Sometime during the late 1800s, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire still stretched from the Adriatic Sea to modern-day Ukraine, a Hungarian entered a bookstore in Vienna and asked the clerk, “Can you sell me a globe of Hungary?” By so perfectly capturing the hubris of a people who feel their nation is the world, the story has become apocryphal. Of course, within a generation, Hungary would be stripped of two-thirds of its territory by the Treaty of Trianon, making the globe-buyer’s pride seem less farcical and almost tragic in retrospect.

But the story takes on yet another meaning today because, in the wake of the April 12 parliamentary elections in Hungary, it has been non-Hungarians who have been asking to see the globe of Hungary. Moderate and liberal political observers not only in Vienna but also in Brussels, Paris, Berlin, and New York see the crushing defeat of strongman Viktor Orban as signaling the ebbing of global illiberalism. The hope is that where Hungary goes, the world will follow: far-right candidates such as Marine Le Pen, for instance, will not win in France, and the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) will not triumph in Germany.

But just like the perspective of the original globe-buyer, this view is far from reality. Peter Magyar, the new prime minister of Hungary, won because of a wave of antiestablishment energy that can just as easily benefit populist contenders in other countries. In the recent Bulgarian elections, for instance, the political party of the former president, Rumen Radev, whom Western media describe as a Russophile and Euroskeptic, ran and won on an anticorruption campaign similar to Magyar’s in Hungary—proving that powerful anticorruption rhetoric can bring to power not only Orban’s opponents but also the kinds of political leaders usually seen as his allies.

If anything, once elected to power, national populists in Europe will continue looking for ways to remake liberal democratic regimes, and Orban’s playbook will still be viewed as extremely valuable. Indeed, his defeat does not signal the end of far-right politics in Europe but rather an end to the illusion that Trumpism is a global movement. By accepting defeat and not challenging the outcome, as Trump did in 2020 and has promised to do again, Orban reaffirmed the democratic credentials of Europe’s new right. And as a fellow conservative, Magyar represents not a repudiation of Orban-style nationalism but its evolution.

His victory signals a new era for European politics. By distancing itself from Trump, the far right in Europe may actually push the continent toward a new consensus—one in which pro-European elites are ready to accept the centrality of the nation-states in the future of European integration while far-right parties accept that Moscow, Beijing, and Washington, not Brussels, are the real threat to their national sovereignties. Europe, in other words, might finally become more European.

How Orban Lost Hungary

In many ways, Orban, Europe’s longest-serving prime minister, had become for the political right what, decades ago, Fidel Castro was for the political left: a leader of a small, relatively unimportant nation who nonetheless captured the world’s imagination. He made Hungary the intellectual, institutional, and financial hub of Europe’s new right. If you were a far-right intellectual, Budapest would treat you like a king. If you were a far-right party, Hungarian banks would gladly help you with a loan. If you were a Polish former right-wing minister (such as Zbigniew Ziobro) or a former North Macedonian prime minister hiding from justice (such as Nikola Gruevski), Budapest would grant you political asylum.

Orban’s original electoral revolution, in 2010, was........

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