Péter Magyar was sworn in as Hungary’s prime minister on 9 May, ending sixteen years of Viktor Orbán’s illiberal stranglehold and the myth of the far right’s inevitability. It is a stunning reversal.
The new cabinet, drawn largely from experts and technocrats, such as István Kapitány, former executive of Shell, is a sharp contrast to the ever more clownish regime that it replaced. Its identity rests on the trifecta of westernization, expertise, and bourgeois-civic modernization: a fairly conventional platform, but at the moment it shines as if it were revolutionary. Anyone who remembers the 2008 crisis associated with western techno-economic elites, or the French gilets jaunes uprising against expert-approved carbon taxes,it difficult to feel unqualified enthusiasm for technocratic governance. Yet, in the shadows of Trump and Orbán, a critical attitude toward technocracy appears to be a luxury.
As the initial celebrations of this democratic “Hungarian spring” subside, the new administration faces an historic burden of responsibility. Neither illiberalism nor the liberal “end of history” is inevitable. The magical thinking that the far-right dominoes will now automatically fall could lead us to the next illiberal cycle, and not just in Hungary.
Defeat not victory
The moment calls for a celebration, but not of liberal democracy’s victory. . Orbán did not fall because Hungarian society suddenly embraced liberal constitutionalism. He lost because the economy tanked, and everyone could see his cronies getting rich. His regime was exhausted morally and economically.
On the surface, Orbánism wasn’t always so shambolic. It rose as a political response to the exhaustion of the pre-2010 liberal model, which was dependent on foreign capital and cheap labour. Orbánism welded together three constituencies: it preserved the centrality of transnational manufacturing capital, emancipated the domestic bourgeoisie, and integrated workers through a mixture of statist-clientelist redistribution and nationalism. The aim was to accelerate accumulation at the top while buying quiescence at the bottom. Through the 2010s, this social contract delivered well enough to endure.
Accumulation chases quick profits, though, while development requires long-term planning and upgrading which can go against short-term interests. Without a quality bureaucracy, accumulation degenerates into cronyism. For all the talk of “national champions,” Orbán was never interested in high-quality institutions; his party-state fused loyalty and spectacle. Without an eco-social developmental state, the contradictions of dependency returned and corroded the authoritarian social contract at the heart of Orbánism. When the material delivery failed, the nationalist movie built on moral panics about minorities and external enemies lost its audience.
The “old opposition” had its chances before, but unifying without innovating just reproduced the failures which had brought Orbán to power in the first place. Magyar broke that pattern by rejecting the playbook. He was the right person at the right time: a Fidesz insider with the credibility and energy to channel disgust into hope, and the pragmatism to avoid alienating voters with liberal orthodoxies.
Three traps
When taking the next steps, Hungary needs to be mindful of past centrist mistakes. In the US, the Democrats passed ambitious legislation after Trump’s first term, but retreated from it halfway through and failed to turn policy into a story voters believed in, so Trump returned. In Britain, Starmer won a landslide promising normalcy; less than two years later, Reform UK leads the polls, and Labour has collapsed.
In Slovakia, the pro-EU coalition that followed Vladimír Mečiar’s rule ran stabilization programs that weakened their own social base; within a decade, the nationalist-populist politics represented by Robert Fico was back. In Tunisia, the democratic parties of the 2011 Arab Spring perpetuated the dependent development inherited from the authoritarian era, fattening the coastal export enclaves and leaving the interior regions and precarious youths behind; within a decade, autocracy returned.
The pattern is consistent: the defeat of an illiberal leader does not resolve the underlying drivers of discontent. Like others attempting to revive democracy, Péter Magyar must confront three stubborn obstacles.
The first trap is economic. Hungary’s economy still relies heavily on low-wage assembly and manufacturing activities tied to transnational corporations, with chronic brain drain and a domestic business sector lacking the capability to innovate. The new administration’s heavyweight portfolios (finance, economy, foreign affairs) signal a market-liberal, fiscally orthodox reorientation, paired with a welcome half-turn toward fairness. This includes a small income tax cut at the bottom and a symbolic wealth tax at the top. More substantively, public healthcare and education are slated for serious reinvestment. For families who have spent the last decade dreading the local hospital and watching teachers leave the profession, this promises critical improvement.
