{"id":101941,"date":"2026-04-17T05:00:39","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T09:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=101941"},"modified":"2026-04-16T18:07:33","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T22:07:33","slug":"hungary-in-the-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/04\/17\/hungary-in-the-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Hungary in the news"},"content":{"rendered":"

The way the mainstream media reacted to the recent Hungarian election results, you’d think it was the 2020s equivalent to the fall of the Iron Curtain. Outgoing leader Viktor Orb\u00e1n has been portrayed as Hungary’s Trump when he hasn’t been discussed as Hungary’s Mussolini. His successor, P\u00e9ter Magyar is largely unknown outside Hungary where he had been a member of Orb\u00e1n’s Fidesz party before leaving to join his current party, Tisza. In The Critic<\/em>, Ben Sixsmith<\/a> provides some useful background on the state of politics in Hungary today:<\/p>\n

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Hungarian Prime Minister-elect P\u00e9ter Magyar, on 15 March 2026 during a national day demonstration at Heroes’ Square in Budapest. Magyar is wearing a traditional bocskai<\/em> jacket and a national cockade.
Photo by Norbert Banhalmi and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

Tisza \u2014 the name being a portmanteau of the Hungarian words tisztelet<\/em> (respect) and szabads\u00e1g<\/em> (freedom), and a reference to the nation’s second largest river \u2014 was founded in 2020 and registered in 2022. It was a very marginal conservative party with policies<\/a> like “raise the minimum pension” and “stop migration”.<\/p>\n

In the 2022 parliamentary elections, the party fielded no candidates at all.<\/p>\n

Tisza became a major force in Hungarian elections when P\u00e9ter Magyar joined the party. Magyar, who has a legal background, had been a member of Viktor Orb\u00e1n’s party Fidesz. More significantly, he had been married to the Hungarian Minister of Justice, Judit Varga, from 2006 to 2023.<\/p>\n

In 2024, Varga resigned, along with Hungarian president Katalin Nov\u00e1k, after both were exposed as having signed a pardon for a convicted paedophile who had been a director of a state-run children’s home. Magyar resigned from Fidesz, accusing Orb\u00e1n of “hiding behind women’s skirts”.<\/p>\n

“For a long time I believed in an idea, a national, sovereign, civic Hungary,” wrote Magyar in a much-quoted statement<\/a>, “But in recent years, I have slowly and finally realized that all of this is really just a political product.”<\/p>\n

Magyar became a ferocious critic of alleged government corruption. His ex-wife responded to his anti-Orb\u00e1n activities by accusing him of domestic abuse. Magyar denied this. Undaunted, he led various anti-government demonstrations, which attracted tens of thousands of Hungarians. He was also chosen to lead Tisza.<\/p>\n

Magyar has profited from good timing. He is also a photogenic man who has performed well on social media. His politics are more mysterious. He has called himself a “critical pro-European and a conservative liberal”.<\/p>\n

He is not the sort of liberal that anti-Orb\u00e1n Westerners might want him to be. While he has said<\/a> that he will “move away from the current, uncritically friendly approach towards Russia”, he has also said that it will take time to stop buying Russian fuel, and he has criticised the Ukrainian approach to Hungarian minorities. He has sometimes tried to outflank Orb\u00e1n on sovereignty, saying that<\/a> Fidesz have brought in too many guest workers, and even questionably saying that<\/a> migrants have been stealing ducks from Hungarian ponds. Still, it remains to be seen if the pro-EU Magyar will maintain his more right-wing opinions or be swept along by European orthodoxy \u2014 not least when he has emphasised the importance of unlocking EU funds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At The Sceptic<\/em>, James Alexander<\/a> says that the situation is more complicated than a split between Orb\u00e1n and what he terms “the Roral Response”:<\/p>\n

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President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban pose for a photo in the Oval Office, Friday, November 7, 2025.
Official White House photo by Daniel Torok via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

What is the Orb\u00e1n-Roral Divide? It is the Manichaean yin-yang binary of the simplistic political imagination, which supposes that, on one side, we have Orb\u00e1n, Putin, Trump etc., and that, on the other side, we have von der Leyen, Merz, Starmer, Carney, Zelensky and of course the man after whom I name the category: Rory Stewart.<\/p>\n

It has some truth in it, but it is bewildering when we see the binary exalted as if it is the only truth of politics. The downfall of Orb\u00e1n illustrates this almost perfectly.<\/p>\n

The subject today is Orb\u00e1n Developments. And the Roral Response.<\/p>\n

News.<\/p>\n

As you all know, Orb\u00e1n, after 16 years of power, fell in the recent election.<\/p>\n