When Hungary’s voters toppled Viktor Orbán, the country’s proudly “illiberal” leader, they not only delivered a stunning rebuke to the Trump administration, they cost the MAGA movement in the U.S. a model for authoritarian right-wing governance, a culture war ally, and an inspiration to MAGA-aligned far-right nationalist movements in Europe. Right Wing Watch has been documenting the U.S. right’s love affair with Orbán for the past decade.
The Trump administration’s extraordinary last-ditch effort to save Orbán included a campaign visit from Vice President J.D. Vance and a promise by Trump that he would support Hungary with the “full Economic Might” of the U.S. if voters did what he wanted. But voters, fed up with sixteen years of increasingly dictatorial rule and with an extraordinary level of corruption that enriched Orbán friends and family while most people suffered from a languishing economy, said “no thanks.”
If that description of Orbán’s regime sounds familiar, it should. The MAGA movement in the U.S. was explicitly copying Orbán’s playbook for maintaining a tight grip on power through an authoritarian takeover of the country’s institutions: the judiciary, education, journalism, business, and the arts.
During Trump’s first term, the White House rolled out the red carpet for Orbán even though—or maybe more accurately because—Orbán was widely recognized as a destroyer of democratic values and institutions. In 2018, the Heritage Foundation promoted Orbán’s project to “replace the shipwreck of liberal democracy by building 21st Century Christian democracy.”
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, mastermind of Project 2025, has called Orbán’s Hungary “the model” for “conservative statecraft.” As Right Wing Watch reported in 2019, the Orbán regime even used monuments and memorials to try to reconstruct the nation’s past and legitimize its authoritarian rule. In 2024, J.D. Vance, who had called for an aggressive attack on American universities, said the U.S. could “learn from” Orbán on that front.
Because Orbán portrayed his harsh anti-immigration, anti-abortion, and anti-LGBTQ policies as defenses of the family and Christian civilization, he was also adored by U.S. religious-right leaders and media as a “hero.” Years before the first Conservative Political Action Conference to be held in Europe in 2022, Orbán hosted the 2017 World Congress of Families, a global gathering of the anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ movement that trains right-wing activists to turn their governments into enforcers of “traditional” values.
One harbinger of Orbán’s downfall was the public’s rejection of his government’s ban on the annual pride parade. People responded to Orbán’s threat of “clear legal consequences” for anyone taking part with defiance, turning out in far greater numbers than ever before. Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s party and generally considered a conservative, has said since his election that he would restore democratic standards and the rule of law. He also made it clear that he supports the right to assemble and that “everyone can live with, and love, whomever they want, as long as they do not violate the laws and do not harm others.”
Like the U.S. right-wing does routinely, Orbán rallied his political supporters by smearing philanthropist George Soros, who was born in Hungary. Orbán forced the Soros-founded Central European University and the pro-democracy Open Society Foundations to leave the country.
While massive crowds celebrated Orbán’s defeat and political leaders welcomed what is expected to be a more Europe-friendly government, the Heritage Foundation attempted to put the best face on the defeat of their close ally and downplayed the impact of his loss as “less of a political sea change than a correction after alleged corruption.” That may be true on some issues like migration, but it may also be wishful thinking; journalist Michelle Goldberg argues, “The geopolitical consequences of Magyar’s victory could be profound.”
Péter Magyar, who defeated Orbán, wasted no time saying he would stop the flow of Hungarian tax dollars to CPAC events in Hungary and to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a think tank that promoted Orbán’s political agenda. The Orbán government funded that and other institutions to influence public opinion at home and abroad. A Hungarian news outlet reported in 2024 that The Danube Institute had paid more than $1.64 million “to its foreign collaborators over the past three years.” Among the beneficiaries of Orbán government largesse was right-wing American commentator Rod Dreher, who moved to Hungary in 2022 and has promoted Orbán to American readers, and CPAC gatherings in Budapest.
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