Election loss for Hungarian PM Orbán has ripple effects for Trump, US conservatives
The big election over the weekend was in a small European country nearly half a world away from Washington, but the defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has significant reverberations in the United States
WASHINGTON -- The big election over the weekend was in a small European country nearly half a world away from Washington, but the defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has significant reverberations in the United States.
That's because President Donald Trump and many U.S. conservatives have long embraced Orbán, who has become an icon among the global right for his anti-immigrant stance. The American president's agenda has striking parallels with the way the Hungarian leader used the levers of government to tilt the media, judiciary and electoral system to keep his party in power for 16 years.
Trump supported Orbán’s reelection bid and even dispatched Vice President JD Vance to Budapest last week — in the midst of the Iran war — to stump for the incumbent.
Orbán's loss was a reminder of how the war has diminished Trump's ability to help allied politicians overseas, as well as of the limited ability of leaders to use their power to tilt voting in their direction in an age of worldwide discontent over incumbents of all ideological stripes.
“Oppositions can win despite a tilted playing field,” said Steven Levitsky, a politics professor at Harvard and coauthor of the book “How Democracies Die.” “Democracies are facing many challenges in many parts of the world, but so are autocracies.”
Orbán’s defeat has immediate global implications because he was the European leader closest to Russian President Vladimir Putin and had blocked European Union aid to Ukraine, which is defending itself after Russian's 2022 invasion.
His fall was celebrated on Sunday by both Democrats and Republicans, some of whom criticized their own administration for such overt support for the Hungarian leader.
“Don’t fiddle-paddle in other democracies’ elections,” Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska said on the social media site X.
“The freedom-loving people of Hungary have voted decisively in favor of democracy and the rule of law,” posted Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi.
Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is part of the wing of the American right that embraced Orbán. The Conservative Political Action Conference, which Schlapp's group hosts, held its first European session in Budapest and has made Hungary a regular destination.
Orban was a featured speaker at the group's conference in Dallas in 2022.
Schlapp said there's an easy explanation for Orbán's loss.
“Eventually, democracies just want change,” he said. “In democracies, you don't have kings, and the people in the end speak.”
"The people of Hungary were saying, 'We're having a difficult time with inflation, the economy and the war. Let's try the new guy,'” Schlapp said, noting that he backs Trump's Iran war but the turmoil it's created, especially in European energy markets, hurt Orbán.
Diana Sosoaca, a far-right member of the European Parliament from Romania, on Sunday called Vance's Hungarian visit “a big mistake” given widespread revulsion at the Iran war on the continent.
“You invite a representative of the United States of America, who created the big disorder in this world?” Sosoaca said in an interview posted by the Kremlin-controlled network RT, formerly known as Russia Today. “It was the biggest mistake he could do before the elections.”
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