It was barely mid-evening on April 12 when Viktor Orbán, who has ruled Hungary for the last 16 years and turned the country into a lodestone for the international populist movement, walked up to a microphone, voice hoarse with fatigue, and admitted defeat.

“The responsibility and opportunity to govern were not given to us,” he told a shocked crowd of supporters, adding that he had congratulated the opposition leader Péter Magyar on his victory.

It was a surprising and unexpectedly gracious admission from a man who has rarely played by the rules, and put paid to weeks of speculation that he might fight to retain power.

As news of Magyar’s victory broke, huge crowds gathered to hear him on the banks of the Danube with the national parliament, a glorious neo-Gothic building, illuminated in the background.

“We’ve done it,” he said. “We have liberated Hungary and have taken back our country.”

Crowds whooped and hollered, broke into patriotic songs from the 19th Century, and chanted “Dirty Fidesz” and “Russians go home” — a reference to Moscow’s infiltration into Hungary’s business and government circles.

Public transport was jammed with mostly young people with huge smiles on their faces, cheering, clapping, and hollering. Cars honked their horns in rhythm.

“We’ve gone from being the most miserable country to the happiest,” one local media outlet splashed as its headline.

It could all have been so different.

We will probably never know all the plans that were left on the drawing board as Orbán and a small group of operatives he had hired for the purpose prepared for election day.

Sex tapes of opposition figures were mentioned; so was a fake assassination attempt, to be carried out by Russian operatives, which was called off after details were leaked by (probably) Western intelligence agencies to the US media. And there actually was an “attempt” to blow up a pipeline bringing Russian gas to Hungary through Serbia that was so incompetent it was almost comedic.

At the international level, the interference was even more overt.

Even as most EU members quietly hoped for a Magyar victory, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and several other leaders made strident interventions in favor of Orbán. Trump even sent his vice president, JD Vance, to Budapest in the dying days of the campaign and on the eve of the vote promised significant American investment into Hungary if his ally was re-elected.

And at the domestic level, there was a mind-numbing Fidesz information campaign that plastered posters all over Hungary suggesting that a victory for Magyar would lead Budapest into open war with Russia.

State television, meanwhile, was vitriolic in its attacks on Magyar’s Tisza party, and social media hummed with AI-generated ads telling Hungarians that their children would be shipped off to the frontline if Magyar won.

The campaign failed.

Hungarians instead looked at their collapsing state-run hospitals, their crumbling infrastructure, their stagnant economy, and the huge and ostentatious wealth accumulated by Orbán’s associates, and decided it was time for change.

For Magyar, a 45-year-old former Fidesz loyalist who only broke with the party two years ago, the challenges ahead are gargantuan.

Repairing relations with a much-relieved Europe may be relatively easy, and that might help release the €17bn ($20bn) in funds held back because of the Orbán government’s corruption and rule-of-law violations. It’s a big sum, equal to about 15% of the annual budget spending.

But in other international quarters, he will face extremely stiff opposition. Budapest is crawling with Russian agents (it has almost as many diplomats stationed in the country as in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland combined.) Russian businessmen, too, will fight tooth and nail to hang onto their influence and money.

Indeed, recent revelations (read my previous post for more on Russia’s influence in Hungary) show that money from Moscow and former Soviet organized crime bosses has flowed into Hungarian politics ever since the fall of communism.

Then there is Trump and the Washington administration, which may be unhappy that its old friend has been evicted.

China, meanwhile, has invested heavily in eastern Hungary — mostly in battery factories for electric vehicles — and will want reassurances that Budapest will not sell out its interests in order to placate Brussels.

But the international file will be relatively straightforward compared to domestic issues.

Magyar has won a two-thirds majority, which, according to the Hungarian constitution, gives him the power to fire officials in committees and offices of state he needs to make the clean sweep his voters are demanding.

But after 16 years in power, Fidesz’s placemen are entrenched. Magyar now faces the choice of working with them or forcing them out, and earning the enmity of some very powerful and wealthy men.

I am told that, in the run-up to the election, Magyar made no efforts to reach out to the security services — the interior ministry, the upper echelons of the police, and the secret services — and many are now fearful for their jobs.

“Much will depend on whether Magyar now steps with care or with confrontation,” I was told last night by one insider.

And then there is the parlous state of the Hungarian economy. The country has had almost no growth for the last four years and has the highest accumulated inflation rate in the EU when measured since 2020.

Making matters worse, Fidesz introduced a host of populist measures ahead of the election, including a cap on the price of petrol at the pumps, a hugely sensitive issue at a time of soaring prices, and another on communal heating and power bills.

Magyar cannot afford to sustain those caps and will soon be forced to hand Hungarian consumers significant price rises.

And lastly, there is the politics of it all.

By remaining vague on policies and sidestepping divisive political issues such as Hungary’s relations with Ukraine and LGBT rights in the public sphere, Magyar has managed to unite political factions from the center-right to the left.

In government, he will no longer be able to avoid these issues.

For now, most analysts argue Magyar has done enough to win a honeymoon with voters. “I think there will be several long weeks of calm,” one said.

Yet as the euphoria wears off, he will be forced to navigate an extensive minefield.

Kirill Dmitriev, Russia’s presidential envoy who has been a go-between between the Trump administration and Vladimir Putin, posted yesterday that he believes Orbán’s defeat will accelerate the collapse of the EU, not reinvigorate it.

Some of this is sour grapes. Moscow will be furious after losing its most important asset in the EU.  

But I have watched successful popular uprisings in Central and Eastern Europe during four decades — Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004 are only two examples — when Moscow subverted the new governments and succeeded in pulling them back into its orbit.

I feel divided. My optimistic side is with the Hungarian young people who crowded onto the banks of the Danube last night and cheered for a new beginning. My experience warns of troubled times ahead.

The regional big players — Russia and Western Europe — are effectively at war, though it is not yet kinetic, the US has gone off-script, and the world is facing an economic and fuel crisis.

Magyar will have to prove an extremely adept leader if Hungary is to reclaim its place among the democracies of Europe and enjoy its post-Orbán rebirth.

Julius Strauss is a former foreign correspondent who writes and reports on Russia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and the Balkans in his newsletter Back From the Front, where a version of this article was first published.  For 15 years, he worked full-time as a foreign and war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. He has covered Ukraine and Russia extensively, as well as the Bosnian war, the Kosovo war, the Iraq war, the Afghan war, the Chechen war, and multiple uprisings, revolutions, and coups.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.