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To be in Budapest last Sunday evening was to see history again being made on the Danube. As rapturous crowds gathered on the riverbank opposite the brightly illuminated parliament building, chanting “Ria-ria Hungaria!” and “Hungary-Europe!”, we all knew that the implications of the dramatic election victory for the Tisza party of Péter Magyar go far beyond this one central European country. The result is very good news for Ukraine and the European Union. It’s correspondingly bad news for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the US president, Donald Trump, those twin backers of Viktor Orbán’s regime. The critical question now is whether Hungary can be the first country in the world to emerge from such a far-reaching populist erosion of democracy – the “Orbánisation” Trump is trying to emulate in the US – and whether Europe has the political will and imagination to enable it to succeed.
Already on Friday evening, standing amid a huge crowd of young people at a “system-changer” concert on Heroes’ Square, I felt the energy for change. In the very square where, back in 1989, I watched a fiery young student leader named Viktor Orbán call for the end of the weary old communist regime and for the Russians to go home, I now saw a new generation of Hungarians calling for the end of a weary old regime led by this same Orbán and his Fidesz party. “Filthy Fidesz!” they cried and, yes, “Russians go home!” For everyone knows that today’s Orbán is Putin’s man in Brussels.
On Saturday evening, standing in a smaller crowd of mainly middle-aged people listening to Orbán give his final campaign speech in front of the statue of St Stephen on the Buda side of the river, I felt the full exhaustion of his regime. Despite the professional panoply of mobilisation – standardised flags, little groups with megaphones to prompt the chants, searchlights pointing up into the night sky à la Albert Speer – this rally had all the energy of a pensioners’ tea party. Orbán himself was hoarse, aggressive and irritable, even at one point complaining about young people these days. I thought to myself: he’s the old communist now. In the bus on the way down from Buda, the student who was interpreting for me heard a woman behind us ask one of the Fidesz flag-wavers, “How much have they paid you since 15 March?” “I’ll tell you later,” he replied.
Yet despite the encouraging opinion polls, on the morning of election day we were still completely unsure how things would turn out. As Sunday progressed and we started seeing record figures for turnout, spirits rose. After the polls closed at 7pm, the actual constituency results soon showed a landslide. An outpouring of popular will had simply overwhelmed the gerrymandering, media control and outright vote-buying that made this definitely not a level playing field. Then, shortly after 9pm, an astonishing brief message popped up on Magyar’s Facebook page: Orbán had just rung him and conceded defeat. (To adapt Shakespeare: nothing became Orbán in his political life like the leaving of it.) At once, the celebration began. “Voldemort is gone!” exclaimed Julia, a young researcher accompanying me down to the river.
Later that evening, Magyar delivered his acceptance speech on the bank of the Danube. He promised to make Hungary a country where everyone can live freely as they choose, to restore constitutional checks and balances, mend relations with neighbours and make Hungary a strong partner in Nato and the EU. “Europa! Europa! Europa!” chanted the crowd.
Monday morning dawned and sober analysis began. Can they do it? Obviously what happened in 1989 was much bigger than this, but everyone is using the same Hungarian word for system change that we heard so often then. (Rendszerváltás can also be translated as regime change, but for me that carries strong overtones of external intervention.) Since the landslide has given Tisza the crucial two-thirds supermajority in parliament that allows you to change constitutional arrangements, they can overcome most of the kinds of obstacle that are hindering a post-populist transition in Poland. The president and the constitutional court could still be a problem. Much will depend on how united Fidesz remains and how far Orbán wants to go in resisting the change. But there’s a good chance the political system can be transformed.
A more difficult challenge is the economics. The Hungarian economy is in a bad way. Fidesz has already blown more than three-quarters of this year’s annual budget in an attempt to woo voters. Nobody knows what’s in the energy, investment and loan contracts with Russia and China. Magyar’s sweeping promises to maintain Fidesz welfare payments and price controls won’t help either. Tisza aims to recover large sums stolen by people connected with the Orbán regime, but that won’t be easy. So gaining rapid unbureaucratic access to some €17bn (£15bn) of frozen EU funds, plus new ones to follow, will be critical.
The EU and individual European governments should do all they can to support this unprecedented post-populist system change. Not without conditions, of course. But rather than those conditions being the Brussels bureaucratic box-ticking ones that the Orbán regime exploited so brilliantly, they should be substantive political ones, tailored to the unique nature and difficulty of this transition. National leaders, including the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, should join the EU’s institutional leaders in having that top-level conversation with the incoming Hungarian leadership. Issues such as media freedom, accountability and checks on an overmighty executive should be high on the list.
I was so struck by the number of young Hungarians spontaneously chanting positive slogans about Europe on the streets of Budapest. In a sense, this almost feels like Hungary’s second “return to Europe” (one of the mottoes of 1989).
The EU also owes the Hungarian people morally, since Brussels was itself among the principal enablers of Orbán’s demolition of liberal democracy. It allowed billions of euros in EU funds to be directly and corruptly misused for that purpose. One of the first European politicians to congratulate Magyar on Sunday, Manfred Weber, was for many years a prime protector of Fidesz in the European People’s party. “Dear Viktor” was indulged for far too long by the “gentleman’s club” of national leaders in the European Council, including female members such as the former German chancellor Angela Merkel. (The former European Council president Jean-Claude Juncker once famously greeted the Hungarian prime minister with the jovial words “Hello, dictator!” Ho, ho.)
Above all, though, there’s the priceless prize of showing that there is a path out of deep populism. Hungary was one of the first European countries to escape from communism in 1989. It was absolutely the first to fall into democracy-eroding populism in 2010. If it can now be the first to emerge successfully on the other side, that will be a vital precedent. Even the US might then want to take some Hungarian lessons.
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Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His book The Magic Lantern contains an eyewitness account of the young Orbán’s 1989 appearance in Heroes’ Square
