TheMarketForIdeas

On April 12, 2026, Péter Magyar and his Tisza party rewrote history. With nearly 80 percent turnout, Tisza secured 138 seats in the 199-seat Hungarian parliament on 53.6 percent of the vote, handing Viktor Orbán his first electoral defeat since 2006 and ending sixteen years of Fidesz rule. The celebrations along the Danube were genuine. They were also, in some important respects, premature.

The biblical parable invoked in this title is usually read as a story of grace and redemption. But it has another dimension: the dutiful son, who had never shirked, is not treated with the fatted calf. Consideration was given to the one who went astray and has returned. There will be unearned political capital for Magyar without him ever having proved anything. He can leverage this for restoration of relations between Hungary and the EU and Hungary and Ukraine, but structural issues lock him into many Orban policies. At the same time, the prodigal son returns to his father’s estate. He does not build a new one. The fatted calf is slaughtered, the feast is held, and the next morning the same farm is still there, with the same debts, the same fields, the same labourers. For Magyar, the morning after looks remarkably like Orbán’s afternoon before.

The victim of his own success

The Western media has spent years constructing a simple story about Hungary: Viktor Orbán as democratic backslider, friend of Putin, wrecker of EU institutions, enemy of liberal values. There is truth in that narrative. But it has crowded out a more uncomfortable one. Under Orbán, Hungary ran budget surpluses in most years and sustained commercial surpluses for extended periods, something that Romania, despite its geographical proximity and frequent lectures from Bucharest about European values, has conspicuously failed to achieve with any consistency. In the first half of 2025, Hungarian households were paying €10.40 per 100 kWh for electricity – the floor of the EU, at roughly a quarter of Germany’s €38.35. Gas was no different: Hungary sat at the bottom of the EU table there too.

None of this happened by chance. Moscow offered preferential rates – discounts running to 15-20 percent – and Orbán built a consumer subsidy system around them, trading long-term strategic exposure for short-term political comfort. A CSD report published earlier this year captured the outcome precisely: Russian gas climbed from roughly 60 percent of Hungary’s imported volumes in 2021 to above 90 percent by 2025, while oil dependency tracked a near-identical arc from 61 percent to 93 percent. The infrastructure and contractual web that produced those numbers cannot be unwound quickly or without serious cost.

This is where the story of Orbán as uniquely villainous breaks down. Orbán was, in important ways, a victim of the polycrises and permacrises that have been dismantling mainstream governments across Europe for the past decade. The energy shock of 2022, the inflation that followed, the strains on household budgets, the Ukraine war and its economic reverberations through supply chains and commodity prices, as well as on the auto industry (uniquely important to Hungary, as for Slovakia) and investor sentiment: these pressures hit Hungarian voters just as they hit voters everywhere else. Orbán did not cause the global energy shock. But he had built his political house so thoroughly on Russian supply that when that supply became a liability rather than an asset, he had nowhere to hide. Neither could cheap Russian energy compensate for all of the other effects of the global crises, in particular the slowing down of the German and EU economy.

This pattern is not unique to Central Europe. In the United States, the Biden administration found itself blamed for an inflation that had structural roots in pandemic-era monetary policy and supply-chain disruption, combined with the Ukraine shock. The opposition exploited the resulting discontent skilfully. Now, Donald Trump is suffering from the same effects. The populists, once in power, also become victims of circumstances outside their control (leaving aside the US’ self-made Iranian debacle). In Hungary, Magyar and Tisza did the same. They were not wrong to point out the dependencies, the corruption, the erosion of judicial independence. But it is worth being clear about what drove their final surge: not a sudden ideological conversion of the Hungarian electorate, but the accumulated weight of economic hardship that Orbán’s energy gamble had left his voters to carry.

What changes, and what does not

Magyar has pledged to end Hungary’s dependence on Russian energy by 2035 and to double the share of renewables by 2040. The choice of a former Shell executive as energy minister is telling: this is a government that will approach the transition through commercial logic rather than ideological ambition. He has been careful to tell interviewers that he does not want to get rid of Russian energy sources “tomorrow.” This is prudence, not weakness. It reflects physics, infrastructure, and contract law.

