No gods, no monsters

The prominence of words like “ousted” and “fall” in mainstream commentary about this week’s Hungarian election is deeply telling.

Since the beginning of his second term as Prime Minister in 2010, Viktor Orbán has loomed large in the minds of Western commentators. His overtly nationalist rhetoric, and his willingness to mould the organs of state to achieve his political ends, has led many establishment commentators to conclude that Hungary is the birthplace of a new and dangerous strain of authoritarian politics.

In 2014, the late John McCain described Orbán as a “neo-fascist dictator”. In 2019, then-Swedish Minister for Social Affairs Annika Strandhäll insisted that the Hungarian Government’s family planning policies “reek of the 1930s”. In 2022, the European Parliament voted to condemn the “deliberate and systematic efforts of the Hungarian government to undermine European values”, arguing that Hungary under Orbán was now described as a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”. The V-Dem Institute and Freedom House both reclassified Hungary as an “electoral autocracy” or “hybrid regime” over the course of Orbán’s premiership. In the power centres of the Western establishment, the question was not whether Orbán actually wanted to rule Hungary as an out-and-out authoritarian — it was instead whether or not he’d already reached that position.

It should therefore come as no surprise that many establishment commentators have described Orbán’s electoral defeat in the same language that they might have applied to the removal of Bashar al-Assad or Saddam Hussein. The insurgent Péter Magyar, whose Tisza Party displaced the ruling Fidesz in a landslide victory, is correspondingly described in a tone of reverence usually reserved for long-suffering freedom fighters.

This is, plainly, hysterical. Orbán did alter the Hungarian constitution in a way that allowed him to pursue his political aims, but the changes that he oversaw were a far cry from an Enabling Act. He cut funding for charities and organisations that didn’t align with his political beliefs, and provided funding for those that did — but in doing so, he was largely replicating the playbook deployed by numerous left-of-centre leaders across Europe.

When he was defeated at the ballot box, he conceded almost immediately, and, at the time of writing, shows no signs of resisting the peaceful transfer of power. Viktor Orbán is simply not the latter-day Mussolini that many Eurocrats and Guardian commentators believe him to be.

But this Orbán obsession is not a uniquely left-wing affliction. Both ends of the political spectrum are guilty of overstating the importance and peculiarity of his political project. 

For some on the emergent “new right”, Orbánism represents a much-sought-after antidote to the left-liberal orthodoxy which has dominated “Western” society since the end of the Second World War. Pre-election endorsements from J.D. Vance, Javier Milei, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Giorgia Meloni demonstrate the outsized role that Hungary plays in the imagination of right-wing luminaries the world over.

The fact that Orbán is so widely celebrated is by no means an accident. This is a narrative sustained, in large part, by conservative organisations in Western Europe and North America who have received money from the Hungarian government and its civil society organs. In building this grand narrative around himself, Orbán was able to simultaneously draw on international support for his domestic efforts, and demonstrate to the Hungarian people that he was capable of exercising outsized influence on global events. 

But in its practical application, Orbánism is a profoundly unsatisfying answer to the malaise which has fallen across Europe and its descendant societies. Under Orbán, Hungary’s economy has been sluggish compared to the impressive performance of its Central and Eastern European neighbours — in 2025, Hungary emerged as the poorest EU nation by household consumption, trailing Bulgaria and Romania. Wage growth has also been persistently slower than peer countries, and the petty corruption which led many Hungarians to turn away from Orbán has proven to be a drag on the country’s medium-term prospects.

And the country’s much-vaunted fertility policies have amounted to precious little. While Hungary did see an increase in its Total Fertility Rate between 2011 and 2021, the birth rate has now settled at 1.4 children per woman, well below replacement rate. A cursory look at other Central and Eastern European countries shows a similar pattern over the same period, suggesting that for all of the international excitement about Hungary’s generous fertility incentives, they have, in practice, amounted to very little.

The most defensible aspect of the Orbán record is on migration. His restrictionist approach will almost certainly prove more successful in the long-term than the suicidal policy of mass migration pursued by most Western governments over the past few decades. 

Viktor Orbán is neither the man to “save the West”, nor the man who was a hair’s breadth from dragging it back into the 1930s

But we should also be realistic about the fact that Hungary’s challenges are not the same as those faced by Britain, or the United States. The international supply of migrants to Hungary is simply far lower. The country does not have a multi-generational problem of unassimilated migrants from incompatible foreign cultures. Orbán is directionally correct about the threat that mass migration from the Third World poses, but identification of the problem alone does not provide a roadmap towards meaningfully addressing it.

Viktor Orbán is neither the man to “save the West”, nor the man who was a hair’s breadth from dragging it back into the 1930s. His nearest parallels are really found in Hungarian history — in figures like István Bethlen, or Gyula Gömbös. Nationalist leaders in a nationalist country, who put their fingers on the scales of the political process and promoted grand, state-led initiatives which ultimately fell short. For all the international excitement about Orbán, he is a man explained best by reference to his Central European context — and like it or not, the road to Western renewal does not originate in Ruritania.