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Monday, April 13, 2026

13: Hungary

Orbán’s Defeat Shows What Trump’s Opponents Keep Doing Wrong The Hungarian election was a setback for MAGA. But the winner’s campaign should be a wake-up call for Trump’s opponents. .......... There is no question that Orbán’s downfall is a loss for MAGA-style politics and a reminder that even a developed system of so-called “illiberal democracy” has its limits. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance committed personal credibility and political capital to sustaining Orbán-ism, including by dispatching Vance to campaign for the premier in the final days of the election. ............... That is because

Orbán’s ouster represents a new triumph for a particular brand of disruptive politics: one defined by reformist candidates who launch new parties and blow up old ones, winning elections by rendering traditional political structures obsolete.

Hungary’s Peter Magyar, the leader of the anti-Orbán Tisza party, is the latest victor in this mold. There is no equivalent figure among Trump’s American opponents. .................. Magyar joins an eclectic club of successful insurgents scattered from Paris and Rome and Ottawa to Buenos Aires and Seoul and Washington. ................. Magyar, 45, was an obscure midlevel official in Orbán’s party before turning apostate in a spectacular defection, armed with a damning secret recording of his spouse who served in Orbán’s government. ..........

Democrats have largely hewed to the command-and-control mindset that gave them Hillary Clinton’s coronation in 2016, the party’s abrupt flight to safety with Joe Biden in 2020 and the anointment of Kamala Harris in 2024 without even the pretense of a contested nomination. At least at the national level, Democrats’ political culture prizes order and nonconfrontation, deference to interest groups and demographic symbolism, reverence for norms over original thinking and big ideas.

.................. The American party system is heavily armored against disruption. It would be all but impossible to replicate here what Magyar has done in Hungary — or what France’s Emmanuel Macron and Argentina’s Javier Milei did before him — and turn a fledgling political organization into a personal vehicle and bring it to national power in a flash. We do not have secondary political parties that can surge to prominence in a single campaign, like Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia or Rob Jetten’s D66 in the Netherlands. ................ Yet as Trump himself has shown, it is possible to devour a major party from the inside — commandeering an old institution with grassroots support, casting aside its entrenched leaders, remaking it in a new image and earning a fresh look from voters who didn’t like the old version. Mark Carney has done something similar in Canada, with a very different political agenda. So has Lee Jae Myung in South Korea. ....................... I remember hearing from a senior Canadian lawmaker that Carney was an academic stiff sure to flop in electoral politics, only a few months before he freed the Liberal Party from Justin Trudeau’s shadow and led it to an astonishing upset. .............

The strongest successor to Trump — from either party — would not be a ladder climber awaiting his or her turn, but rather someone ready to claim the role through disruption and combat.

The US blockade of Iran is a gamble. Will it work?

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