The Paks II nuclear plant, now officially under construction after the initial concrete pour was completed in February 2026, will proceed under any government Budapest elects. The project is too deep into execution, the €10 billion Russian state loan too structurally embedded, and the country’s need for reliable baseload power too pressing for cancellation to be a realistic option. Four Soviet-designed reactors at Paks already account for between 40 and 50 percent of Hungary’s electricity generation; the new units are designed to lift nuclear’s contribution toward 70 percent of national consumption. With loan repayments spread across 21 years of reactor operation once grid connection is achieved, Moscow’s financial claim on Hungary’s energy sector runs well into the 2040s. A parliamentary supermajority does not change that arithmetic.

Where the change is real is in tone and alignment. A Budapest that engages Brussels constructively rather than treating it as an adversary will see frozen EU funds released, rule-of-law proceedings wound down, and Hungary’s voice restored in NATO councils – all leverage that Orbán voluntarily discarded. The dynamics around Ukraine shift too. Kyiv had little incentive to accommodate Hungary on the Druzhba pipeline so long as Budapest was blocking EU military and financial support; once that obstruction disappears, Ukraine’s motivation for keeping the pipeline closed largely dissolves with it. A quiet normalisation on energy transit becomes achievable, one that neither side needs to announce with fanfare.

The fuel diversification deals are real and genuinely significant. Russia’s last nuclear fuel delivery, made in late 2025, covers Paks’ requirements only through November 2028. After that, Framatome steps in from 2027 with Western-manufactured VVER-440 assemblies, and from 2028 MVM Group’s contract with Westinghouse adds American supply to the mix. The point is not trivial: the reactor design that once required Moscow’s fuel monopoly has been successfully opened to Western suppliers, as Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Finland had already demonstrated. That is a structural crack in the lock-in, even if the lock itself has not been removed. And it is still an Orbán government achievement.

This is consistent with a broader pattern in Orbán-era energy policy that the rhetoric obscured: systematic hedging. In September 2024, Hungary joined Azerbaijan, Georgia and Romania in a joint venture to build a roughly 1,000 MW subsea cable spanning some 1,100 km, designed to carry Azerbaijani renewable power into the EU. The Szeged-Arad pipeline and the BRUA corridor were built on Orbán’s watch. None of these are the decisions of a government that had staked everything on Russian supply with no thought of alternatives. Orbán publicly embraced Moscow. He, the state energy company MOL and their engineers were hedging.

The economy he leaves behind, and the laws he cannot unwrite

The new parliamentary majority can amend the constitution. Tisza has the two-thirds supermajority for that. What it cannot easily do is undo the economic architecture that Orbán built beneath the constitutional layer.

The Cato Institute’s recent policy analysis, a document that conservatives who previously celebrated Orbán should read with some discomfort, documents how Hungary fell from 31st to 67th in the Human Freedom Index between 2010 and 2023, last among EU members. Freedom House reclassified the country from “Free” to “Partly Free,” the first such EU reclassification ever. On the Varieties of Democracy Liberal Democracy Index, Hungary halved its score from 0.65 to 0.32 between 2010 and 2024, a level comparable to Nigeria and Kuwait. These are not talking points from Brussels bureaucrats. They are measurements.

But behind those measurements lies something harder to reverse than constitutional text: the systematic transfer of state property and resources to private foundations and NGOs controlled by Orbán loyalists. Over the course of sixteen years, vast amounts of government property and public endowments were placed into nominally independent bodies whose governing boards are stacked with Fidesz-aligned figures. Universities, cultural institutions, media entities, and strategic economic holdings were restructured to sit outside direct government control, which means they also sit outside easy government recapture. A new government can pass laws, but laws require enforcement mechanisms, and enforcement mechanisms require institutions that are still, in many cases, staffed and influenced by the old order.

Orbán himself said it plainly: he needed to win only once, but properly. The property transfers are the legacy of that proper winning. They create a deep state of a particular kind: not a conspiratorial bureaucracy, but a legally constituted archipelago of loyalist-controlled foundations that will outlast his government and constrain his successors. Magyar can change the prime minister’s office. He cannot easily change who controls the endowment portfolio of a restructured university foundation.

The Transylvania question nobody in Brussels wants to discuss

There is another political constraint on Magyar that Western coverage has largely ignored, because it sits uncomfortably with the celebratory narrative of his victory. Hungary has a substantial diaspora in Romania, concentrated in Transylvania and the Ardeal region. They vote in Hungarian elections. They are courted, cultivated, and politically mobilized by Budapest governments of every stripe.

