After the Earthquake: What Orban’s Defeat Means for Europe
The winner, Peter Magyar, had framed the vote as a historic choice ‘between East and West.’
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Hungary has voted, and Europe will never be the same. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party has ended Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year grip on power in what must be counted as one of the most consequential electoral results in the history of the European Union.
The pollsters – the independent ones, at least – were right. The voters came out in record numbers, turnout exceeded seventy percent, and the anti-Orbán wave that Brussels had been quietly hoping for finally broke. This morning, the celebrations in Budapest were still going on. The hard work, however, starts now – for Magyar, and for every ally who has a stake in what Hungary becomes next.
Magyar himself set the tone as he cast his ballot on Sunday. Framing the vote as a historic choice “between East and West,” he called on Hungarians to write history – and they did. It was a deliberately simple formulation, but a geopolitically loaded one: a signal to Brussels, Warsaw, and Berlin that the era of Budapest’s ambiguity about its own civilizational direction is over.
The EU gets its breath back
For the European Union, last night’s result is nothing short of a rescue.
Orbán’s Hungary had become the bloc’s most reliable internal saboteur. It blocked the €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine. It delayed Swedish NATO accession. It coordinated with Tehran while a war raged on Europe’s eastern border. It granted asylum to criminal suspects fleeing justice in neighboring EU member states.
Victorious Magyar pledges to mend Hungary’s fractured ties with the EU and unite a divided nation.
The systematic abuse of Hungary’s veto power had drained the EU’s capacity to act precisely when the international environment demanded speed and cohesion.
A Tisza-led Hungary will not be an unconditional enthusiast of deeper European integration — Magyar has been careful to present himself as a sovereign conservative, not a Brussels federalist.
But a Budapest that simply operates within the norms of EU membership — that does not treat every council meeting as an opportunity for extortion — already transforms the geometry of European decision-making. On Ukraine support, on defense financing, on relations with the United States, the EU can now move with one fewer anchor dragging it backward.
The relief should, however, be tempered by realism. Orbán spent 16 years building his system, and systems do not dissolve overnight. The Constitutional Court is stocked with Fidesz loyalists. The Budget Council retains veto power over any spending plan. State media, the judiciary, and much of local government remain in the hands of the old regime.
Magyar faces the same institutional siege that Donald Tusk encountered in Poland after 2023 — and Tusk, two years on, is still wrestling with the wreckage. The EU’s applause is warranted. Its expectations must be managed.
NATO’s awkward member grows up
For NATO, the implications are equally significant. Hungary under Orbán was a peculiar creature: an alliance member that actively undermined its cohesion, maintained privileged ties with Moscow, and — just days before the election — welcomed the American Vice President as a kind of political endorsement of the Kremlin’s most useful European interlocutor.
JD Vance’s visit to Budapest will be remembered as one of Washington’s more spectacular miscalculations; the man he came to support lost the election.
A Tisza government will not overnight transform Hungary into Poland or Estonia. Magyar has not campaigned on dramatic increases in defense spending or on a conspicuous break with Moscow. But removing Budapest’s role as NATO’s structural exception — the ally that could always be relied upon to slow, dilute, or simply sabotage consensus — is itself a strategic gain of considerable magnitude.
For the Eastern Flank, for the Baltic states, and for Warsaw, even a neutral Hungary is an improvement. And there is every reason to expect Magyar to go further than neutrality, given his openly pro-Western orientation, his long-standing criticism of Orbán’s Russia policy, and the unambiguous direction he signaled at the ballot box on Sunday.
Ukraine and Russia: A message, not a miracle
In Kyiv, the result will be welcomed with genuine relief.
Hungary’s blocking of EU financial support for Ukraine was not merely a bureaucratic inconvenience – it was a signal to Moscow that the EU’s unity was penetrable, that one determined spoiler could hold twenty-six others hostage. That signal has now been revoked. The unblocking of EU financial instruments for Ukraine will likely be among Magyar’s first and most visible acts of European statecraft.
Yet it would be an overstatement to present Budapest’s change of government as a turning point in the war. Ukraine’s fate depends on American political will, on European defense production, and on the stamina of its own society and armed forces – none of which is determined in Budapest.
What changes is the narrative. A democratic Europe, with a citizenry that votes out the Kremlin’s most valuable EU asset, sends a message to Moscow that cannot be easily dismissed: that the illiberal model is not election-proof, that European publics ultimately choose the West, and that Putin’s long bet on European democratic decay has hit a wall.
Fugitives’ hour of reckoning
Perhaps the most immediate and concrete consequence of Tisza’s victory will be felt not in Brussels or Kyiv but in the comfortable Budapest residences of two Polish political fugitives. Zbigniew Ziobro, former justice minister of Poland, and his one-time deputy Marcin Romanowski both obtained asylum from the Orbán government while facing serious criminal charges in Warsaw.
Romanowski has been sheltered in Hungary since late 2024 and was even employed by an Orbán-linked institution. Ziobro followed in January 2026, facing twenty-six charges, including leading a criminal organization and the unlawful purchase of Pegasus spyware to surveil political opponents.
Magyar was unambiguous during the campaign: a Tisza government would extradite both men on day one in office. He suggested, with a pointed edge, that they might prefer to relocate to Minsk or Moscow before that became necessary – with a hint that Orbán himself might be on the same flight.
The legal picture is more complex than the political rhetoric; Hungarian courts, still filled with Fidesz appointees, will have the formal say on extradition requests. But the political protection both men have enjoyed –the Orbán government’s willingness to treat asylum as an instrument of ideological solidarity with Poland’s Law and Justice party – has evaporated.
For Warsaw, and for Donald Tusk personally, that shift closes one of the bitterest chapters in Polish-Hungarian relations in living memory.
More broadly, the result reshapes Central European politics. The Visegrád Group became dysfunctional after 2022 due to Orbán’s pro-Russian stance. Magyar’s election-day framing of the vote as a choice between East and West was not accidental – it was a direct appeal to the Central European mainstream that Hungary had abandoned.
A Hungary that re-engages in good faith with its neighbors – with Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia — creates the conditions for Central European cooperation to resume on a genuine, rather than performative, basis. That is not a small thing in a region that has long understood its security to depend on its collective weight.
The Work Begins
Viktor Orbán built his system to be difficult to dismantle.
He said as much, repeatedly and with evident satisfaction. Magyar now inherits that system, with a parliamentary majority that may or may not survive the institutional obstacles Orbán left behind. Europe’s allies should resist the temptation to declare the job done. What was decided last night in Hungary was necessary. It was not sufficient.
But for one morning, the relief is real, the result is historic, and the direction – after 16 years – has changed.
See the original of this analysis by Marcin Zaborowski, Policy Director at the Future of Security Programme and Ukraine Support Council at Globsec, here.
