BUDAPEST — Sixteen years of Viktor Orbán ended the way democratic eras are supposed to end: at the ballot box, with a concession. On Sunday night Hungary’s opposition leader Péter Magyar claimed victory and Orbán, the longest-serving prime minister in his country’s history, called to congratulate him. “Hungary has chosen Europe,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, calling the result “a victory for fundamental freedoms”. Poland’s Donald Tusk welcomed Hungary “back to Europe”.
The numbers are not ambiguous. With the count essentially complete, Magyar’s Tisza party took 54.3 per cent of the vote and 138 of parliament’s 199 seats — a constitutional two-thirds majority. Fidesz fell to 37 per cent and 55 seats; the far-right Mi Hazánk held six. Turnout reached 77.8 per cent, the highest since the democratic transition in 1989. Voters under thirty broke decisively for Tisza — more than 60 per cent, against 15 for Fidesz. Magyar spoke of liberating the country; supporters compared the night to 1956 and 1989 in the same breath, which tells you what this election had come to mean.
For the EU, the result removes its most persistent internal blocker — the man who vetoed aid to Ukraine, weaponised budget talks and turned “illiberal democracy” from provocation into governing doctrine. For Hungarians, the harder inventory starts now: a captured media landscape, a judiciary under pressure, a civil society that spent years being surveilled and starved of funds, and laws — on LGBTQ+ rights, on NGOs, on universities — that do not repeal themselves. Freedom House, which downgraded Hungary from Free to Partly Free during Orbán’s tenure, notes that the machinery of the state was rebuilt around one party; dismantling that carefully is slower than winning an election.
Magyar is no liberal insurgent — a conservative, a former Fidesz insider, careful on gay rights, disciplined on everything. That caution helped him win; it will now define what change actually means. Two-thirds of parliament is enough to rewrite the constitution Orbán rewrote for himself. Whether Tisza uses that power to restore institutions or merely to inherit them is the question Europe will be asking by summer.
On Monday morning, Budapest woke to something it had not seen since 2010: a government-in-waiting that was not Fidesz, and a prime minister-elect who owes his mandate to the highest turnout in the country’s democratic history. The rest is work.