Under Orbán, this cultivation took forms that Bucharest found increasingly grating. Hungarian state support for cultural and economic institutions across the border in Romanian territory, dual citizenship policies, funding for Hungarian-language schools and media, direct financial ties between Budapest and Hungarian community organizations in Transylvania: these were described by Romanian analysts, sometimes with diplomatic restraint and sometimes without it, as Hungary pursuing co-sovereignty in Transylvania and Ardeal. The wooden language of MFA communiqués from Bucharest conceals considerable anger. The ghost of Trianon still moves through these discussions, and Orbán’s speeches at the summer school in Băile Tușnad have been a perennial irritant.

Magyar will not abandon Hungarian voters in Romania. He cannot. They are too numerous, too politically significant, and too useful as a source of votes and legitimacy. What may change is tone rather than substance. The overt irredentist rhetoric may soften, the Tușnad pilgrimages may become less ideologically charged, and the framing of support policies may shift toward European minority rights frameworks rather than nationalist ones. But the economic support mechanisms for Hungarian communities in Romania are not going to disappear. They will be repackaged, legitimized through different vocabularies, and continued.

For Bucharest, this is actually the more interesting question. The energy relationship between Hungary and Romania is a rare genuine brightspot. The Szeged-Arad pipeline, the BRUA corridor, the planned electricity interconnection worth €30 billion with EU funding, the Black Sea Green Corridor joint venture: all of these point toward a deepening of infrastructure ties that serves both countries. Romania is on course to become the EU’s largest gas producer on the back of its Black Sea reserves, and that timeline converges almost precisely with Magyar’s 2035 target for ending Russian dependency. A government in Budapest that wants a credible domestic story about energy independence has every reason to put Romania front and centre in that narrative, far more visibly than Orbán ever did.

The MOL-NIS test

How much of the Orbán energy inheritance Magyar is genuinely willing to disturb will become clearer almost immediately after he takes office. The test case is MOL’s agreement, struck in January 2026, to take a 56.15 percent stake in Serbia’s Naftna Industrija Srbije from Gazprom Neft. Washington extended the negotiating window in March, moving the deadline to May 22, with final OFAC clearance still required.

The attraction of the deal commercially is obvious. Its strategic implications are less comfortable. Russian crude arrives in Hungary via Druzhba, moves onward to the Pančevo refinery in Serbia, and the resulting products can re-enter EU markets without triggering the direct sanctions that apply to Russian oil. A MOL-controlled NIS would embed that circuit inside a Hungarian state-adjacent corporate structure, precisely the kind of vertically integrated workaround that the CSD report warned could keep Russian hydrocarbons flowing through regional networks long after Brussels declares the dependency resolved. Magyar’s position on this transaction will be the earliest available signal of where continuity ends and genuine change begins.

The limits of the mandate

The celebrations were genuine. The mandate is real. But mandates have limits, and some of the limits on this one are structural in ways that no election can resolve.

The Biden comparison holds here: a new administration can change the rhetoric, the alliances, and the declared direction of travel while remaining bound, in practice, by the physical and contractual legacy of its predecessor. Magyar inherits an energy system shaped by Russian supply arrangements that accumulated across decades. The infrastructure is in the ground, the contracts are signed, the financing is drawn. None of that dissolves because the government changes.

The constitutional architecture can be reformed. The property that now sits inside loyalist-controlled foundations cannot easily be retrieved. The Russian financial grip on Paks II extends through the 2040s regardless of who is prime minister. The energy transition to 2035 is a real target but a distant one, and it will require a level of EU financial support and Romanian gas infrastructure cooperation that neither comes automatically nor comes fast.

What is genuine is the diplomatic reset. Reengagement with Brussels, the unlocking of suspended funds, a constructive stance on Ukraine: these are real gains, available now, and they matter. The goodwill a pro-European Hungary can accumulate in the near term is something Orbán spent years burning through. Getting it back is worth something. But goodwill is not the same as room to manoeuvre.

Orbán was a victim of the polycrises that have been destroying mainstream governments across Europe, and populist forces in opposition have been the primary beneficiaries of the resulting discontent, whether in France, in Germany, or in the United States. In Hungary’s specific case, those forces happened to come in the form of a centre-right party led by a telegenic former Fidesz insider who understood exactly which levers to pull and when to pull them. That is Magyar’s achievement. It is considerable.

But the prodigal son, welcomed back with the fatted calf, still has to work the farm. And the farm has a lot of Russian energy and money and Chinese projects running through it.

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons.