Orbán Lost. Illiberalism Didn’t.

The defeat of illiberal leaders raises a harder question than it resolves: what actually comes after illiberalism—and how much of it truly recedes?

Image made using “Viktor Orbán, 2021.10.21 (08),” by European Union; “HUN-2015-Budapest-Hungarian Parliament (Budapest) 2015-01,” by Godot13 licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International; “Viktor Orbán, 2025.06.26 (04),” by European Union.

Voting Against Orbán, Maybe Not Against Orbánism

On Sunday, Viktor Orbán, who with his party Fidesz claimed for his country the term “illiberal democracy” and spent sixteen years proving it could work, conceded defeat and promised to serve Hungary “from opposition.”

The scale of the loss matters as much as the loss itself. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party secured 138 of 199 parliamentary seats, so a full two-thirds supermajority. Turnout surpassed 77%, the highest since the end of communism in 1989. This was not a narrow rejection, nor a protest vote that surprised everyone including the protesters. Magyar built a cross-ideological coalition that pulled support from traditional opposition voters as well as disillusioned conservatives, mobilized by fatigue with corruption.

But there is a distinction that the jubilant coverage of Sunday’s result has been too quick to collapse, and it matters for what comes next. Some votes reflected genuine ideological rejection, especially among young and urban voters, but many read more as a judgment on performance. After sixteen years in power, particularly in a final phase defined by economic drift, Orbán had come to personify a system that had simply run out of momentum.

The vote registered fatigue with the man and his tenure. It is far less clear that it amounted to a rejection of Orbánism itself, if we take the term to mean the set of cultural assumptions that the previous governments spent years embedding into the common sense of Hungarian public life.

Look at the numbers with care. Fidesz took 37.8% of the vote. This means that roughly one in three Hungarian voters looked at the past sixteen years of corruption allegations and economic stagnation and still chose to stay. Any account of post-illiberalism that does not begin with that fact is writing a different story than the one that actually happened.

Magyar’s campaign itself was conspicuously careful in its attempt not to look like a liberal repudiation of conservative values. He ran on corruption, healthcare, and public transportation—the material that makes up the texture of everyday life for Hungarians. He did not run on a migration policy reversal. He did not campaign as a champion of the Brussels consensus on gender and identity. He is himself a man of the Fidesz apparatus, who only left the party in the spring of 2024. He is not an outsider; he is a conservative, is very anti-immigration, and is quite a nationalistic figure. He did not ask Hungarian voters to become different kinds of people.

The Damage to Illiberalism’s International Project

Orbán was undone mostly by his own failures, but his defeat also unfolded within a shifting geopolitical context whose significance is felt well beyond Hungary.

For Russia, Orbán’s exit has immediate and strategic consequences. It deprives Putin of his main ally inside the EU and likely opens the door to unblocking a 90 billion euro loan to war-battered Ukraine that Budapest had been vetoing. Slovakia remains something of a Kremlin-friendly presence, but it is a smaller and less consequential player. The balancing act that Budapest performed between Brussels and Moscow (and Beijing) is over, and it remains to be seen whether any other EU government could or would take over that role.

That said, imagining a 180-degree reversal of Hungarian foreign policy would be a mistake. Magyar is not a Brussels integrationist or a fan of Volodymyr Zelensky, and over time he may follow more of Orbán’s foreign policy instincts than the celebrations in European capitals currently assume.

For the American right, the blow is more ideological than strategic. For a decade and a half, Orbán carved out a model of illiberal democracy that was seen as a blueprint for Trump’s MAGA movement and its admirers across Europe. So-called Post-liberal intellectuals like Patrick Deneen, along with media figures like Tucker Carlson, made pilgrimages to Budapest. Rod Dreher has made it his home since 2022, and Gladden Pappin immigrated to Budapest himself around the same time. The influential and highly publicized CPAC conference has held laudatory events there, too.

The Hungarian model of Christian nationalism was held up as a vision of what conservatism could achieve if it simply had the courage to stop playing by liberal rules. That moment is closing. Magyar has begun openly criticizing the use of state resources to sustain these transnational networks, including by publicizing evidence that Orbán’s government directed taxpayer funds toward initiatives such as CPAC. The EU political group Patriots for Europe, led by France’s Jordan Bardella, also loses its most credible exhibit.

More fundamentally, the fate of the intellectual ecosystem Orbán built will test how dependent illiberalism is on state patronage for its institutional reproduction. Orbán spent years carefully constructing structures to give illiberalism its respectable face (the Danube Institute, the Mathias Corvin Collegium, the European Conservative, etc.). Whether that apparatus quietly reorients itself, decamps to friendlier capitals, or simply dissolves now that the patron who made it possible has been voted into opposition remains to be seen.

Post-Illiberalism Is Not the Restoration of Liberalism

The harder questions begin where the celebration ends. Post-illiberalism is not a return to the liberalism that preceded it. This is the central illusion that needs puncturing, and it is an illusion that liberal institutions such as the European Commission, centrist think tanks, and the foreign policy commentariat are deeply invested in maintaining, because the alternative is analytically messier and institutionally less comfortable to sustain.

The evidence from every post-illiberal transition suggests the same uncomfortable truth: the system does not reset, it reconfigures. The architecture has been altered, and any attempt at restoration must build on new foundations.

Four structural reasons explain why.

Laws change faster than the people who administer them: packed courts, captured broadcasters, and gerrymandered boundaries do not automatically self-correct when the legislation enabling them is repealed.

Illiberal elites do not disappear either; Fidesz retains 55 seats, its business networks retain their wealth, and illiberal movements in opposition become a permanent pressure with a vested interest in proving that liberal government cannot work.

