Trump’s Humiliation in Orbán Defeat Stunner Is Only Just Beginning

For Viktor Orbán’s epic loss in Hungary to have real meaning in America, Democrats and liberals need to proclaim themselves part of the global anti-authoritarian movement.

The extraordinary defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary has unleashed much mockery of JD Vance, and it’s richly deserved. The vice president’s last-minute rally in Budapest cast the Hungarian election as a referendum on global illiberal movements, which makes Orbán’s epic defeat all the more humiliating for him—and for Donald Trump, who dispatched Vance and has long seen Orbán as a kindred ideological spirit.

But there’s another moral to draw here. It’s that American liberals and Democrats should more firmly align themselves with anti-authoritarian, anti-ethnonationalist, pro–liberal democracy forces abroad. They can better connect the drama of the battle against Orbánism to the struggle against Trumpism at home.

The scale of Orbán’s defeat was extraordinary. Challenger Péter Magyar’s Tisza party is on track to win a two-thirds parliamentary majority, potentially enabling the reversal of many Orbánist antidemocratic policies designed to lock in his power forever. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explains, the “overwhelming frustration of the Hungarian population” under Orbán unleashed a popular turnout large enough to triumph even though Orbán had “thoroughly stacked the electoral playing field.”

In other words, the victory over Orbán can legitimately be called “too big to rig,” as Trump often dishonestly describes his 2024 vote totals. Trump’s victory was historically narrow in an election that wasn’t tilted against him. By contrast, in Hungary it took record turnout against Orbán to overcome his deep counter-majoritarian rigging.

So what does all this mean for American politics? It’s true, as Damon Linker says, that this isn’t a full victory for liberals and doesn’t guarantee that “right populism is on the way out,” either domestically or globally. Magyar is a center-right politician: Though a vast improvement on Orbán, he hardly campaigned as a full-blown liberal on  immigration or LGBTQ rights, for instance.

But the Hungarian election doesn’t have to map neatly onto U.S. politics for American Democrats to seize upon it.

To see why, consider the speech Vance........

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