Viktor Orban will probably lose. What then?

For sixteen years, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has won every fight: four consecutive parliamentary supermajorities for his party, Fidesz; a constitution rewritten to his specifications; courts, media, and oligarchs brought to heel. He turned Hungary into what scholars politely call an "electoral autocracy" and what his critics less politely call a one-party state with elections. Along the way he made himself Donald Trump's closest ally in Europe, Vladimir Putin's most useful one, and the European Union’s “black sheep.”

On Sunday, Hungarians go to the polls. And for the first time since Orban returned to power in 2010, he will probably lose.

The man poised to end his run is Peter Magyar, a 45-year-old former Orban ally who was, until recently, part of the Fidesz machine he now wants to dismantle. Magyar is no liberal university professor or George Soros-funded NGO type. He's a social conservative who shares much of Orban's original political appeal. He broke with the ruling party not over policy differences but over stagnant living standards and systemic corruption – and in doing so became the first credible challenger in a generation to consolidate the anti-Orban vote.

The grievances are beyond justified. Hungary's economy grew just 0.4% last year, compared to Poland's 3.6%. Inflation has been outpacing wage growth. Public services like health and education have steadily deteriorated. Meanwhile, Orban and those around him have grown visibly, extremely rich. The vast majority of single-bid government contracts now go to a handful of Fidesz insiders. The corruption voters once tolerated in better times has become too brazen to ignore – a recent scandal involving a toxic spill and alleged cover-ups at a Samsung battery plant north of Budapest have compounded the sense that the rot runs deep. Orban's culture-war playbook has no answer for any of this.

For all his efforts to rig the system, the real engine of Orban’s dominance all these years has been a fractured opposition: liberals, greens, social democrats, and the far right all splitting the anti-Fidesz vote while the prime minister monopolized the patriotism lane. Magyar blew that up. By running as a nationalist who opposes Orban's record rather than his worldview, he's pulled voters from across the spectrum – from disenchanted Fidesz supporters to liberal urbanites to rural small-town voters – into his Tisza party and united them by a single shared goal: removing Fidesz.

Independent surveys put Tisza's lead over Fidesz at roughly 14 percentage points; even averaging in pro-government pollsters, which still show Fidesz ahead, the gap is around 9 points. Turnout is expected to hit record levels, which favors Magyar given that his voters report being more motivated to show up on election day. Perhaps the most telling indicator: for the first time, more Hungarians now believe Magyar will win than believe Orban will. In a system built on the psychology of inevitability, that shift is a barrier Orban will have a very hard time coming back from.

Orban has tried everything to turn the race around. Smear campaigns, pre-election cash giveaways, rallies recast as open public events that backfired when protesters showed up to boo him, fearmongering about the Ukraine war spilling over Hungary's border. This week, Serbia's president – a close Orban ally – conveniently accused Ukraine of planting explosives on a Russian gas pipeline running through Serbia to Hungary, a claim Serbia's own military intelligence, Kyiv, and Magyar all promptly denied and denounced as a false-flag operation.

In a last-ditch show of solidarity, the Trump administration even dispatched Vice President JD Vance and the Second Lady to Budapest to campaign alongside Orban this week—Trump himself dialed into a rally Vance was speaking at. Orban has cultivated his relationship with Trump longer than almost any foreign leader save perhaps for Russia’s Putin, positioning himself as MAGA's model European statesman and the American right's favorite autocrat. Vance duly railed against the EU and claimed (also without evidence) that Ukrainian intelligence was rigging elections in both Hungary and the United States. It won’t move the needle. Most Hungarians have no idea who Vance is. They're overwhelmingly pro-EU. And they're increasingly skeptical of Orban's closeness to a president associated with trade wars and rising prices. MAGA is more likely to hurt than to help.

None of this means that a Tisza victory is guaranteed. A significant share of voters – some one in four – remains undecided. And Orban has spent years building a system structurally tilted to keep Fidesz in power even as voter sentiment turns sharply against him. Hungary's 106 single-member constituencies were gerrymandered to favor the ruling party: opposition-leaning districts are substantially larger, meaning Tisza needs roughly 3 to 5 percentage points more of the popular vote just to win the same number of seats. State media remain firmly in Orban’s grip. Voter intimidation and vote-buying in the countryside – documented pressure on public workers and effectively non-secret balloting in elderly care facilities – can shift results by several points in rural districts. Sunday's election will be free, but it will not be fair.

