When Viktor Orban fell from power in Hungary last week, the media rushed to project his defeat onto the U.S. political scene. Headlines included: “Orban was first. Trump is next,” “Orban’s defeat is a road map for beating Trump,” and “Trump’s humiliation in Orban defeat stunner is only just beginning.”
News giants missed the big, crucial lesson. Orban lost to a conservative candidate. In the United States, Democrats are taking the opposite path from the one Hungarians took.
In the latest episode, I explain. Listen now:
Peter Magyar, the prime minister-elect, is avowedly conservative. But he is not far right and anti-democratic, as Orban is considered to be.
An Associated Press story on the PBS website carries the headline, “Orban’s election loss has ripple effects for Trump and US conservatives.” Somehow it manages to avoid mentioning that Magyar is conservative.
In parliamentary democracies, people don’t vote directly for a prime minister. They vote for members of parliament, which in Hungary is the super easy to both spell and pronounce Országgyűlés. (I have not even attempted to say that word on the show.) The parliament then chooses the leader.
Candidates from liberal parties have tried to supplant Orban and his party, Fidesz. But Hungarians resoundingly rejected them. Years ago, left-wing candidates ran against Orban “on an antigraft message,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Orban “focused on immigration and went on to win a resounding two-thirds majority in parliament.”
This time, left-wing parties gave up and threw their support behind a new, broad coalition that backed Magyar. “The radical left-wing Momentum Movement” announced it would not participate in the 2026 elections,” English-language news site Hungary Today reported. The Centre for European Reform reported that, “Left-liberal parties such as the Demokratikus Koalició, DK (Democratic Coalition) and Momentum have been decimated.”
Parties with small support have much greater power in parliamentary democracies, where they can be vital in making or breaking a majority coalition. But in the United States, two parties control just about everything. Our choices are binary.
Based on the news coverage, you’d think Hungarians were simply fed up with a right-wing strongman, voted in his opponent, and showed that the same thing can happen here. The reality is that a coalition worked to make sure there would be an opponent supported by a majority of the population. That inspired people to show up to the polls. Hungary had a record-breaking 79% turnout.
At the rate the U.S. Democratic party is going, that won’t happen here. The left is embracing openly anti-democratic socialists like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his allies. They’re holding campaign events with anti-democratic, anti-American, antisemitic hate monger Hasan Piker. (He is now being called out for a racist rant against Vietnamese people — something you almost surely have not heard about in the news.)
U.S. Democrats are heading in a direction exactly opposite to what Hungarians did.
We live at a time with rising dangers from the left and the right. If there is a lesson from the Hungary elections, it’s that voters don’t have to give in to either extreme. They can support people who stand against both extremes and commit to shoring up democracy.
Peter Magyar succeeded because he was a dynamic candidate who could unite the center-right and center-left political parties in a parliamentary democracy.
Zohran Mamdani won in NYC as he was a dynamic candidate running against a corrupt opponent. His proposed policies addressed the concerns of the NYC “silent” majority. Yes, he needs to condemn Hassan Piker, just as mainstream Republicans need to condemn the extreme influencers on the right. A Democratic Socialist will not be the Democratic nominee for President in 2028, nor will any Democratic Socialist be running for Senate. Yes, they have succeeded in congressional races.