Orban ousted: What Magyar’s victory means for Hungary and the EU

The images from Budapest said it all. Tens of thousands of Hungarians, many in tears, waving flags along the Danube as Peter Magyar declared: “We have freed Hungary.” After 16 years, Viktor Orban, the man who turned his country into a template for European “illiberalism”, had been swept from power.

With 53.56 percent of the vote and 138 seats out of 199 in parliament, Magyar’s Tisza party secured a two-thirds supermajority, the same constitutional lever Orban once used to dismantle checks and balances. Magyar has promised to use it to rebuild them.

For the European Union, Sunday’s result was greeted with undisguised relief. “Hungary has chosen Europe,” said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen on X. But the jubilation in Brussels will be getting ahead of the reality on the ground.

“One can be cautiously positive,” Ian Bond, director of the Centre for European Reform in London, told FRANCE 24. “But not everything is going to change.”

Watch more‘Love has triumphed’: Hungarian papers react to Orban loss in historic elections

Magyar is a conservative, a former Fidesz insider who broke with Orban in 2024. His Tisza party draws a strikingly mixed crowd: 43 percent of his voters identify as liberal, 22 percent as left-wing, 10 percent as Green, and only 11 percent as right-wing conservative. Keeping that coalition together while delivering on sweeping institutional reform will be a balancing act of its own.

“His first priority is rule of law, and that will keep him very busy,” says Denis Cenusa, an associate expert at the Geopolitical Security Studies Centre in Vilnius. “Because it will depend entirely on his ability to revive the Hungarian economy, including by regaining access to EU structural funds.”

The corruption mountain

The economy was among the top priorities that drove Hungarians to the polls in record numbers, with a historic turnout of 79.5 percent, the highest since the country adopted democracy at the end of the Cold War.

Prices in Hungary have surged by 57 percent since 2020, the highest increase in the EU, and nearly double the bloc’s average of 28 percent. The average monthly salary stands at €1,037, compared with a €2,654 average in the euro area. 

Behind those numbers lies a deeper malaise. Hungary ranked last in the EU on Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, scoring just 40 out of 100, its worst result ever. Its score has dropped 15 points since 2012, the most significant decline of any EU member state.

Magyar’s first announced move after his victory was clear and pointed: Hungary would join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, the EU’s powerful anti-fraud and anti-corruption body. 

It is a promise that resonates, but one that will collide head-on with the institutional architecture Orban spent 16 years constructing. The judiciary, the media, the electoral system and the public procurement networks have been reshaped in Fidesz’s image.  

Read moreHow Orban benefits from Hungary’s tailor-made election system

Polish warning

Europe has been here before. When Prime Minister Donald Tusk‘s coalition ousted Poland’s PiS government in late 2023, Brussels also celebrated. The lesson, according to Tania Rancho, a researcher in EU fundamental rights law at Paris-Saclay University, is to manage expectations.

“Tusk didn’t overturn everything. Not on immigration, not on women’s rights,” she says. “The Polish precedent shows that a pro-European replacement doesn’t automatically mean a progressive one.”

The parallel is instructive. Magyar, like Tusk, is pro-EU and anti-corruption. But on the politically charged questions that defined the Orban era, his positions remain largely unknown or deliberately vague.

On LGBTQ rights, for instance, Magyar said almost nothing during the campaign. The EU is currently awaiting a landmark ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on Hungary’s 2021 anti-LGBTQ law, a piece of legislation that, in the words of the Court’s Advocate General, “establishes systematic discrimination” against LGBTQ people. In May 2025, twenty EU member states had already denounced the law as a violation of fundamental freedoms. What Magyar will do if and when the CJEU strikes it down remains to be seen.

Watch more‘Change is feasible’ in Hungary after Magyar victory: FT reporter Marton Dunai

On migration, arguably Orban’s most resonant wedge issue, the picture is equally complex. Magyar has nationalist instincts on the topic, says researcher Denis Cenusa, “but he won’t make a political brand out of it. That means he’ll be more likely to find common ground with Brussels,” as it is moving in a harder direction. 

Orban’s Hungary was a grotesque extreme of that tendency, deporting asylum seekers at the border while quietly issuing work visas to Asian migrants in the name of economic need. But the underlying logic of “chosen” versus “imposed” migration is one that resonates well beyond Budapest.

Geopolitical ripple effects

For the rest of the EU, Sunday’s result removes a persistent irritant from the bloc’s decision-making machinery. Orban had used his veto power to block or delay EU aid to Ukraine, sanctions against Russia, and the accession process for Kyiv. 

But Bond, the former senior diplomat, urges caution on Ukraine in particular. Magyar, he notes, “still has reservations”, as he has opposed sending weapons to Kyiv and remains sceptical of Ukrainian EU membership. “I don’t believe in an overnight conversion,” Bond says flatly. Magyar reiterated that stance on Monday, saying: “We are talking about a country at war. It is completely out of the question for the European Union to admit a country at war.” 

Watch more‘Undeterred’: Hungarian journalist faces threats, espionage claims from Orban

Cenusa is equally measured on the wider geopolitical significance. “The Orban factor on EU integration was slightly exaggerated,” he says. “He was creating problems, but he was not the only one. With or without him, EU integration will proceed.” 

What does change, he argues, is the symbolic register. The defeat is “a blow to European illiberalism” but it may also, paradoxically, be “an incentive for far-right forces to learn from Orban’s mistakes.”