Despite using all the levers of power to tilt the election in his favor, MAGA favorite Victor Orban has been kicked out as prime minister after being in power for 16 years, with his Fidesz party getting roundly defeated.

With 98.74% of the vote counted, [Péter] Magyar’s Tisza party was projected to have won 138 of the 199 seats in the country’s parliament, giving them a super-majority capable of amending the constitution and key laws, suggesting they would be able to reverse some of the changes made by Orbán and Fidesz, and potentially unlock EU funds.

Fidesz won 55 seats, while the extreme-right Mi Hazánk party won six.
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The election was being closely watched around the world as a test of the resilience of the Maga movement and the global far right, many of whom have long looked to Orbán as an inspiration and sought to follow his playbook.

Days before the election, JD Vance had travelled to Budapest, with the US vice-president saying that he had come to “help” Orbán. Donald Trump had also repeatedly endorsed Orbán, most recently on Friday when he vowed to bring US “economic might” to the country if Orbán was re-elected.
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In recent months, Orbán, 62, had also been endorsed by rightwing and far-right leaders ranging from France’s Marine Le Pen to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

Just as Trump is trying to do here, Orban tried to rig the elections.

His rightwing populist government used its time in office to steadily whittle away at the checks and balances that constrained its power: rewriting election laws to its own benefit, manoeuvring to put loyalists in control of an estimated 80% of the country’s media, and retooling the country’s judiciary.

Ahead of the election, as the government stepped up its efforts to clamp down on dissent, local resistance swelled, bursting into public view as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Budapest in June in defiance of the government’s efforts to ban Pride.
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Analysts were swift to warn that change would probably come slowly. During Fidesz’s 16 years in power, the party stacked the Hungarian state, media and judiciary with loyalists; how they would respond to a change in government was now up in the air.

“The path ahead for Hungary is a complicated one – Fidesz’s control of the business sector, media, public administration, and the judiciary reaches far and deep,” said Dalibor Rohac, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Others pointed to all that Magyar and Tisza had been up against. In the lead up to the election, billboards generated with AI and paid for by the government became a mainstay across the country, depicting Magyar as a danger to the country and a stooge of the EU and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“Tisza could win against all odds: help from the United States and from Russia, a massive state disinformation machinery, and all state institutions helping Fidesz,” said Péter Krekó, the director of the Budapest-based Political Capital thinktank.

This losss has to give Trump, Vance, and the entire MAGA cult some concern because they had held Orban up as a model for a country’s leader and are trying to do the same thing here.

Orban’s loss after Vance spent so much time in Hungary promoting him has to to be considered strike two for Vance, following his abortive talks in Pakistan with Iran.