After Orban

The regime of Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party in Hungary has for the last 16 years been a model for the populist attempt to remove liberalism from democracy. Right-wing populists naturally seek a democratic mandate against corrupt elites but want to be unrestrained in the use of state power to repress minorities and political opponents deemed outside the community and interests of common folk. The result in Hungary since the early 2010s has been an autocracy with checks on Orban's executive authority severely reduced, political opponents persecuted, and immigrants and LGBT people scapegoated. The very phrase "illiberal democracy" which academics have come to use to characterize other similar regimes such as Putin's Russia, or the political goals of other far-right populist movements such as MAGA was used by Orban to describe his ideal political order. So foundational in cannons of far-right politics has the Fidesz regime been that it has cultivated a close relationship both with the MAGA movement and Putin's Russia.

Orban pioneered techniques of resistance to EU policies as well as an illiberal coalition within the European Parliament. This is only natural as right-wing populists usually subscribe to Euroskepticism on the basis of their awareness that the EU is a technocratic body which exists to protect the kind of procedural politics consonant with a liberal world order. As such Hungary has used its veto to block EU assistance to Ukraine and sanction of Russia during the Ukraine-Russia war. However, Fidesz seems to have come out on the losing side of the 2026 elections with the majority of the seats going to Peter Magyar's Tisza party which has brought together right-wing and left-wing opposition to Fidesz. Magyar is a conservative who left Fidesz and has promised sweeping corruption reform, making supporters and observers hopeful that as the new prime minister he will bring Hungary back within the liberal EU orbit.

Despite the fact that Orban's government was a global model for the far-right, the broader fortunes of far-right parties in other countries will be determined by domestic factors. Comparisons to Donald Trump's 2020 presidential election loss to Joe Biden are easy to come by. In 2020 Trump's right-wing populism was defeated by the centrist, technocratic liberalism of the Democratic Party establishment. In this case Trump refused to ever concede defeat, but in 2026 Hungary, Orban has already politely conceded his loss.

In both instances the far-right was handed a major defeat by a liberal establishment which it had previously put on the back foot. However, the long-term results of Trump's defeat should make us wary for those of Orban's. In not addressing any of the issues with the elitist and technocratic nature of American liberal democracy and failing to bar Trump from reelection despite him attempting a coup against the 2020 election results, the Biden administration set the stage for 2024 when Trump returned with a vengeance and immediately carried out a huge purge of government bodies according to his illiberal designs.

The basic fuel of right-wing populism is the elitist nature of technocratic politics and the existence of culture wars between dominant majorities and marginalized minority groups. All liberal democratic states are marked by technocratic politics in which most important political decisions are made by elected and appointed officials and the extent of mass political participation is voting for representatives and on referendums. As a consequence, racial, gender, sexual inequalities and discrimination can be found throughout them. The fact that they all define political participation by nationality means by necessity those deemed outside the national community are politically and socially marginalized.

The struggle by these marginalized groups such as people of color, LGBT people, women, immigrants, and their allies has created since the 19th and 20th centuries a massive culture war across these societies in which these groups contest their marginalization and dominant groups and their allies fight against the progress they make and attempt to make. The intensification of these struggles since the 60s plus increasing inequality as a result of liberal democratic political-economic elitism has produced a rising right-wing populist movement which has gained political power throughout the global north. Right-wing populism proclaims that the solution to the culture war and elitism is to capture democracy in the interests of the native common people and their social traditions, thus not only excluding elites, but also various minority groups and progressive movements. Since liberal democracy, defined by technocratic separation of government powers and thus expert mediated public political consensus, is inherently elitist no matter how many electoral defeats populists suffer at the hands of their centrist adversaries, liberal democracy will always create the conditions for right-wing populism to crop up, especially in the 20th century as inequality and culture wars accelerate.

Thus, even if Magyar manages to implement a swing of Hungary back into the liberal democratic orbit, it will likely be precisely this achievement that keeps the populist flame alive in the country. Actually, defeating the threat posed to minorities and political freedom posed by right-wing populism requires replacing liberal democracy with a non-elitist alternative aligned with the self-determination of marginalized groups. This alternative would have to put control over social administration in the hands of voluntary associations of individuals with the power to allocate social wealth to meeting the needs of all those individuals. Such associations would need to be constructed within the existing world and begin to take control of social space and social wealth and thereby undermine both right-wing populist movements and the technocratic power-structures.

Sources
https://time.com/article/2026/04/12/viktor-orban-election-loss-trump/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv2QItiMgj4&pp=ygUPaHVuZ2FyeSBsZ2J0IGR3
Populism, Mudde and Kaltwasser
https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-self-coup-south-korea-presidents-attempt-ended-in-failure-a-notable-exception-in-a-growing-global-trend-235738
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/illiberal-democracy-and-the-struggle-on-the-right/?ref=redandblackanarchists.com.au
Politics, Tansey and Jackson
Democracy, Zack