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The elections in Hungary have concluded, and the opposition with Péter Magyar at the helm has achieved a historic win. Voters seized the chance to steer Hungary back towards the rest of Europe.
However, even before the elections, it was evident Magyar’s Tisza Party could not simply run with a liberal and pro-European message. Magyar was working with exactly the same society that Viktor Orbán was. And the eggshells Magyar had to walk on indicate that Hungarian foreign policy, which is what concerns Europe most, might be less an extension of Fidesz and Orbán than an extension of the society itself.
While the internal conflicts, slippage of the rule of law, and corruption were used to entice disillusioned voters, the four cornerstones of Hungarian foreign policy—the Hungarian diaspora, as well as relations with Ukraine, Russia, and the EU—were handled with conspicuous caution by the opposition, though with one notable exception—relations with Russia. If anything, the treatment of each of these subjects by Tisza in this election tells us a lot about the electorate they have inherited from Orbán, and how foreign policy in Hungary might change or not change now that Orbán has finally been dethroned.
Why, exactly, were these matters so important to Orbán and Magyar? Or rather, why are they so important to the Hungarian electorate?
The Gold Mine of Diaspora
In 2010, at the start of his second term as the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán devised a way of increasing his voter base—by amending the Citizenship Act so that Hungarian citizenship was given to ethnic Hungarians who lived outside of Hungary. In doing so, he created an entirely new electoral class.
A brief historical detour is in order. In 1920, after the end of WWI and as part of the Treaty of Trianon, the Hungarian borders of what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire were rearranged. Although the lands Hungary lost were majority non-Hungarian, the borders cut through ethnically mixed territories, leaving approximately a third of ethnic Hungarians on the wrong side. At the same time, the lands passed to neighboring and newly-created states dominated by the region’s other main ethnic groups. By once again siding with Germany, this time in WWII, Hungary regained some of its former lands, and then promptly lost them, finding itself once again on the wrong side of history.
Through the Citizenship Act, which was adopted in 2011, the descendants of these ethnic Hungarians were offered and granted Hungarian citizenship in countries where dual citizenship was permitted, and then a year later acquired voting rights. These were people who had never lived in Hungary, had owed no allegiance to Hungary for decades, and who often had different cultures and customs through their integration into different societies. What they did have, however, was a feeling of gratitude to Viktor Orbán for giving them a sense of belonging.
This proved to be a master stroke for Orbán—he acquired his own private electorate. And Péter Magyar attempted to turn it. In May 2025, he made a pilgrimage to the Romanian town of Oradea, walking 310 kilometers in 11 days, ostensibly in response to Orbán’s endorsement of George Simion in the Romanian presidential election, which ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania read as a betrayal.
In late December 2025, Slovakia passed a law making it a criminal offence to publicly question the Beneš Decrees—the post-WWII measures that imposed collective guilt on ethnic Hungarians and Germans, stripping them of property and citizenship. Orbán stayed largely silent, his alliance with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico making confrontation inconvenient—and besides, ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia cannot acquire Hungarian citizenship without surrendering their Slovak one, leaving Orbán with no electorate there to protect.
Magyar seized the opportunity, participating in various protests and capitalizing on Orbán’s conspicuous silence on the plight of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia.
What is telling is that by framing Orbán as insufficiently committed to the diaspora, Magyar was actually addressing Hungarians inside Hungary—since there were no votes to acquire in Slovakia. He referred to Slovakia by its historical Hungarian name, Felvidék, signaling a nationalist view of Slovakia that his electorate would recognize. It was an appeal, in other words, to the common resentment of a lost empire.
Even if Magyar managed to flip any of the diaspora vote, they will continue to support the same message as before—indeed, the only message that links them to Hungary: a connection to a time and place long gone.
A Country in Want of an Enemy
Viktor Orbán framed his electoral campaign as though his actual opponent was not Magyar but Volodymyr Zelenskyy. His name and likeness appeared on many posters, and there was even a dedicated Twitter account counting the number of times Orbán had complained about Zelenskyy that day.
Orbán’s obsession with Zelenskyy and Ukraine is overblown. However, judging by Magyar’s response to Zelenskyy’s sardonic attacks—claiming, with Orbán, that “no foreign leader can threaten any Hungarian,” the subject is a sore one. While Magyar may not have the same antipathy to Ukraine as his opponent did, that might be immaterial, since the Hungarian electorate shares the anti-Ukrainian sentiment. According to a 2025 Policy Solutions poll, half of Hungary’s electorate considers Ukraine dangerous, 64% oppose EU accession for Ukraine, and Zelenskyy ranks as one of the most disliked foreign leaders in the country, level with Putin.
Unlike the fraught shared history with Poland, where centuries of oppression and reprisals left wounds on both sides, Hungary has no comparable grievance to explain its hostility toward Ukraine.
What exactly has Ukraine done to Hungary to warrant such animosity?
All roads in this case lead to Trianon. As a result of the post-WWI land transfers, Hungary in 1920 lost what is now Zakarpattia to Czechoslovakia. It briefly recovered Zakarpattia at the start of WWII and then lost it again to the Soviets, who annexed it by assigning it to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1945. Ukraine had no say over the transfer—they were themselves under Soviet occupation at the time.
