Orban defeated: Good morning and goddamn it's a beautiful day

All of a sudden, after months of total darkness, there is hope.

Photo by Jure Tufekcic on Unsplash

The sun is streaming through the window, the sky is a glorious light shade of blue, the birds are singing, and the tyrant king has been destroyed.

Last night, at 9:14 pm local time, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban called opposition leader Peter Magyar and conceded victory following a landslide defeat at the general election.

Some disparate thoughts below.

This is a triumph for Hungarians. There are obviously major international dimensions to what has happened here, but take a moment to think of the Hungarians who have fought for it. They have laboured for 16 years, in conditions far worse than anything we have faced here.

Orban took over everything and placed Fidesz party loyalists in key positions, maintaining a kind of institutional Gleichschaltung. He stuffed the judiciary full of his cronies. He put them in positions of local power. He inserted them into schools. He placed them in museums and opera houses. He even made sure a Fidesz puppet was put in charge of a cooking magazine. No part of social life was outside of his control or his pathological need for dominion.

And yet for all that time, many brave Hungarians diligently did their work. They kept their head down when they had to and raised it when they needed to. Countless journalists lost their jobs, or reported for every smaller independent outlets on miniscule salaries, or simply found ways to sneak objective facts and independent reporting into what had otherwise become government propaganda. In think tanks and museums, schools and music festivals, many Hungarians worked diligently despite the pressure on them. Others lost their jobs because they would not bend to authoritarianism.

Many Hungarians embraced authoritarianism. But many others opposed it through the long years in the wilderness. They are heroes and today belongs to them.

It is almost impossible to overstate the scale of the achievement in overthrowing him. Orban controlled the media. He controlled the information environment. He had direct control of the country’s media assets: cable news, websites, newspapers, regional press, sports papers, lifestyle magazines, radio stations. He gerrymandered the electoral system, reducing the number of MPs, redrawing the constitution boundaries, and granting full voting rights to the diaspora in ways that were all intended to secure Fidesz’ power.

And yet Magyar did not just defeat Orban. He secured a super-majority of over two-thirds of the seats. For nearly a year, Orban pumped anti-Ukraine and anti-Europe messages to the Hungarian public, deploying his full-system information dominance to encourage fear and hatred. They rejected him. They committed to a European future.

The super-majority is crucial. A slim result would have probably seen Orban try to pull off a Trump-style coup. The weeks leading up to the election saw Fidesz intimidate and bribe voters. The regime was primed to accuse Zelensky and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen of subverting Hungarian democracy. Orban would have had enough of a voice in the parliament and - crucially - complete control over the judiciary, allowing him to perhaps succeed. And then what? Expulsion from Europe? The complete destruction of Hungarian democracy? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

A few people online suggested yesterday that they were surprised Orban turned out to be honourable in his concession. That’s utter nonsense. Orban has no honour. He has no decency. He is a thug and a vandal and a wannabe despot. The man would have happily overruled democracy to get what he wants, but it was simply impossible for him to do so. The scale of the landslide was too vast.

He could feel the fear. He knows how ballot box opposition can turn to street opposition if thwarted, as it did in Ukraine, a country he detests for this very fact. He knows the yearning that lies in every democrat’s heart: To feed the tyrant to the soil. And he preferred, as one commentator put it yesterday, to retreat rather than become a street ornament.

With a super-majority, Magyar can get under the hood and repair the constitution, turning Hungary back into a modern liberal democracy. He can recreate an independent judiciary. Fidesz must be extracted by the root from Hungarian society. Fidesz loyalists must be removed from their positions of control. All of that becomes much easier with a result of this magnitude.

Magyar gets this. During his speech to the crowds thronging on the banks of the Danube yesterday, he said: “Today the Hungarian people decided to change the regime and those who are part of this regime must leave public life… I call upon all the puppets to do the same, to leave their office, those who served the Orbán regime in the last 16 years.”