Still, Tisza's support appears robust enough to overcome the structural handicap. The question is by how much. Magyar needs a lead of roughly 9 to 12 points to secure a simple parliamentary majority; most polling puts him comfortably above that. But the constitutional supermajority he’s gunning for would require a significantly wider margin. The difference matters enormously, because in Orban's Hungary, it means the difference between a new government and an actual change of regime.

A simple majority would barely let Magyar govern. Orban has spent sixteen years embedding Fidesz loyalists across every institution that matters: the constitutional court, the supreme court, the fiscal council, the media authority, the data protection office, the prosecutor’s office, and the list goes on. Most of these positions require a two-thirds supermajority to change. With a simple majority, Magyar could pass some legislation but would have no way to amend laws Orban enshrined in the constitution or to dislodge the loyalists he positioned to sabotage his agenda. Almost as soon as he took office, the Fidesz-controlled fiscal council would veto his budget for political reasons, and Tisza – unable to override it – would be forced to negotiate with Orban himself. Magyar is counting on unlocking EU funding to stabilize Hungary's finances after Orban’s pre-election spending spree. Brussels would be inclined to release up to €6.4 billion in frozen recovery funds before they expire at the end of August, in a show of goodwill. But the other €20-plus billion in frozen European defense and cohesion funds would require far deeper institutional reforms – in some cases, a supermajority – to unlock.

A constitutional majority is a different story entirely. That would give Magyar the power to rewrite the constitution, clear out Fidesz loyalists from captured institutions, fully access EU funding, and even adopt the euro – a core campaign pledge. It's a stretch but not impossible: Tisza could get there with a lead of roughly 16 to 17 points, or with a somewhat smaller margin if it forms a coalition with the far-right Our Homeland party, whose leader surprised everyone in March by signaling a willingness to negotiate with whoever emerges victorious. The gap between these two outcomes is the gap between a four-year siege against Fidesz’s rearguard and something closer to genuine regime change.

Don’t expect Orban to go quietly into retirement. In any scenario short of a Tisza supermajority, he will deploy every legal instrument available – from recounts to court challenges – to drag out the count. Results could take weeks to be officially certified. Combined with the 30-day window before the president issues a mandate, government formation could slip to June. Orban will use that time to entrench his party further and effectively wall off more areas of governance from the incoming administration. If the vote is close, expect claims of foreign interference (with Ukraine as the scapegoat), an effort to mobilize Fidesz supporters in the streets, and possibly an attempt to suspend the transition entirely. Russia will assist with disinformation and influence operations regardless.

None of it will change the outcome. Regardless of Tisza’s margin, Orban’s post-election maneuvering would be countered by massive counter-demonstrations in support of Magyar, particularly in Budapest. Divisions within Fidesz's own parliamentary caucus would also constrain how far the outgoing prime minister can push things. And the EU is already discussing reviving Article 7 sanctions proceedings against Hungary if Orban blatantly manipulates results or refuses to concede. He would ultimately be forced to accept defeat – even as he uses every institutional lever he’s embedded to obstruct and bring down the Magyar government before its term ends in 2030.

Whatever its mandate, a Tisza government would move quickly on rule of law and anticorruption reforms and end Hungary's spoiler role in EU decision-making. For Brussels, a Magyar win would at a minimum provide relief from the leader who has done more than anyone to stymie sanctions on Russia, block aid to Ukraine, and serve as Moscow's most reliable advocate. Investor confidence and intra-European cohesion would improve. But on the issues where Orban has most effectively shaped Hungarian opinion, Magyar would tread carefully. Fidesz's relentless anti-Ukraine campaigns have been so successful that Magyar would be reluctant to back EU efforts to fast-track Kyiv's membership or increase financial support. He's pledged to keep Hungary's southern border fence and has fully endorsed Fidesz's immigration policies. The anti-EU diatribes would go. The nationalism wouldn’t.

More broadly, an Orban defeat would not be a repudiation of his politics or a win for liberalism. Tisza is closer in spirit to the European right than to the center. It stands opposed to Orban's corruption, not his worldview. The forces that made Orbanism formidable aren’t going anywhere, and they extend well beyond Hungary. Nationalist and far-right parties are currently in government in Italy, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Finland, and Sweden. They're polling strongly in France, Germany, Poland, and the UK. Across the continent, roughly a quarter of voters support them. The squeeze that pushed Hungarians toward Orban in the first place – a sense that the system is rigged against them – is the same squeeze driving politics across Europe almost two decades later.

The question Magyar would face in government is the same one confronting every leader on the continent: Can you deliver material improvements fast enough to keep voters from deciding the whole system is broken?