BUDAPEST — On Tuesday, the day that the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled to Kyiv to show solidarity with a besieged Ukraine, Viktor Orban, the prime minister of nearby Hungary, trumpeted his neutrality at a sprawling rally in Budapest.
“We cannot get between the Ukrainian anvil and the Russian hammer,” he said. He accused the Hungarian opposition of trying to drag Hungary to war and vowed to send neither troops nor weapons to the battleground.
State-aligned media — which, in Hungary, is almost all media — had been blasting out Kremlin talking points for weeks, and it was easy to find people in the crowd who echoed them. An older man in a traditional black Bocskai jacket described Russia’s invasion as “just” and Volodymyr Zelensky as “scum” before blaming George Soros and the Freemasons for the war. A middle-aged woman expressed sympathy for Ukrainian refugees but accused Ukraine of provoking Russia by oppressing Russian and Hungarian speakers. “You don’t wake a sleeping lion,” she said.
Hungary’s opposition — which appears, for the first time in over a decade, to have a shot at ousting the authoritarian Orban — held a rally in Budapest on the same day, on the opposite side of the Danube.
I’d met the opposition candidate for prime minister, Peter Marki-Zay, the mayor of the southern Hungarian town of Hodmezovasarhely, the day before, as he worked on his speech. One of his central points, he said, was that Hungary must decide between two worlds: Vladimir Putin’s Russia or the liberal West. “Putin and Orban belong to this autocratic, repressive, poor and corrupt world,” Marki-Zay told me. “And we have to choose Europe, West, NATO, democracy, rule of law, freedom of the press, a very different world. The free world.”
Recently, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama made a number of highly optimistic predictions about how Russia’s war on Ukraine would play out. Russia, he wrote on March 10, faced outright defeat, and Putin wouldn’t survive it. Further, he wrote, “the invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who, prior to the attack, uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin,” including Donald Trump and Orban. The Hungarian elections on April 3 will be an early test of this theory.
Just as Israelis from across the political spectrum united to get rid of Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarians of many different ideological persuasions are working together to defeat Orban, a hero to many American conservatives for his relentless culture-warring.
Hoping to neutralize Orban’s demagogy against urban elites, the Hungarian opposition has united behind Marki-Zay, a 49-year-old Catholic father of seven and a relative political outsider.
Marki-Zay, who lived in Indiana from 2006 to 2009, often sounds like an old-school Republican. He favors lower taxes and a decentralized government. “We want to give opportunity and not welfare checks to people,” he told me.
He believes in Catholic teachings on gay marriage, abortion and divorce but doesn’t think they should be law. “We cannot force our views on the rest of the society,” he said. “One big difference between Western societies and certain Islamist states is that in Western society, church doesn’t rule everyday life.” Some on the left might blanch at the gratuitous invocation of Islam, but part of Marki-Zay’s skill is using conservative language to make case for liberalism.
In the coming elections, Marki-Zay is an underdog, but the fact that he’s even in the running is a remarkable development in a country with a system as tilted as Hungary’s. Hungarian electoral districts are highly gerrymandered in favor of Orban’s party, Fidesz. Gergely Karacsony, the left-leaning mayor of Budapest and a political scientist, said the anti-Orban forces would probably need to win the popular vote by three or four percentage points to achieve a parliamentary majority. (By contrast, in the last elections Fidesz was able to win a two-thirds majority with 49 percent of the vote.) The opposition has had to contend with a near blackout in the mainstream media; Marki-Zay said he hasn’t been asked to appear on television since 2019, while Orban has unleashed a barrage of propaganda against him.
Fidesz, he said, has convinced its base that the opposition “will take away their pensions, will cancel the minimum wage,” will send their children to fight in Ukraine and will “allow sex change operations without the consent of parents” for kindergartners. These voters, said Marki-Zay, “are just frightened. They hate. I meet such people every day during this campaign. People who are just shouting profanities. You can feel the hatred, and you can see in their eyes how fearful they are of Orban losing the election.”
But plenty of voters are still reachable via social media and door-to-door canvassing. Marki-Zay puts his chances at about 50 percent, and while other analysts I spoke to thought his odds were lower, no one wrote him off. A big question is whether the crisis in Ukraine will make voters prioritize stability or turn Orban’s relationship with Putin into a liability. In a recent Euronews poll, 60 percent of respondents said Hungary has gotten too close to Russia and Putin, but that doesn’t mean the issue will determine their vote.
Even if Orban wins another term, Peter Kreko, the director of the Political Capital Institute, a Budapest-based think tank, thinks Orban’s dream of creating a right-wing nationalist bloc in Europe is dead. The war in Ukraine has driven a wedge between him and the nationalist government in Poland, which favors an aggressive response to Russia.
And a history of pro-Putin sentiment has suddenly become embarrassing for some of Orban’s European allies. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally — who received a nearly $12 million loan from a Hungarian bank tied to Orban — has been put on the defensive over campaign fliers showing her shaking Putin’s hand. Matteo Salvini, the head of Italy’s right-wing League party, was humiliated during a visit to Przemysl, a Polish town near the Ukrainian border, when the mayor confronted him with a pro-Putin T-shirt like one that Salvini once wore in Moscow’s Red Square.
There was supposed to be a Hungarian version of America’s Conservative Political Action Conference this month, but it has been postponed until May. In Budapest, many speculated that American Republicans weren’t as keen as they once were to be seen with Orban. “Right now, I think because Orban has so much aligned himself with Russia, I think it’s detrimental to his international image as well,” said Kreko. “And he might win one more round, but I think he just will not be able to fulfill all his authoritarian dreams.”
At the opposition rally, which drew tens of thousands of people, a band played a Hungarian version of Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power,” and Smith, who performed in Budapest last year, sent a video greeting. Ukrainian flags dotted the crowd.
Bogdan Klich, the minority leader in Poland’s Senate, watched from backstage. He hoped that a Marki-Zay victory would be a blow to anti-democratic forces in his own country. “There is a chance that illiberal democracy, that was presented and unfortunately implemented by Viktor Orban here, will be replaced by traditional European and Atlantic values,” he said. “I mean the rule of law, the respect for human rights and civil liberties, independence of judiciary, etc. This is what we need here in Hungary, and in Poland.”
Orban’s rise to power marked the beginning of the authoritarian populist era. If he somehow falls, it might mark the beginning of the end of it.
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