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I felt a surge of jubilation on learning that the people of Hungary had finally ousted their long-entrenched strongman, Viktor Orbán. Eight years earlier – on April 14, 2018 – I had just finished lunch at my hotel in Pest Centre, Budapest, when I noticed a vast crowd streaming along the boulevard behind the cathedral. They moved quietly toward Parliament, holding banners and placards protesting his re-election. Instinctively, I joined them, accepting a placard someone pressed into my hands.

More than 100,000 people filled the boulevard and the sprawling grounds behind the Parliament on the banks of the Danube. The demonstration – organised via Facebook by the “We Are the Majority” group – protested an unfair electoral system, corruption, and the erosion of free media, calling for a recount and opposition unity. What struck me most was the absence of police in such a massive march heading straight to Parliament – something hard to imagine under our own Orbán!

The protests did not end there. They came in waves, sustained and defiant, refusing to concede inevitability to power. And then, eight years on, the seemingly invincible was defeated – as such rulers often appear until they fall.

On the night of April 12, 2026, car horns echoed through Budapest. Tens of thousands gathered, many in tears, chanting by torchlight. The man who had spent 16 years steadily hollowing out Hungary’s democratic institutions – while drawing admiration from strongmen across the world – was swept from office in a landslide. His challenger, Péter Magyar, a former insider who broke with the ruling party after a child abuse pardon scandal, secured over 53 percent of the vote. His Tisza Party won a two-thirds majority – the same constitutional dominance Orbán had once used to remake the system in his image.

The global resonance was immediate. From Washington to Warsaw, from Seoul to New Delhi, the same question surfaced: could this happen here? For Indians, the Hungarian outcome is not a comforting fable, but a complex and urgent case study.

To understand Hungary’s political rupture, one must first see how Viktor Orbán built his system. When Fidesz swept to power in 2010 with a two-thirds majority, Orbán moved swiftly to realise his project of an “illiberal democracy.” Courts were packed, electoral boundaries redrawn to favour rural conservative constituencies, and public media converted into a state propaganda arm. Private media was steadily absorbed by oligarchs aligned with the regime. Civil society groups were targeted through “foreign agent” laws—borrowed, with little irony, from Vladimir Putin’s playbook. The judiciary was hollowed out, while institutions like the European Union were recast as hostile forces threatening a “Christian nation.” The Central European University that had invited me was packing its bags to relocate to Austria.

The cynicism of Orbán’s model lay in its restraint: elections were never abolished; they were engineered. Legal tweaks – such as a winner-compensation formula – converted pluralities into parliamentary supermajorities. The opposition remained formally legal but was fragmented, underfunded, and structurally disadvantaged. This is what political scientists term “competitive authoritarianism”: a regime that preserves democratic form while emptying it of substance. For much of the global right, Orbán became proof that electoral victory could be used to render power effectively permanent.

The system began to crack from within. After 16 years, corruption had grown endemic and governance visibly decayed. Ordinary Hungarians felt it in failing hospitals, struggling schools, and shrinking household budgets. Inflation surged, infrastructure deteriorated, and educated youth left in large numbers for Western Europe. Péter Magyar seized this moment. He named the oligarchs, linking the abstract language of democratic erosion to concrete indignities – a hospital without basic medicines alongside the spectacle of elite excess. Campaigning relentlessly across towns and villages, he framed his appeal not in liberal opposition but in patriotic reclamation. He did not run against Hungary; he ran for it.

Orbán’s Hungary and Contemporary India

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