Péter Magyar, who led his Tisza party to a landslide victory last month and ended sixteen years of Viktor Orbán’s rule, delivered his first speech as Hungarian prime minister on Saturday, apologising “to those wronged” under his predecessor, vowing he would “serve, not rule” Hungary, and committing his government to repairing relations with Brussels. The opening days of his administration have been notable for a pointedly different style — viral footage of the new prime minister dancing at a public event has been treated by domestic and foreign press as evidence of an “optimistic era” — and a less remarked-upon fact, which is that the formal architecture Orbán built, from the captured public broadcaster to the constitutional court appointments to the gerrymandered electoral map, remains in place and is now Magyar’s to use or to dismantle.
The received wisdom
The dominant European reading, voiced from the European Parliament chamber down to the editorial pages of the broadsheet press, is that Magyar’s victory closes a long and embarrassing chapter for the EU and opens a normalisation. On this account, Hungary will rejoin the mainstream of the bloc on rule-of-law issues, the rule-of-law funds frozen under Article 7 will flow again, and the Visegrád grouping — already weakened by the change of government in Poland in late 2023 — will lose its remaining illiberal anchor. The further version of this reading is that Magyar represents a new generation of pro-European centrists who learned from Orbán’s communications playbook without absorbing his politics, and that his combination of personal charisma and institutional moderation is exactly the model that other EU member states facing right-populist insurgencies should study. The “I will serve, not rule” framing has been received in Brussels with audible relief.
A different read
A right-of-centre reader who has watched several of these European transitions should be wary of the redemption narrative without dismissing it. The fact pattern of the last fifteen years is that incoming governments which inherit captured institutions tend to use them, and that the discipline of dismantling rather than repurposing illiberal machinery is rare. Poland is the freshest case study: the Tusk government’s efforts to reverse PiS judicial reforms have been criticised by some of the same European institutions that demanded the reversals, on the grounds that the means employed — bypassing the constitutional court, dismissing prosecutors by ministerial fiat — were procedurally indistinguishable from the original sins they were intended to undo. The honest conservative observation is that the rule-of-law standard, applied symmetrically, is awkward for both sides; applied asymmetrically, it is not really a rule of law at all.
The temptation facing Magyar will be the same one Tusk faced and largely succumbed to. Hungary’s public broadcaster, MTVA, has been a Fidesz instrument for so long that “restoring its independence” will be widely understood, inside and outside the country, as a euphemism for replacing one set of loyalists with another. The constitutional court appointed under the 2011 reforms is dominated by Orbán-era nominees with long terms remaining; the choice will be between waiting them out, which will paralyse Magyar’s legislative agenda, or finding constitutional pretexts to remove them, which will hand the Fidesz opposition exactly the grievance Orbán had against the post-communist judiciary in 2010. Niall Ferguson’s general observation about post-revolutionary settlements applies with force here: it is much easier to capture institutions than to liberate them, because the act of liberation usually requires the same instruments as the act of capture.
The further problem is that Hungary’s economic position is genuinely difficult, and not in ways the redemption narrative captures. The forint has been weak; inflation, while down from 2022 peaks, remains above the EU average; and the energy dependency on Russia that Orbán cultivated has not been undone simply by changing the government. Toyota’s announcement last week that the Iran war has cost the company £3 billion is a reminder that the Central European industrial base, of which Hungary is a significant node, is highly exposed to global supply disruption. Magyar inherits a small open economy in a hostile global environment, and the European structural funds that Brussels is preparing to release will be useful but not transformative. The Tisza government’s first hard test will be a budget that disappoints both its young metropolitan base and its rural constituency, and the political talent required to manage that disappointment is different from the political talent required to win an opposition election.
There is, finally, a strategic dimension that the dance-move coverage has obscured. Orbán was a constant obstacle to coordinated EU policy on Ukraine, on China, and on enlargement; his removal genuinely simplifies the bloc’s life on those files. But he also represented a particular vein of Central European political opinion — sceptical of Brussels overreach, sceptical of Western liberal universalism, attached to national sovereignty and traditional family forms — which has not gone away simply because the government has changed. If Magyar governs as a conventional pro-European liberal, that vein of opinion will reorganise behind a successor party, possibly with the actual Fidesz brand, possibly with something newer; the populist vote in Hungary did not disappear in April, it was beaten by a more attractive populist on a different prospectus. The lesson Western European centrists ought to draw is the opposite of the one currently being drawn: Magyar won by being a populist his electorate found congenial, not by being the centrist Brussels would prefer.
What to watch
First, the first concrete steps on MTVA, the constitutional court, and the electoral map — symbolic apologies are easy; institutional dismantlement is the test. Second, the EU’s decision on rule-of-law funds and the conditions attached. Third, the residual Fidesz vote: where it goes, and on what platform, will determine whether Hungarian populism is in retreat or merely between vehicles. Fourth, Magyar’s personal style: charm has a half-life, and the dance footage will look different when the budget passes.
— J