Hungarian is a pretty unique language (supposedly related to Finnish but only philologists detect any similarity), hardly more than one person out of every 1,000 in the world is Hungarian and not even making it to the World Cup but last Sunday’s elections there ousting the far right might just be the shape of things to come – a kind of Aleph touchstone for current electoral trends.
No automatic extrapolation, of course, but there has been a fairly steady stream of recent results elsewhere in the same direction. Most eyes are obviously on the United States, with a uniform string of defeats for Donald Trump in this year’s local voting plus unanimously negative opinion polls, but one stinging setback in particular will be singled out here – in a special Florida state election in the last week of March, Democrat Emily Gregory flipped the Palm Beach district housing Trump’s Mar-a-Lago luxury club estate, turning a Republican majority of 19 percent into just over two percent in her favour.
But beforehand there were major or minor reversals of fortune elsewhere for those well right of centre. Italian premier Giorgia Meloni suffered her first defeat in four years when the electorate said no by a 54-44 percent margin to a referendum on her judicial reforms in an unusually high turnout of 60 percent. In the French municipal elections (mayoral run-offs March 22) there was a strong shift towards centrist options with the National Rally (as the National Front now call themselves) winning no major city beyond Perpignan despite high hopes elsewhere in the South in Marseille, Nice and Toulon. Mid-March regional elections in Castille and Leon saw Spain’s far right Vox falter in their almost exponential advance of recent years, adding only one seat. In Britain Sir Keir Starmer’s plunging popularity was assumed to gift the Manchester Labour stronghold of Gorton and Denton to Nigel Farages’s fast-growing far right Brexit populist Reform Party in the February 26 by-election but instead victory went to the Greens. Further examples could be produced but this paragraph is already much too long.
Since then Peru’s presidential elections last Sunday were expected to turn the June 7 run-off into a primary between two right-wingers but rural votes seem to be turning leftist Roberto Sánchez (who is not Sandro restored to life, to the chagrin of the singer’s local devotees) into Keiko Fujimori’s future rival. Not that voting has become a one-way street worldwide. Rather than either left or right, the underlying trend is hostility towards incumbent governments of any stripe – disgruntled voters seem to be saying: “Any colour as long as it’s black” like Henry Ford over a century ago.
To what extent do Hungary’s far more significant general elections last Sunday set a pattern and to what degree are they sui generis? The government defeat at the hands of pro-European centrist opposition leader Péter Magyar was the chronicle of a death foretold for reasons other than 16 consecutive years in office inevitably accumulating erosion anywhere at any time. That Viktor Orbán somehow managed to be a pal of both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin was simply flying in the face of Hungary’s past and present – the global economic havoc caused by Trump’s Middle East incursions also reaching the Danube in the case of the former and lingering memories of the brutal Soviet repression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in the case of the latter despite continuing dependence on his fuel supplies. Plus how could Hungarians not vote for somebody surnamed Magyar?
Orbán’s comeuppance now gives Trump a hat-trick of his bear hug proving to be a kiss of death – last April MAGA tariffs enabled Canadian Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney to survive an “unwinnable” election after opinion poll leads of 15-20 percent for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives throughout 2024 while the following month Australia’s Labor government romped to a landslide over the Liberal Peter Dutton (who lost his seat) after trailing prior to Trump’s inauguration. Perhaps needless to say, The Donald gave both Peter and Pierre an exuberant support which proved counterproductive.
Magyar’s margin was bigger than any of the above although largely due to the quirks of an electoral system created by an Orbán falling into his own trap. With 53 percent of the vote, his Tisza party laid claim to almost 70 percent of the National Assembly seats (137) but this was because 106 of the 199 seats were constituencies with first past the post (enabling Starmer to bag two-thirds of British seats with a third of the vote back in 2024) and only 93 by proportional representation (PR) – Orbán’s ultra-nationalist Fidesz was thus reduced to 56 seats when PR would have given his 37.8 percent 76 in the highly polarised election. This system is not as outlandishly unique as sometimes argued by Orbán critics – the Greeks also give election winners bonus seats while German parliamentary representation is divided between constituencies and PR.
A quick footnote on Magyar’s party label – the Tisza is both a river (the Danube’s longest tributary) and evokes Kalman and Istvan Tisza, virtually hereditary premiers in the Hungarian half of the 1867-1918 Dual Monarchy with Austria, but the name comes from the first syllables of the Hungarian words for respect and freedom.
With Orbán losing power and Trump upbraiding Meloni for sticking up for Pope Leo against his insults, President Javier Milei finds himself in a shrinking club – will 2026 be the year when it all comes apart for the new right?
The wheel may be swinging against the right recently but it could always turn back before spinning full circle. Both Milei’s anarcho-capitalism and totalitarian socialism are unattainable ideals making a mixed economy inescapable everywhere – its electoral corollary is democratic alternation between the left and right to restore the balance between public and private sectors within that mixed economy.
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