Hungary's Orban Defeat is Also a Defeat For The Right and It Also Offers a Road Map

Viktor Orban, center right, in Budapest on Sunday, the night of his election defeat. He was voted out after 16 years in power in Hungary.Credit...Bernadett Szabo/Reuters

By Mark Landler

Reporting from Paris

New York Times

Vice President JD Vance wasn’t the only right-wing ally whose last-minute pitch for Prime Minister Viktor Orban fell flat. In the weeks before Mr. Orban lost power in a landslide election on Sunday, Hungary’s faltering populist was also flanked on the campaign trail by far-right leaders from France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Now, those politicians must reckon with the bruising defeat of a man who was at once their leadership model, intellectual godfather and, in some cases, long-distance financier. What lessons they draw from his defeat could foretell whether the populist, far-right wave keeps rolling across Europe.

With far-right parties in France, Britain and Germany all within striking distance of power, Hungary offers a road map for how populist movements can go astray, said Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the Jean Jaurès Foundation, a left-leaning think tank in Paris. 

Mr. Orban, he said, was brought down after 16 years in power by voters fed up with his government’s corruption, inattention to the economy and ceaseless battles with the European Union. His coziness with President Trump, embodied by Mr. Vance’s visit, did nothing to help and may have added to the backlash because of the unpopularity of the American-Israeli war on Iran and the resulting spike in energy costs.

Two men in dark suits, one waving, the other raising a fist. A crowd with many small flags is visible behind them.

Vice President JD Vance campaigning with Mr. Orban in Budapest this month.Credit...Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

On that last point, there are signs that leaders are taking the lesson to heart. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, whose far-right pedigree and assiduous cultivation of Mr. Trump had earned her the reputation of “Trump whisperer,” broke openly with him this week, calling his criticism of Pope Leo XIV over the war “unacceptable.”

Ms. Meloni has also edged away from Mr. Trump on the war. She has joined more centrist European leaders, like President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, in preventing American war planes from using air bases on European soil as a springboard for offensive strikes on Iran.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s far-right party, Reform U.K., stumped for Mr. Trump during his three presidential campaigns and was a regular visitor to his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, hoping for a return endorsement.

As it became clear how unpopular Mr. Trump has become in Britain, even among some Reform voters, Mr. Farage has gone, by his own description, from fast friend to chance acquaintance. “I happen to know him,” he told the Financial Times this week, “but that’s by the by.” 

Nigel Farage, in a suit, speaks at a podium, hands raised. Donald J. Trump stands smiling to his right, wearing a dark suit and a pink tie. 

Nigel Farage of the British party Reform U.K. at a rally in 2016 in Jackson, Miss., with Donald J. Trump. Mr. Farage is now seeking to distance himself from the president.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

Still, in other ways, analysts said Europe’s far-right parties remain vulnerable to the same failings that brought down Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party.

Mr. Farage’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, has recently been caught up in allegations that his property company failed to pay adequate taxes (Mr. Tice has said the dispute is over a “technicality.”). A former leader of Reform in Wales was jailed last year for taking bribes in return for making favorable statements about Russia while he was a member of the European Parliament.

“Farage has to be really careful about corruption,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, who follows the right. “That is a kind of Achilles’ heel for him.”

In France, the leader of the far-right National Rally, Marine Le Pen, is appealing a conviction for embezzling from the European Parliament to fund her party’s operations. Unless her appeal succeeds, she will be barred from running for president of France next year. Jordan Bardella, her protégé, is expected to run in her place. 

“I would love for my country that they can learn a lesson from this, that they can change their behavior,” Mr. Camus said of the National Rally. “But I fear they cannot. They do not have the imagination.”

For Ms. Le Pen, the defeat of Mr. Orban deprives her not only of a stalwart ally but also of a potential source of funding. In 2022, at a time when Ms. Le Pen’s last presidential campaign was in financial trouble, she obtained a loan of 10.7 million euros ($12.5 million) from a Hungarian bank part-owned by a friend of Mr. Orban’s. Mr. Orban supported her after her conviction, and Ms. Le Pen linked arms with him before his defeat at what was billed as a rally of “Patriots of Europe.”

Four people stand on a stage, with two waving. Many hands holding cellphones fill the foreground, and a Hungarian flag is visible.

Far-right leaders from across Europe with Mr. Orban last month on the campaign trail. From left are Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Mr. Orban and Matteo Salvini, a deputy prime minister in Italy.Credit...Marton Monus/Reuters

Praising Mr. Orban as a “visionary and above all a pioneer,” Ms. Le Pen said his victory would kick off a string of victories for far-right parties in France, Spain, Italy and Poland. That would deliver a cherished goal of the far right: an effective majority among members of the European Union, bringing a halt to what Ms. Le Pen views as the corrosive overreach of Brussels.

But with Mr. Orban defeated, the National Rally instead faces growing scrutiny for what critics say is the lack of a credible economic plan, another weakness it shares with Hungary’s Fidesz. At a time when the Iran war is worsening a cost-of-living crisis, economists doubt the party, known in France by its acronym, R.N., has the tools to deal with France’s poor productivity and yawning deficit. 

“That, essentially, is the daily reality for voters,” said Pascal Perrineau, an expert on the far right at Sciences Po, a university in Paris. “And here, they see that the populists’ promises have been for nothing — that Trump is failing in his fight against inflation, that Orban has failed in his fight against inflation, and that, tomorrow, the R.N. would fail in the fight against inflation.”

Mr. Bardella and Ms. Le Pen have tried to reposition the party to be more business friendly. She met for a private dinner with corporate bosses in Paris last week. A year before the presidential election, Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Bardella still lead all rivals in opinion polls.

But a far-right victory no longer seems foreordained. A recent poll that pitted Mr. Bardella against the leading center-right candidate, Édouard Philippe, in a runoff, found that Mr. Philippe led by 52 percent to 48 percent, the first time in several months that Mr. Bardella was not the front-runner.

“They have lost something really important,” said Ben Ansell, a professor of comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford. “They have lost a sense of inevitability.”

And yet Mr. Ansell noted that in France, Germany and other countries, far-right parties did still retain one conspicuous advantage: They are insurgents, running against entrenched political interests — the same dynamic that enabled the Hungarian challenger, Peter Magyar, to topple Mr. Orban. 

In France, the departing president, Mr. Macron, is in his ninth year in office, the longest-serving leader of a major European country. In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has cobbled together a familiar, and unwieldy, coalition of his center-right Christian Democratic Union with the center-left Social Democrats — the same two parties that have dominated German politics for decades.

That gives the German far-right party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, a rich target for its crusade against politics as usual. Some analysts offered a contrarian take: While the AfD, like its right-wing brethren, allied itself with Mr. Orban, the party could use the defeat of a longstanding incumbent to inspire German voters to vote out their own incumbents. For the AfD’s base, among disaffected voters in eastern Germany, it might even carry an echo of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

“They will latch on to whatever narrative is convenient,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “If they have to, they will latch on to the idea of being the last of the Mohicans.”