After 16 long years, Hungarian voters have swept away Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian, pro-Moscow Fidesz party. American Vice-President JD Vance’s last-ditch effort to campaign with Orbán in Budapest and a wildly inaccurate poll produced by Trump pollster McLaughlin & Associates predicting a Fidesz victory couldn’t save the Hungarian prime minister. Preliminary results show that the recently established opposition Tisza Party, a hybrid alliance that includes both liberals and conservatives, has won a two-thirds majority. Forty-five year old Péter Magyar, previously an ally of Orbán but now a staunch adversary of his regime, will become Hungary’s next prime minister. With over 90% of all votes counted, Tisza has secured around 138 of 199 seats in Parliament.
With this landslide victory, I’m hopeful that Hungary’s new government will dismantle what Orbán referred to euphemistically as his Regime of National Cooperation. This will mean restoring the professional civil service and an independent media, removing party apparatchiks from the state broadcaster, establishing an independent judiciary, holding the oligarchs accountable, and ending the country’s alliance with Vladimir Putin, especially with respect to the war in Ukraine. From a Canadian perspective, I hope that the Embassy of Hungary to Canada, along with the consulate in Toronto and Montreal, will once again be staffed by fair-minded career diplomats — ones who represent Hungary and interact with the Hungarian diaspora with integrity.
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