Orbán's re-election campaign exposes tensions at the heart of Donald Trump’s plans to boost the far‑right in Europe
The battle for Hungary is part of an ongoing debate over the west as a geopolitical project.
When Hungarians are heading to the polls on 12 April to elect a new prime minister, the world will be watching. This may sound exaggerated, but these parliamentary elections are about much more than simply whether the incumbent prime minister, Viktor Orbán, will serve another term as his country’s leader.
His main challenger, Péter Magyar, until two years ago was a close ally of the Hungarian prime minister. On some key issues — future oil purchases from Russia, resisting fast-track EU accession for Ukraine — Magyar is a continuity candidate who, at best, signals moderation, rather than radical change. If he fails to win a two-thirds majority, which would allow him to change the constitution and undo many of the deeply undemocratic changes Orbán has made to Hungary’s political system, Magyar’s hands will also be tied domestically and he may not even be able to deliver on his key campaign promise — to clean up the systemic corruption that has thrived under Orbán.
In fact, while important, the outcome of the elections is almost secondary in a bigger picture of an election campaign that has revealed much about the broader, and increasingly fraught, geopolitical dynamics of geopolitical dynamics of European politics.
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Throughout his campaign, Orbán leaned into the close relationship he has built with Trump over many years. This is not surprising. The US president publicly endorsed him twice — first in February and then again in March. Trump also dispatched both his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and vice president, J.D. Vance, to Hungary. Vance, visiting Hungary just days before the elections, praised Orbán’s governance model and leadership style as a model for Europe and attacked the EU for trying to influence the outcome of the vote.
Such blatant election interference by the US in a Nato and EU member state is as unprecedented as it is worrying. It signals a new level of determination by the White House to shape alliances with other far-right populists predicated on the vague notion of “moral cooperation…and the defence of western civilisation”, as Vance put it during his visit to Budapest on April 7.
While Orbán revelled in Washington’s endorsements, his unconditional embrace of Trump is no longer the dominant approach to Washington among Europe’s right-wing populist parties. The appeal of the MAGA movement is rapidly diminishing in Europe. While fulsome in their support for Donald Trump for more than a decade, many European right-wing populists have begun to realise the fraught nature of their association with Trump. “America first” is exactly what it says on the tin, and Trump’s interpretation of what it means makes it even worse for some of his erstwhile supporters.
For Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki, Trump’s cosy relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin runs counter to the almost universal perception of Russia as the main threat to Polish security. For the Danish People’s Party, which sits with the far-right Patriots for Europe faction in the European parliament, Trump’s designs on Greenland were so unpalatable that one of its members, Anders Vistisen, told the US president to “fuck off”.
For, others, like the French National Rally, Trump’s tariff threats have affected some of their core constituencies among farmers. Even more so, Trump’s illegal war against Iran, hugely unpopular across European electorates, exposes the electoral liabilities of an association with Trump.
This does not make these right-wing populist movements more liberal. They still share a broad resentment of liberalism and what it stands for: open societies, open borders, and a commitment to global institutions. Many of these parties have staked their political legitimacy on the defence of the sovereignty of their individual nation states. They now need to ask themselves whether this sovereignty is perhaps more threatened by Washington — and Moscow — than by Brussels.
The answer to this question will partly be determined by the outcome of Sunday’s elections in Hungary. A win for Orbán would, at a minimum, indicate a sufficient appeal for an autocratic and illiberal model of governance and a residual appeal for an alignment with Trump. But this may not be a logic that prevails for long.
On the one hand, the defeat of Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni in a constitutional referendum that would have increased political influence over courts signals that a sizeable pro-liberal core electorate can still be mobilised.
On the other hand, Orbán’s close relationship with Putin and his persistent obstruction of the EU’s Ukraine policy is likely to leave him more and more isolated, even among otherwise ideologically close right-wing populists. This vulnerability became apparent as early as 2022 when Orbán’s long-time ally Jaroslaw Kaczynski, then Polish deputy prime minister, publicly bashed his pro-Russian leanings.
Divisions over the EU’s Russia policy have exposed one significant faultline among right-wing populist movements across Europe between those seeking accommodation with the Kremlin and those seeking deterrence and containment. The far-right Sweden Democrats, for example, threatened to leave the European Conservatives and Reformists parliamentary bloc in the European parliament if Orbán’s Fidesz party had been allowed to join — precisely because the Hungarian prime minister was seen as too close to Russia.
For these Russia-sceptical parties, Orbán’s alignment with Putin is clearly anathema, and Trump’s rapprochement with the Russian president is likely to cement their weariness of too close an alignment with the White House. Geographical proximity to Russia and a long history of confrontation with Russia will remain powerful drivers for these parties’ foreign and security policies. Ironically, but consistent with general absence of strategic vision in the White House, Trump’s endorsement of Orbán may thus effectively accelerate Orbán’s isolation among right-wing populists in Europe and undermine Washington’s agenda of building a powerful coalition of like-minded illiberal leaders eroding the EU from within.
These tensions and contradictions at the heart of a supposedly ideologically well-aligned transatlantic populist right movement predate Hungary’s parliamentary elections and they will outlast them. At a time of almost unprecedented global disorder and uncertainty, the battle for Hungary is as much an election campaign as it is part of an ongoing debate over the meaning of the west as a geopolitical project.
An earlier version of this analysis was published by The Conversation on April 9, 2026.
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