Good morning.
“Ding-Dong! The witch is dead, the wicked witch is dead!”, sang the munchkins in the 1938 film The Wizard of Oz – and, for all the bad news in the world lately, I felt equally happy when I saw last night that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán lost the election.
And not just ‘lost’: Editors will be reaching for a thesaurus to find variants of ‘brutal’ and ‘crushing’ to describe the result, but the magic word is ‘two-thirds’.
That’s the parliamentary majority the incoming prime minister, Péter Magyar, needed to overturn Orbán-era reforms and restore rule of law to Hungary’s state institutions, prompting an unfreezing of billions of euros in EU funding, and that’s the majority he got, according to early counting on Sunday (12 April) evening.
It’s a testimony to the resilience of the democratic spirit in Hungarian society – Orbán was mangled/bulldozed/demolished despite spending billions of forints on a vicious propaganda campaign, credible reports of vote-buying, and outside meddling by Israel, Russia, and the US.
It might take Magyar years to undo the damage: Just look at Poland, which overturned its illiberal regime in 2023 and which is still fighting to remove its old stooges from key positions in 2026.
But I’m a foreign policy writer and, in this area, the positive effects will be almost immediate.
The most obvious of these is an end to Orbán’s pro-Kremlin vetoes in the EU Council, EU funds flowing to Kyiv, and new sanctions on president Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Slovakia’s Orbánist prime minister Robert Fico might have the same ideas, but he has never had the guts to veto anything of substance by himself.
At the same time, Israel also just lost its Orbán firewall against EU sanctions – even if there’s no majority to impose trade punishments over its genocidal wars, at least there is a clear path to blacklisting extremist settlers and government ministers, which Hungary alone had been blocking.
And, in a less quantifiable effect, Orbán’s fall is a blow to the morale of the wider forces of darkness inside the West: the far-right populist parties on the rise in countries such as France and Germany, as well as Orbán’s European Parliament group, the Patriots for Europe, which will take their seats at the next Strasbourg session with a broken nose.
It is also a boost for the morale of independent journalists everywhere: Hungary’s best media were instrumental in exposing Orbán’s wickedness.
The biggest witch is the one still occupying the White House, but as Americans prepare for the mid-terms in November, it’s not beyond imagination that the abject failure of Trump’s favourite European autocrat might also give US voters pause for thought about what kind of country they want to live in.
The new Trump-Netanyahu-Putin axis in world affairs is frightening, but it is weaker today than it was 24 hours ago.
“How’s she doing? … She’s got quite a big bump on her head”, said Dorothy’s relatives at the end of The Wizard of Oz.
“Aunt Em, is that you? (sits up holding head) I must have had a dream,” she said.
Hungary’s bad dream is over: welcome home!
Andrew Rettman – foreign-affairs editor
What else you need to know
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