line, echoing Putin, that the west “provoked” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nor that, in 2014, Putin was the leader he most admired, albeit “as an operator, but not as a human being”.
For now, in the lead in the opinion polls on 25%, Reform is set for a stonking win in next month’s local elections. But that doesn’t mean Farage will be looking like a prime minister in three years’ time. Straws in the wind include this from Kellner: Reform has overtaken Labour as the party people would most vote against, which will be crucial when tactical voting considerations come into play.
It’s doubtful that most Reform voters waited breathlessly for Hungarian election results, but there is often a mysterious osmosis in political opinion, a vibration by which people who may not be news obsessives breathe in a change in the air. Prof Rob Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester University, ponders the “turning tide” point: he has seen many such mirages fade away. We will have to wait and see if Orbán’s defeat sends shockwaves through conservative fellow travellers. “Will those commentators in the Telegraph and Spectator change their mind about thinking Reform may be the answer?” Ford asks.
The British right flew too close to Orbán. Just this year, the Good Law Project reported how the Mathias Corvinus Collegium thinktank, funded by the Hungarian state, gave more than £500,000 to the UK’s Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation. The latter’s directors include not just Reform’s head of policy, James Orr, but the Spectator editor and former Tory minister, Michael Gove. What happened to the cordon sanitaire that used to protect conservatism from the hard right?
There’s a warning, too, for Labour. Ford tells them to draw no comfort from the Hungarian result. About to take “their worst hammering in history”, Labour’s greatest risk is their current “daze of complacency”.
Exactly 70 years after the failed Hungarian uprising, the country’s resounding rejection of Fidesz may spark renewed enthusiasm for European unity and the liberal-democratic idea. This is a vote to send hard-right populism back to the fringes where it belongs. A raft of European elections next year will tell us if this was just a Hungarian story – or if it resonates loudly around the continent. But good news is pitifully scarce, so make the most of it now.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Thursday 30 April, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour faces from the Green party and Reform UK – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader. Book tickets here
