Hajrá Magyarország!

A Nation Saves Itself

On my mind from early Monday morning, I saw a nation that saved itself rather than sacrifice itself to the poverty in the promise of a leadership that had been in power for so long it had run out of ideas.

Hungary was hungry for change, and they went out to get it. The scale of the victory was telling: from the opposition Tisza Party not even contesting parliament at the last election, when the ruling Fidesz Party gained a super-majority and a fourth term for Viktor Orban, to the ruling party suffering such a catastrophic defeat that Mr Orban conceded within minutes of the polls closing.

Power and Its Costs

There are many analyses of these results, and they will probably continue for years with different angles and postulations to the point of exhaustion; it is irrelevant. Mr Orban, a long-serving Prime Minister who had modelled the country after a fashion, could have taken the opportunity, after any one of his electoral victories, to bow out in a blaze of glory, handing the baton to a protégé. But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; many men fall prey to that lure.

You could look into the history of Viktor Orban, the people who helped and mentored him, and the exposure he had to liberal democracy before he turned towards illiberal democracy, supporting such conservative causes that antagonised broader Western European values, and wonder how the quest for power and the desire to retain it made the man seem more villainous than respectable.

Hope Over Fear

That reputation for villainy over respectability, however, is precisely what made Peter Magyar's campaign such a masterclass in political messaging. Religious zealotry and Christian nationalism can only do so much when a government has run out of answers to the questions that most urgently trouble ordinary people: the cost of living, wages that do not stretch to the end of the month, a healthcare system groaning under neglect, hospitals short-staffed as doctors and nurses leave for better prospects elsewhere, and the everyday concerns of communities that had long felt invisible to those in power. These were the realities that Magyar took seriously, and that Orban could not convincingly address.

What Orban could offer instead was fear. Enemies were conjured beyond the borders: Brussels encroaching on sovereignty, migrants threatening the national character, foreign financiers orchestrating Hungary's undoing. But fear of the outsider offers little comfort to people struggling inside their own homes, pitted against each other, whilst the ruling party tilts on patronage and patrimonialism, favouring partisans and acolytes against others.

Hope and expectation over fear and trepidation, over the foreign influences of a similar nationalist ilk; an unwillingness to compromise on the fight against corruption; taking Hungary from the isolation and recalcitrance that Europe saw as backsliding to the promise of situating Hungary back in the West for advantage and prosperity, whilst building back the institutions that had lost their independence to cronyism; this was what won the people.

Democracy Always Matters

Those people, and especially the youth among them, saw in Magyar a hope and a future that, had Viktor Orban won again, would have seemed even bleaker. For Viktor Orban to have been electorally humiliated after appearing unassailable and invincible for more than a decade is a message that populism can totally run out of road and find itself at the precipice of a cliff edge, without any possibility of recovery.

Beyond the jubilation for Hungarians and the evidently hard work of fixing things that lies ahead, we all celebrate with them the realisation that democracy matters and that everyone needs to get out to vote, if they really do desire change.

Hajrá Magyarország!

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