The battle against populism is a battle against corruption. Much has been made of the way that Magyar ran on an anti-corruption ticket. This makes it sound as if his campaign was not technically anti-populist, as if it were not aimed at core populist principles. But in fact, the corruption was the point. Orban did not gain control over the media by passing legislation banning free speech. He did it by getting his network of oligarch allies to buy up outlets and then turn them into Fidesz mouthpieces.

It started back in 1994, when his ally Lajos Simicska took control of the state media company Mahir alongside a large publishing company, then used tax loopholes to found Fidesz’ first daily newspaper. In these early days they perfected the strategy: buy out an entity, shift its editorial stance to a pro-Orban position, then flood it with money from their other business interests. Other loyalists were given positions in state advertising, from which they could pump advertising money into regime-friendly outlets. In the end, Orban turned against Simicska and dismantled his media empire. Then loyal oligarchs donated 476 media outlets to the government’s Central European press and Media Foundation. The job was done.

This is one of the things which people often fail to grasp about populism. They treat the corruption as an unrelated secondary narrative to the main ideological agenda. But in fact they are both elements of the same agenda. The corruption buys loyalty. It creates a closed eco-system of funding for regime-friendly voices. It secures allies in place across the constitutional landscape. Corruption is the means by which a regime can replace accountable liberal institutions with closed personal networks.

The fight against the far-right is much more compelling to voters when it is framed in the practical opposition to corruption than the ideological opposition to populism.

The most immediate issues which arise from the election are basically financial. The first concerns the €17 billion in EU funding which has been held back as a result of Hungarian democratic backsliding. There were lots of calls last night for the EU to immediately flood Hungary with the money as a reward. That’s not right at all. It would make the EU nearly as corrupt as those who oppose it.

The funds have been withheld as a result of Orban’s corruption. Hungary was told it could secure the funds if it demonstrated fair procurement rules, an independent judiciary and academic freedom. The EU was fighting for its liberal values in the only way it knows: using money.

The retrieval of the funds therefore hinges on quick reforms to show compliance. With a super-majority, that should be fairly easy. The tough part is a ‘super-milestone’ on judicial reform which needs to be completed - or at least to show evidence of progress - by August 31st. This unlocks the first €10 billion. There will then be a series of more granular reforms around climate and digital transition which needs to be completed by 2028. This unlocks another €7 billion. The crucial point here is that wealth should be shown to come from liberal democratic reforms, not from voting the right way, or we’re just as bad as the bastards we’ve come here to bury.

Ukraine is the other key financial element. Hungary’s veto was the block holding up a €90 billion EU loan for Ukraine. Magyar is not exactly a die-hard Zelensky ally. He is critical of Ukraine joining the EU and of weapons being sent to the country. But this should not be a major problem. He wants back into the EU fold. He wants to fundamentally change Hungary’s relationship with the continent. And where desires coincide, practical solutions develop.

It will be very easy for Magyar to simply stand back and not veto the Ukraine loan. This will create huge goodwill. It is also potentially crucial in the war against Russian imperialism, finally allowing Europe to step into a funding leadership role that the US has vacated. There will then be perfectly obvious compromises on Ukrainian membership, probably by unlocking the next stage of talks while remaining initially ambiguous on when and how full membership will take place.

Populism’s spiritual figurehead has been destroyed. Some people like to put Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi forward as the first of the modern populist leaders, but he is of a slightly different quality and vintage. He was too chaotic and clown-like to inspire many others to emulate him. It was Orban who provided the template, the proof of concept. He was the forerunner.

This was not simply about social control, democratic backsliding and the use of corruption as a political method. It was about the fundamental populist narrative: the creation of a rolling series of imaginary crises, a constantly updated fictitious enemy representing the global elite and internal minorities. It was about a storyline of grievance and victimhood, a constant attempt to pitch citizen against citizen.

