SPECIAL What actually happened in the election: Our poll expert takes apart Orbán’s defeat

The magnitude of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s defeat is surprising, perhaps even shocking. The fact his Fidesz party lost by a solid margin, however, should have surprised no one.

Orbán is widely derided by Western elites as an autocrat, and it is true that the state and most privately owned media are relentlessly supportive of him. But that’s never why Orbán was re-elected three times. He won because he did what every good democratic politician does: Provide peace and prosperity while respecting the nation’s values.

From 2010 through 2022, Hungary’s economy grew steadily, bringing comfort and some luxuries to the former Communist nation for the first time. The country did not get sucked into the nascent conflict in Ukraine and proudly refused to take in the any of the millions of mainly Middle Eastern migrants who swarmed into Europe in the last decade. 

Those latter stances may have annoyed many other Western European leaders, but there is no evidence that average Hungarians wanted something different. Many current leaders probably wish their nations had been more like Orbán as they figure out how to deal with the growing internal unease over the migrants whom their predecessors let in.

Orbán also had the luxury of running against a largely discredited centre-left, Budapest-focused opposition. Hungarians had decisively rejected that path in 2010 after the Socialists ran the economy into the ground in 2008. Even had they wanted to change horses, they knew they didn’t want that one.

He lost on Sunday because he took his eye off the ball following his decisive 2022 re-election. Cronyism, never far beneath the surface, seemed to increase. The clemency scandal that caused the resignation of the President and Justice Minister added to the sense that Fidesz now served a clique rather than the people. 

Fidesz wasn’t entrusted with government to enrich its friends and protect them from justice. It was elected to make Hungarians richer materially and spiritually. The fact that Fidesz elites would pardon a paedophile in their circle severely weakened the national spiritual bond the party had spent so much time building up.

Orbán also stopped delivering material riches. Inflation has been much higher in Hungary than elsewhere in Europe since 2022, and real GDP has been essentially flat. The country isn’t in recession, but it is in the fourth year of stagnation – and that is never good news for an incumbent government.

Any Western European government that had experienced scandal and a stagnant economy would expect to be tossed on its rear come election time. That’s what happened to Britain’s Conservatives in 1997 and 2024, and that’s what happened to Viktor Orbán.

The fact that this seems so surprising to Fidesz backers – presumably including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance – makes this landslide defeat stand out, however. It seems that the media empire Orbán created also built a bubble for the regime’s allies. 

Regime friendly pollsters churned out surveys that told them what they wanted to believe, that Orbán was sure to win re-election. Other polls were discredited for being connected to the opposition, which in many cases was true. But just because someone is your adversary doesn’t mean they are lying.

A genuinely independent poll from Atlas Intel, a South American firm, showed the same thing as the non-Fidesz pollsters. I saw a privately commissioned poll by James Kanagasooriam of Britain’s Focaldata that not only showed Tisza with a large double-digit lead but did a seat-by-seat analysis using an MRP to find Tisza with a huge majority and a shot at a supermajority.

These polls were accurate and mainly backed up the opposition polling narrative. Yet Fidesz supporters I met in the last few days were supremely confident of re-election with only relatively minor losses. They believed their leaders – and those people were either lying to themselves or to their backers or both.

Hungarian populist conservatism may be down but it’s not out. It took an enterprising politician, Tisza leader Péter Magyar, and a complete rebranding of the opposition into a centrist-to-centre-right entity to give it even a shot at winning. Keeping a centre-right policy focus while depending mainly on centre-left voters is going to be very difficult.

Magyar will also find it easier to talk about restoring economic growth than bringing it about. He surely will soon be rewarded with a resumption of suspended European Union funding, which should help. That won’t do anything to improve Hungary’s lacklustre entrepreneurial culture, nor can shield the country from the energy insecurity that affects everyone.

Magyar was also aided by the magnitude Fidesz’s complacency. Orbán should have known he needed to shift gears, and the older Viktor Orbán would surely have done that. That’s what he did when the far-right nationalist Jobbik party rose in the early 2010s, pushing Orbán make opposition to migration a centrepiece of his platform.

Instead, we saw the government doubling down on its old playbook. It added even more subsidies for families and pensioners rather than spend on the decrepit health service. It tried to tie Magyar to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky even though its simply not plausible that Hungary is going to get dragged into a war that has been a stalemate for years.

No wonder Hungarians rejected him. 

It’s difficult to see how Orbán can remain as Fidesz’ leader. His successor will surely realize that the party needs to reform to regain credibility. Magyar may not get the chance to run again against a tired, overconfident foe.

The Brussels elite surely thinks it has won, and indeed it has for now. It also thought it had won a permanent victory, though, in Poland in 2023 when Donald Tusk’s coalition unseated the populist Law and Justice party. Tusk found it hard to govern, though, and the Law and Justice-backed candidate for President, Karel Nawrocki, won last year. Victory, it seems, can be fleeting.

Hungarian conservatives will get over the shock and start the painful but necessary task of rethinking and reforming. Populist conservatives elsewhere – I’m looking at you, President Trump – should take note that cultural affinity will not trump economic stagnation at the ballot box. In short, this is a setback for populist conservatism, not a final defeat, as long as they take away the right lessons.

In democracies, ultimately the people rule. Orbán forgot that. We will see if other populist leaders learn from his demise.