Hungarian voters delivered a decisive electoral upset to strongman Viktor Orbán, who spent 16 years consolidating power, capturing institutions, and portraying himself as the global template for illiberal democracy.  Opposition leader Péter Magyar won a landslide victory, with turnout exceeding 77 percent. The new government now holds a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority. In this episode of The Stakes, CFK Global Fellows Gábor Scheiring and Kristóf Szombati, both veterans of Hungarian opposition politics, examine what happened and what the results do and don’t resolve. They trace how Magyar built a movement that broke through a media environment controlled by Orbán allies, mobilized rural communities that previous opposition campaigns ignored, and attracted defectors from inside the regime’s own security apparatus.

Scheiring and Szombati are watching the victory carefully. Orbán not only ran a party but also built a repressive ecosystem that includes loyalist-stacked institutions and a hollowed-out civic space shaped by years of NGO suppression, none of which changes with an election result. The two fellows raise questions about whether economic and other frustrations could again fuel the far right within a few years. This conversation makes clear that once the ballots have been counted, the work of democratic recovery truly begins.