Beneath the institutional level, society itself has been reshaped in ways that do not simply reverse themselves with electoral change. At the same time, the political language has shifted, and even reformers must operate within a vocabulary partly defined by their predecessors.

And underlying all of this is the deepest loss: liberalism is no longer the default. It is now one option among several, a choice that must be argued for and won repeatedly rather than simply inherited. Which means post-illiberalism is not an endpoint, but the start of a permanently contested order.

Three Futures, None of Them Comfortable

Illiberal governments have been voted out before. Law and Justice (PiS), which governed Poland for eight years, lost its parliamentary majority in 2023 and now occupies the opposition benches. In the Czech Republic, Andrej Babiš was defeated in 2021 before he could fully cement his grip. Slovakia seems to be, partially and ambiguously, oscillating between democratic reform and Robert Fico’s return. In Brazil, the margin of Jair Bolsonaro’s loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2022 was thin enough to provoke an attempted Capitol-style insurrection. And in the United States, Donald Trump was voted out in 2020 after four years of institutional stress-testing.

The pattern is consistent enough to be meaningful: illiberal governments, when they stop short of full authoritarianism, do eventually face electoral accountability. The mechanism works. Hungary, in that sense, confirms its status as an illiberal democracy: Orbán accepted electoral defeat without resorting to violence.

What is far less clear is what the mechanism produces on the other side. Three trajectories suggest themselves.

Scenario 1: The Restoration Thesis

This is the dream scenario for liberal elites, and the one they are most inclined to believe in: that illiberalism provokes such a sustained backlash that liberalism finds itself genuinely reinvigorated. Not just electorally successful but substantively renewed, with stronger institutions, a more engaged citizenry, and a political culture that values liberal democracy precisely because it has experienced its absence.

The evidence for this scenario is thin. Let’s take a closer look at one of the “success stories” I provided above as an example. In Poland, Donald Tusk’s government has struggled to reverse the judicial changes that PiS made, blocked at every turn by a Constitutional Tribunal still stacked with PiS-aligned judges. It faces a PiS-backed president, Karol Nawrocki, who wields veto power over the entirety of Tusk’s reform agenda. Meanwhile, the Polish right has radicalized, with newer far-right formations like the Confederation (KWiN) and The Crown (KKP) pulling the ecosystem further from the liberal center.

What looked like democratic restoration in 2023 now appears more like a temporary rebalancing within a still deeply contested system. Similar stories can be seen across the various case studies.

As for the United States, the Biden administration’s failure to prevent Trump’s return was not primarily an electoral failure but a diagnostic one. It chose to treat 2020 as a verdict rather than a warning. Trump’s return to power was the bill coming due for a liberalism that had confused its own electoral survival with the health of the political culture it was supposed to defend.

Scenario 2: Competitive Alternation

This last point leads us into the second possibility wherein illiberalism and liberalism become two stable, alternating options, neither capable of permanently defeating the other, cycling in and out of power as economic conditions shift and cultural anxieties ebb and flow.

The evidence for this scenario is much stronger than the evidence for the restoration thesis. Let us look at those examples again. In Poland, after losing the parliamentary elections in 2023, a PiS ally was able to win the presidency in 2025 and retain the veto power I discussed above. In the Czech case, Babiš and his party were defeated in 2021 only to return to power in 2025 with the most seats they had ever attained in an election. In Slovakia, Fico and his Smer party have won and lost power several times since 2006, and Fico is now in the middle of his fourth distinct mandate. In Brazil, polls indicate that Lula may lose this year’s elections to Jair Bolsonaro’s son. And obviously, Trump returned with a harder edge and fewer internal constraints.

Competitive alternation is a liveable arrangement in the sense that it preserves competitive elections, but it is a deeply uncomfortable one, because it means that every liberal government governs under the credible threat of illiberal succession, and therefore governs defensively, perpetually managing the conditions of its own potential reversal.

Worse, alternation may not be a stable equilibrium: each illiberal return tends to be more systematic than the last. The second Trump administration is the clearest illustration, arriving not with the improvised chaos of 2017 but with prepared executive orders and a systematic approach to the institutions that had frustrated the first term.

In other countries, however, the dynamic runs in the opposite direction. Rather than radicalizing with each return to power, illiberal forces are gradually absorbed and normalized, integrated into coalition politics until their radicalism is blunted by the responsibilities of office and the compromises of governance. Italy is an instructive case insofar as parties that once seemed to threaten the constitutional order ended up governing within it.

Over time, this alternation does not simply repeat the cycle; it reshapes the system itself, normalizing practices once seen as exceptional. Whether this cyclical reshaping represents liberalism taming illiberalism, or illiberalism quietly rewriting the boundaries of the acceptable, is a matter of interpretation.

Scenario 3: Transnational Circulation

The third possibility relies on the assumption that the defeat of Orbán, like the defeat of Bolsonaro or the first defeat of Trump, does not extinguish the political energy that produced him. It displaces it. Illiberalism is not a local pathology but a travelling formula, endlessly adaptable, that moves toward wherever the conditions are ripest.

The resentments Orbán channeled, the techniques his government pioneered for capturing courts and media and electoral machinery, the intellectual framework his network built to give authoritarian instincts a respectable theoretical face: none of this disappears with his defeat.

The question worth asking is not only whether Hungary can rebuild what was dismantled, but where the next illiberal trajectory is already taking shape, and which countries are moving along it. Magyar’s victory points to a broader pattern: post-illiberal change tends to occur not through cultural rupture, but through managerial correction within largely unchanged value frameworks.

Orbán may be gone. The conditions that made him possible remain.