How Orban, a Wizard of Populism, Lost His Magic Touch

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/world/europe/orban-hungary-election-magyar-populism.html

How Orban, a Wizard of Populism, Lost His Magic Touch
The election defeat for Prime Minister Viktor Orban is less the result of an ideological shift in Hungary, and more the playing out of a fundamental rule of politics.
By Andrew Higgins
April 13, 2026 Updated 1:00 p.m. ET

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The result on Sunday did not represent an ideological earthquake or a sudden swerve among Hungarians from right to left, but rather something highly personal. Voters toppled a strongman leader who, increasingly cocooned in the flattery of sycophants and the praise of a sprawling propaganda machine, had lost his touch.

Mr. Orban and other right-wing populists who have floundered in office ignored the Russian maxim that politics always involves tension between “the television” — propaganda — and “the refrigerator” — people’s lived reality.

“The gap between the television and the fridge becomes unbridgeable,” said David Pressman, a former U.S. ambassador to Hungary under the Biden administration and a frequent target for Mr. Orban’s propaganda machine.

“There is only so much propaganda can do when a citizen cannot get medical care in a hospital but knows their prime minister has exotic animals roaming a palatial countryside estate,” he said. That was a reference to opposition accusations that Mr. Orban’s family had stocked a vast country estate it owns west of Budapest with zebras.

Mr. Orban even had what some called a “Ceausescu moment,” a reference to December 1989, when the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu realized in disbelief that a crowd gathered to cheer him was actually booing. Opposition-friendly news media published photographs and videos of Mr. Orban looking stunned — and then very angry — when people started booing him at a campaign rally in the western city of Gyor.

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