Every single one of the populists who came after him learned their trade, to some extent or other, from Orban. You can see this in the far-right figures who went all-out to back him, throughout his time in power. When Orban won four years ago, Nigel Farage was quick out the gates to congratulate him. Donald Trump barely went a day during this campaign without writing long messages in support of him. He then resorted to trying to bribe, or rather blackmail, Hungarian voters with financial offers, in a grotesque demonstration of his total lack of respect for other country’s democratic processes. He sent JD Vance, a rolling catastrophe of a human being, to demand Hungarians vote the way the US wanted them to.

All the worst bastards in the world did their bit to protect the spiritual father. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, former leader of the National Rally in France Marine Le Pen, co-chair of the Alternative for Germany Alice Weidel.

Unseen, silent, but most important of all: Vladimir Putin. The man who stands at the top of the populist pyramid. The litmus test of global indecency.

He lost a lot last night. It was his worst setback for years. He has lost his client state within the EU, that he can use to block Ukrainian funds, to prevent coordinated defensive actions, to fill the zone with shit, and confuse the narrative. He lost a core strategic asset. The seeping wound which infected European solidarity. He will feel a sense of doubt, and anxiety, and in that feeling is the sentiment which will one day liberate Ukraine.

Don’t underestimate the psychological effect of Orban’s defeat. He was the first but he was always, it seemed, the most invulnerable. He had stacked the system so thoroughly against his opponents that it seemed impossible that he would ever be deposed. He gave populists a profound sense that history blew in their direction. He would always be there, impervious, immovable, showing the way.

Now he is gone. And perhaps they’re not as safe as they think. Perhaps there is no direction to history. There is no wind of destiny for their movement. And they too will feel fear where they once felt confidence.

Look around you and you see populism on the ropes. Trump’s approval ratings are in the toilet. He has started a war he cannot extricate himself from and becomes more visibly hysterical by the day. He looks weak and vulnerable. European figures who once looked sheepish around him now just look kind of bored. Their appetite for resistance is rising, buoyed by domestic electoral demand. Look at Vance, a figure who once arrogantly tried to humiliate Zelensky in the Oval Office - a man he is not fit to speak to, let alone berate. Now he is a global joke, a punchline, the cunt’s cunt.

Look at Meloni, who just lost a referendum in Italy on judicial reform and with it her sense of electoral immunity. Look at Spain, where the ultra-nationalist Vox party is suddenly performing under expectations against a socialist prime minister prepared to stand up to the US. Look at France, where National Rally failed in last month’s municipal elections to secure Marseille, its long-coveted prize, or other key targets like Toulon or Nîmes. Look at Slovenia, where Janez Janša was expected to be victorious and act as a secondary anti-EU saboteur in Brussels, only for him to lose to incumbent Robert Golob’s liberal Freedom Movement.

Look at Britain. Look at that Reform polling. It’s still healthy, sure, but it is clearly highly tenuous. We once used to debate where its ceiling was. We no longer debate that. It’s around 30%. We once used to debate whether it was falling. We no longer debate that. It is.

This doesn’t just matter because of the election result. It matters because it changes the political dynamic today.

Reform weaponised its polling lead to prevent any meaningful political actions being taken in the present. This was the case for Net Zero. Richard Tice attempted to threaten energy companies away from clean energy by warning of what a future Reform government would do. It was also the case for Europe. As long as Farage looked likely to be the next prime minister, there was no point in the EU meaningfully negotiating, because it could all be undone as soon as the next election happened. And it was the case for the media narrative in general. As long as Reform looked invulnerable, journalists could justify taking their talking points as narrative frames for debates. Now, it is harder.

All of a sudden, after months of total darkness, there is hope. There is a sense that liberal democracy can still triumph against the populist threat, it can withstand the joint assault from the Kremlin and the White House.

Populism’s victory is not inevitable. It is not invulnerable. This is just the lie they tell you to kill your resistance, to make you feel hopeless, to see you lost in pessimism and despair.

They can be defeated. Bathe in the glory of their fall. Not out of malice or viciousness, but because that glory is a reminder that the war can still be won and the battles are still worth fighting.