budapest, hungary —
Viktor Orbán is seeking a fifth consecutive term as Hungarian Prime Minister. During his 16 years in office, he transformed the small central European country from a burgeoning Western democracy into an illiberal state, providing a model for right-wing populist governance and drawing praise from abroad.
But many people at home are fed up with the system Mr. Orbán has built. The opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has been campaigning relentlessly against corruption and Hungary’s economic stagnation. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Orban’s Fidesz party, which is backed by the United States and Russia, has largely focused on perceived external threats to Hungary, including what it claims is a threat from neighboring Ukraine and the European Union.
Mr. Tisa has held a double-digit lead over Mr. Fidesz in most opinion polls for more than a year. But analysts say the outcome of the parliamentary vote could be close due to Hungary’s highly gerrymandered electoral system.
Voting begins Sunday morning and ends at 7pm local time. Here’s what you need to know:
Magyar, 45, is widely seen as the toughest opponent Orbán, 62, has faced since returning to power in 2010 for his first term at the end of the century. Magyar, a former insider in Prime Minister Orban’s Fidesz party, split from the party in a high-profile rupture in 2024.
Earlier that year, Orbán’s government was rocked by public outrage over Hungarian President Katalin Novak’s decision to pardon the deputy director of an orphanage who helped cover up abuse of underage boys. Judith Varga, who was Minister of Justice in Orbán’s government at the time, was also involved in the pardon. Both women resigned.
Varga was previously married to a Magyar. In a fiery interview with Hungarian media outlet Partizan, Magyar accused Orbán of “hiding behind women’s skirts.” He also used this interview to share secrets gained from his closeness to the government. “A few families own half the country,” he says.
Corruption was a major theme of his campaign. The Magyars visited numerous towns and cities, gathering large numbers of people even deep within traditional Fidesz territory. Tisa’s support skews towards urban areas and young people. There is a generation of Hungarians who grew up knowing only Orbán. “Fidesz, get lost!” has been a common chant on the streets of Budapest this week.
The Magyar campaign was strictly domestic. Mr. Tisa has avoided contact with international media for fear of being accused by Mr. Fidesz of colluding with foreign agents. The Magyars focused almost entirely on table issues, such as Hungary’s economic slowdown and poor health care, and said little about foreign policy or the European Union. He said little about Ukraine to avoid being portrayed as the kind of liberal European politician that Orbán has long maligned.
This discipline negates Orbán’s obvious policy of attack on the Magyars. Instead, Magyar said, Fidesz intended to blackmail him by releasing secretly recorded videos of “intimate moments with his then-girlfriend.”
“Yes, I’m a 45-year-old man. I have a sex life. I have an adult partner,” he said in February. “Dear Fidesz coward, now reveal everything.” So far, sexual kompromat, if any, have not been made public.
Hungarian is a difficult language. Nationalists joke that Hungarian is the language of heaven because it takes forever to learn. But the word that echoed throughout Mr. Orbán’s election campaign, “habor,” or “war,” is also familiar to foreign ears.
“Hárború” will be featured at rallies, billboards and online advertisements. At his final rally in Székesfehérvár near Budapest on Friday, Prime Minister Orbán reiterated his claim that he had kept Hungarians out of the war and vowed not to give Ukraine “our children, our weapons, our freedom.”
Posters of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy alongside the Magyar language are plastered across Hungarian towns and cities. Some have the words “Dangerous!” written on them. Some people say, “Don’t let him laugh till the end” or “Let’s make him stop!”
Orban’s opponents say much of his electoral success depended on finding potential enemies: first NGOs, then liberal universities, then immigrants, then the LGBTQ movement, and now Ukraine.
Last weekend, Mr. Orban’s allies claimed without evidence that Ukraine had placed two backpacks containing explosives next to a natural gas pipeline near the Hungarian border. In February, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán sent Hungarian troops to guard the country’s energy infrastructure, a move he said was aimed at preventing a Ukrainian attack.
In its election campaign, Fidesz used artificial intelligence-generated videos showing Magyars breaking into Hungarian homes and conscripting young men into military service. Another AI-generated video depicts a girl asking about her father, who is seen kneeling in the mud before being executed. “For now this is just a nightmare, but Brussels is preparing to make it a reality,” the video says. “Fidesz is the only safe option.”
Critics have pointed to the irony of President Orbán’s offensive line toward Ukraine. He emerged on the Hungarian political scene in the late 1980s as a liberal anti-communist, calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. Now, given Orbán’s friendly attitude toward Russia and his demonization of Ukraine, one could say, “Russians go home!” Anti-Fidesz chants have become common among Tisa supporters.
The United States is unusually invested in the Hungarian election because the Trump administration hopes that Orbán’s style of governance will succeed in Europe. The administration’s national security strategy, released last year, detailed how it would push for a more “like-minded” Europe: anti-woke, anti-environmental, anti-immigrant.
Ivan Krastev, director of the Center for Liberal Strategy in Sofia, Bulgaria, told CNN: “This administration believes that there is a Trumpist revolution and that this Trumpian revolution has arrived in Europe, and that Europe is just one election cycle behind the US.”
For this reason, the United States has spent significant diplomatic resources promoting Mr. Orbán’s re-election. Vice President J.D. Vance spent two days in Budapest this week and vowed to support Orban “in any way I can.”
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump said on social media Friday that his administration is “ready to use the full power of the United States’ economic power to strengthen the Hungarian economy, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian people need it, just as we have always done for our great ally.”
Mr. Orban has long played a subversive role within the EU, blocking efforts to finance Ukraine’s defense against Russia. For months, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has used Hungary’s membership to veto a 90 billion euro ($105 billion) EU loan to Ukraine, citing a dispute with Kiev over damaged pipelines transporting Russian oil to Hungary.
“I don’t think anyone in Brussels will be sorry to see Mr. Orbán’s back, apart from one or two proxy allies in the Czech Republic and Slovakia,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.
Mr. Magyar has said little about his support for Ukraine, leading to speculation that he too might sabotage EU efforts to support Kiev.
But in Rahman’s view, Magyar was simply being “careful” about his messaging during the campaign.
“I think Magyar is a much easier volume for Brussels and the EU to deal with,” he told CNN.