Magyar can spur short-term recovery by ticking a few anti-corruption and rule-of-law boxes and reorienting toward Brussels, and roughly 18 billion euros in frozen EU funds will start flowing again. The economy will likely purr - but only for a while. EU structural funds are a sugar rush, not a growth model. Without transformative social and economic policies, the frustrations feeding illiberalism will return.
The second trap is political. Almost every other opposition party figuratively dissolved itself to clear Magyar’s path. The unions are weak. Sixteen years of Orbán gutted the NGO sector. Tisza is barely two years old, with no meaningfully organized party base. Magyar, a textbook influencer politician, floats above Hungarian society with immense symbolic capital, but thin institutional roots. Meanwhile, Orbán’s regime was built to outlast any single government: its endowed foundations, loyal business networks, and captured institutions were designed as extra-governmental fortifications of illiberalism.
The new constitutional supermajority provides the legal tools to dismantle those fortifications. Magyar has granted the new Office of the Prime Minister significant operational leverage to uproot Orbán’s crony networks. These are reasons for hope, but pulling down Orbán’s fortifications, however welcome, still falls short of opening up democratic institutions to the citizens. The countervailing power to keep economic and political elites in check is weak. If Hungarian democracy remains a formal, institutional shell without new channels of representation, participation, and deliberation, large parts of the society will feel alienated again.
The third trap is cultural. Magyar was right not to double down on the liberal “hard talk” of constitutions and identity politics that alienated the voters from the “old opposition.” His softer nationalism worked amid Orbán’s spectacular exhaustion, but singing the far right’s songs at a lower volume is not an alternative identity: voters tend to prefer the original to the copy.
It is not a uniquely Hungarian phenomenon that the centre-right competes with the far right by adopting anti-immigration politics under the guise of a suit-and-tie nationalism. Within this civilisationist frame, even limited forms of feminism and sexual rights discourse can become weaponized within broader civilizational narratives meant to demonstrate the “superiority” of the “West” over the “barbarism” of the “Rest.” In the East European psyche, “Europe” and the “West” function as naive synonyms for law, decency, and merit. However, this kind of civilizational or Euronationalist grandstanding can ultimately strengthen the far right.
Tisza’s new techno-pop narratives are pitched to the educated, urban, professional middle class. However, for the working class in non-metropolitan Hungary, Magyar continues to offer nationalism as a source of symbolic attachment. Without a compelling social vision that speaks to dignity and belonging, cultural grievances remain ripe for exploitation by far-right actors. Sixty percent of Hungarians work in lower-end services or production, yet integrating them in ways that seal off the channels for far-right mobilization seems beyond the new government’s ambition.
The green left and sustainable democracy
There is a structural reason these traps are hard to escape: addressing them requires the kind of organized social force — unions, civic organizations, and durable democratic movements — that centrist governments rarely generate on their own. For the first time since the First World War, the left is not represented in the Hungarian parliament. Comparative experience is unforgiving here. Democracies which confront the far right without a credible progressive pole tend to oscillate between technocratic correction and reactionary backlash, and the corrective phase rarely lasts. Without inclusive foundations, Hungary’s new, hard-won democracy may prove unsustainable.
This is where the analytical case for a green-left pole becomes a clear argument for democracy and socioeconomic renewal. The triple trap is not peculiar to Hungary, just the domestic form of the wider, global and European, polycrisis. The continent is losing ground globally, taking the back seat to China, even in green industry. Its current response is military-Keynesian: build tanks instead of cars. That is a recipe for technological marginalization and the withering of Europe’s global leadership.
A green industrial policy with redistributive teeth is the only available framework linking the economic upgrade that Europe’s peripheries need to the competitive edge Europe’s economic core must recover and the inclusion the working class is owed. Without an organized green-left pole pushing in that direction, the triple trap just reproduces itself one electoral cycle at a time, in Hungary and beyond.
Magyar has time to avoid these traps. His first task is to clear the rubble Orbán left behind. With a two-thirds majority, a record mandate, and genuine goodwill, he has the political capital to lay the groundwork for a long-term plan - but grace periods do come to an end.
Until democrats confront the triple tarp, they might win occasional elections, but they will lose the long-term struggle.