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Dancing on the Danube as Challenger Magyar Topples Orbán

Victorious Magyar pledges to mend Hungary’s fractured ties with the EU and unite a divided nation.

Kyiv Post

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2026年4月13日

4 min read

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BUDAPEST – On the banks of the Danube, opposite Hungary’s neo-Gothic parliament, there was euphoria, partying and drinking galore.

Thousands of voters had gathered hours earlier, waiting to see whether record turnout could achieve what had once seemed impossible: unseating Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s strongman in power without a break since 2010.

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When Orbán conceded defeat, the crowd erupted. “Tisza is flooding over!” they shouted, invoking the river after which Péter Magyar’s party is named.

“Together we liberated Hungary and took back our country,” Magyar declared in his victory speech. “Millions of Robin Hoods have won, even though the party state used all its powers against us.”

He invoked Hungary’s 1956 uprising against Soviet rule and took aim at Orbán’s self-described “illiberal” state.

Spontaneous embraces and raised fists rippled through the crowd.

“All my life has been in this regime,” said Zsolt Patay, a 31-year-old civil engineer, who said he finally felt “released” after years marked by what he described as the erosion of independent media and restrictions on gay rights. “Péter Magyar is not perfect, but he put the work in.”

Supporters roared each time the Partizán YouTube channel, a favoured media outlet among Tisza supporters, projected another defeated Fidesz candidate.

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The winner, Peter Magyar, had framed the vote as a historic choice ‘between East and West.’

At about 10:30 p.m., Magyar arrived at the head of a long, snaking column of supporters and party officials, carrying the Hungarian flag aloft – an image familiar from the past two years as he criss-crossed the country building a grassroots network of Tisza “islands” and mobilising 50,000 volunteers.

Calm and composed, allowing himself only fleeting smiles, he walked through a sea of raised phones and flickering torches.

A conservative and former member of Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party until his break two years ago, Magyar cast his victory in biblical terms as David defeating Goliath. “It is a sin to divide the nation,” he said, in a pointed rebuke to Orbán, who had portrayed him as a puppet of Brussels.

His tone then hardened. He called on the “puppets” of the Fidesz system to resign before being dismissed, and promised consequences for those who had plundered public finances and EU funds.

“From now on, we will not be a country without consequences. Those who stole from the country will have to answer for their actions,” he said.

He pledged to create a government body tasked with restoring national wealth, staffed by “the best legal minds,” and said Hungary would join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.

The crowd responded with chants of “To prison!” Yet Magyar was careful not to sound vindictive, instead striking a note of reconciliation. He said he would govern for defeated Fidesz voters too: “I will represent you all.” He added that he had told Orbán by phone that reunifying Hungary was now their shared responsibility.

A man transformed

Magyar has undergone a striking transformation since breaking with Fidesz and publicly denouncing what he said was corruption at the heart of Orbán’s governing circle.

“I see tremendous psychological change,” said Miklós Sükösd, a Hungarian political scientist at the University of Copenhagen who has profiled Magyar for HVG newspaper. “Two years ago he was partying in ways that were unacceptable. Now he has shown he can behave as a statesman.”

With a projected two-thirds parliamentary majority, Magyar will have the mandate to pursue constitutional change. His next challenge may prove harder still: governing a deeply divided country.