Péter Magyar: A European Hero

GROWING UP AROUND the upheaval of 1989 as Hungary threw off the Soviet yoke, Péter Magyar had a poster of his anti-communist, liberal hero Viktor Orbán on his bedroom wall. He went on to study law and joined Orbán’s Fidesz in 2002 and married one of its rising stars, Judit Varga, who would become Orbán’s justice minister in 2019 while Magyar went to Brussels as a diplo­mat. The marriage fell apart in 2023 but the political rupture came in 2024 when Varga and President Katalin Novák had to resign over a pardon granted to a man accused of covering up sexual abuse at a state-run children’s home. Fidesz made the two women scapegoats and Magyar appeared on opposition YouTube channel Partizán to tear into the government.

He took over the ailing Tisza party and rebuilt it, touring every town and village to unite even Fidesz voters behind him, highlighting the corruption of the authoritarian Orbán regime which had captured all institutions and staffed them with loyalists. The groundswell that secured Tisza a two-thirds parliamentary majority on April 12, ending 16 un­interrupted years of Orbán, rose despite a hostile media and a gerrymandered electoral system. Orbán had once asked the Russians to get out but later became Vladimir Putin’s best friend in Europe. Donald Trump liked his muscle and style. JD Vance, undiplomatically, campaigned for him. In the end, Russian gas and MAGA couldn’t keep Hungarians’ thirst for change at bay. Magyar isn’t a liberal himself and he won’t have it easy restoring democracy since Orbán had built a system to outlast him. But Magyar can rebuild the bridges to Brussels and the EU should give him long-term help, hav­ing learnt from Donald Tusk’s plight in Poland.