For years, Hungary has been a surprising front in the global battle between authoritarianism and democracy. It attracted outsize attention for a small, landlocked country because its longtime prime minister, Viktor Orban, provided a model of how a populist leader could transform a democracy into an electoral autocracy while enriching his backers and family members. Orban also offered a blueprint for how a government could remain a member of Western institutions such as the European Union and NATO yet still cultivate ties with the West’s strategic rivals such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Orban became an icon for aspiring autocrats, including Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Orban’s ouster from political power offers a playbook that is just as important—this time, for defenders of democracy around the world. His decisive defeat in April by an upstart Hungarian political party, Tisza, owes a great deal to the popularity and determined campaign of its leader, Peter Magyar. But Magyar could never have prevailed had other actors, mainly Europe’s center-right establishment, not made key moves that opened the door for his success. Pro-democratic leaders and citizens alike need to understand the real lessons of what happened in Hungary over the past 16 years to have a better chance of deterring or dislodging would-be autocrats in the future.

THE THREAT OF TOLERANCE

The first lesson from Hungary is a simple one: center-right parties are a crucial hinge of democracy. When the establishment center-right tolerates the authoritarians on its flank, it facilitates their rise. When the center-right instead takes a hard line against them, it can thwart their emergence. Orban’s ascent to power clearly illustrates this dynamic: Orban could build an autocracy inside the EU only because for years he enjoyed the political protection of the European People’s Party (EPP), the main alliance of democratic center-right parties in Europe, led for many years by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. When these parties finally parted ways with Orban, they set in motion a chain of events that helped bring him down.

Prior to his defeat, Orban was widely seen as the leader of far-right populist movements in Europe. In 2024, he organized a new political group in the European Parliament, Patriots for Europe, that brought together far-right parties across the continent. But Orban did not start out as a poster child for the far right. His Fidesz party began in the 1990s as a liberal, pro-democracy youth movement that affiliated with liberal party alliances such as the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party (which transformed into today’s Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe). By the late 1990s, Fidesz had repositioned itself as a center-right party, and in 2000, it switched its EU-level affiliation to the EPP during Orban’s first stint as prime minister. Although Orban lost power in Hungary in 2002, he went on to serve as a vice president of the EPP from 2002 to 2012 and developed close ties with the alliance’s senior leaders, including Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy.

After Orban returned to power in 2010, Fidesz morphed into something dramatically different and unrecognizable from its origins: an illiberal, autocratic party that systematically dismantled democratic institutions. At first, the EPP may have simply been blind to........

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