With nearly half of the votes counted on Sunday evening, Tisza was projected to win 135 of 199 seats in parliament, the national election office (NVI) said. Orbán's ruling Fidesz party would get 57 seats based on the current standing.
The results mean that Tisza party leader Péter Magyar is on course to become the country’s new Prime Minister, ousting Orbán, who has led Hungary since 2010. While polling leading up to Sunday’s Election Day indicated that Orbán’s party was trailing Tisza by a significant margin, the outcome marks a stunning political shift in the European country.
Orbán, who has cast himself as a proponent of “illiberal democracy,” is an icon of the global far-right and an ally of President Donald Trump—so much so that U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance joined Orbán in Budapest on Tuesday, in an effort to boost the Prime Minister’s flailing campaign just days before the general election. Vance said that Orbán was “wise and smart” and that his leadership “can provide a model to the Continent.”
“It’s a very important election for what it means for Europe, what it means for Ukraine, but also what it means for the broader far-right movement around the world, which has built up Hungary as the kind of far-right, illiberal ‘democratic model’ where you have an elected autocracy pushing back against migrants and against supposedly woke values,” Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told TIME.
In the years since he first rose to become Prime Minister, Orbán and his party have taken control of Hungary’s media outlets and deployed propaganda to vilify his political opponents, as well as consolidated their power over institutions intended to serve as checks on executive authority, such as the country’s courts.
Bergmann said that Hungary is considered by many to be “one of the most corrupt countries now in the European Union.”
But polls leading up to Election Day showed Orbán’s party trailing behind the opposition party, which Bergmann attributed at least in part to voters’ growing frustration and concerns regarding corruption in Hungary.
Zsuzsanna Végh, a political analyst at the German Marshall Fund, called this “a milestone election” for Hungary when speaking to TIME ahead of Election Day. Magyar's party winning the election signifies Hungarian voters’ rejection of Orbán’s far-right movement. Before Election Day, Végh said that the rise of Magyar and his party creates “a realistic chance to oust Orbán and potentially reform the country to halt the autocratization that we have seen over the past decade and a half and return to a more democratic way of governance and just generally operation of the state.”
His party looks set to secure a two-thirds majority, an outcome which Végh previously said would give him "almost a free hand to actually reform the country."
What the election could mean for the EU
“Effectively, over the past years, the Hungarian government have been blocking EU decision-making, have been hampering the EU’s ability to really act as a global power,” Végh said.
Magyar’s party “positions Hungary as a member of the EU that wants to be a member of the EU, that wants to cooperate, that wants to use this framework to the benefit of the country, instead of undermining the joint action of the union,” Végh said.
But Bergmann acknowledged that “there’s a lot of uncertainty about Péter Magyar and where he’ll actually position himself.”
“He would not be representing Russian interests in the EU’s decision making process, and that is already a huge shift” from Orbán, Végh said.
Experts told TIME that Hungary’s struggling economy was one of the reasons that Orbán’s party was polling poorly leading up to Election Day. If Magyar's party implements his promised reforms and repairs Hungary’s relationship with the EU, then the bloc would likely release funding for the country, which “will create an economic windfall,” Bergmann said. How much funding the EU releases to Hungary, Végh said, depends on the extent of reforms made.
Bergmann said before Election Day that, following a loss for Orbán’s party, “The hope, I think, for Europe is that … you could begin to have conversations about reforming the EU and making it work better.”
The significance of Trump and Vance’s support for Orbán
“I’m a big fan of Viktor,” Trump said. “I’m with him all the way.”
But Végh characterized Vance’s visit to Hungary as an attempt to keep Orbán’s base mobilized ahead of the election—and a move that demonstrates the allyship between the MAGA movement and Orbán’s party.
“In Europe particularly, the rise of far-right parties is driven by domestic dynamics,” she said. “The French context, the Polish context, the Italian one is going to determine the overall success of the far-right parties in the given countries.”
At the same time, Végh told TIME that Orbán's Fidesz losing would leave far-right parties with “a crucial takeaway”: “The realization that even Viktor Orbán’s regime is not foolproof and it is possible to, after all, fall out of power in this hybrid state of a regime.”
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