Yet this piece of land, which before the full-scale war was home to some 150,000 ethnic Hungarians alongside roughly one million Ukrainians, still seems to be the bone of contention, at least on the Hungarian side. While all other countries in Eastern Europe seized the opportunity to move away from Russian influence and to face the future, Hungary turned to face the past.
When Orbán discovered the additional stash of voters in other countries, he approached ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine as well. As with Slovakia, Ukraine did not allow acquired dual citizenship. The Hungarian government offered Hungarian passports to Ukrainian citizens of Hungarian ethnic origin and encouraged them not to declare the passport to the Ukrainian authorities. Ukraine was not happy. A consul was expelled. And Hungary, naturally, blamed Ukraine.
Then came 2014: the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. Ukraine was at war and needed to think of its security. Since ubiquitous “Russian speakers” were quite literally the raison d’état of the invasion, the proportion of Russian speakers had to be reduced to discourage any further attempts to “save them” from being Ukrainian. Ukraine did in 2017 what the Baltic states did only after the start of the full-scale war—they banned state education in Russian after grade five across Ukraine.
Russians were not an indigenous national minority—they were settled across Ukraine throughout the Soviet period as part of a deliberate russification policy, as occurred with other countries under Soviet occupation. Many Ukrainians were russified in the process, but that did not make them Russian. In Crimea, the Soviets deported almost the entire indigenous Crimean Tatar population in 1944 and took over their homes and lands.
However, the ban—intended to restrict the spread of the Russian language and its associated ideology under wartime conditions—unfortunately affected real national minorities. Ethnic Poles, Slovaks, and Hungarians were all affected.
Poland and Slovakia attempted to address the issue through diplomacy. Ukraine had its hands full, and the Russian language was a serious cause for concern when it came to national security. And Poland and Slovakia remembered who the real enemy was.
Hungary, however, did not. Instead of taking the high road, they decided to hassle Ukraine as much as possible, knowing full well that it would not change the overall national policy. But Hungary’s campaign fueled the sense of collective resentment, much to Orbán’s political benefit.
When the full-scale war started in 2022, Hungary accepted Ukrainian refugees, but very soon started pitching for the other side—they vetoed EU decisions on weapons supply and financial help; blocked Ukraine accession talks and all but represented Russian interests in the EU; and, as recent revelations have revealed, essentially spied for Russia in the EU.
Resentment towards other neighboring countries, like Romania and Slovakia, had to be managed in the interest of accessing EU funds. After all, they had to work together on a daily basis. Ukraine, however, was an outsider—a country worse off, looking in through a window from the cold. In other words, a perfect target.
When Grudges Extract Tolls
The third defining element of Hungarian foreign policy has been Russia. While most other Eastern European countries with an experience of Russian occupation have moved as far away from Russian influence as possible, Hungary took a different path. And this choice was one of the weakest elements of Fidesz policy.
They had to reconcile the memory of abuse at Russian hands and the Soviet role in sealing their territorial losses after WWII—conveniently blamed on Ukraine—with the corrupting influence of Putin’s Russia on their own leadership. While Hungary clung to Russian energy resources, the rise of kleptocracy within its own state was too obvious to ignore.
The diverging logic of alignment with Russia has therefore been the one policy element that the opposition was able to latch onto. Following a series of leaked phone calls between Orbán’s team and Russian officials (and yes, the timing of their disclosure cannot be incidental, although the source has not been disclosed), Magyar openly declared treason and called for an investigation.
Despite Orbán’s attempts to force collective amnesia on his people, historic memory once again proved to be stronger. The Hungarian electorate has no love left for Russia. While a significant minority, polling at around 29%, remains amenable to Russia as a counterweight to Brussels, the overall picture is one of historic resentment rather than affinity. It just so happens that they have an equally negative view of Ukraine.
The Due That Is Not Due
Hungary’s interactions with the other EU countries have been anything but positive. While outwardly parroting the value of democratic governance, Hungary has tried to replace the principle of majority rule with the rule of minority—after all, a whole bloc of countries being held hostage by one country is anything but democratic.
It is therefore curious why a country that has so much objection to everything its European neighbors do is not interested in leaving the EU and going it alone or within other alliances. And the answer is simple—financial interests.
The EU provides the biggest potential source of prosperity available to Hungary as a landlocked state in modern Europe. It is not quite clear how they intend to access this prosperity while simultaneously destabilizing the whole EU structure. But overall, the European Union and its funds are treated as their due. Perhaps they consider it compensation for the suffering inflicted by the post-WWI settlement.
This is very different from the rest of Eastern Europe, which also sees European funds as their due, albeit for a different reason—Eastern Europe has never quite gotten over the sense of betrayal at being handed to the Soviet sphere at Yalta in 1945. However, the other former Warsaw Pact countries decided to transform this sense of betrayal into a drive to achieve a better life for themselves and others. Hungary, on the other hand, seems to want to extract rents without offering much in return, or at least, that is the signal its political class consistently sends to its partners.
It is therefore unsurprising that Tisza’s angle was pro-European in rhetoric, transactional in substance, and aligned with Fidesz on migration and sovereignty. Even the 2035 energy timeline suggests a government adjusting its EU commitments to what its electorate will accept—the funds, but not the obligations.
Reading the Meter
Magyar has won. What he has inherited is another matter.
In his election campaign, Péter Magyar found genuine opposition to Fidesz only where the electorate allowed him to—on the question of Russia. All other elements—the power of diaspora, dislike of Ukraine, and the transactional approach to the EU, are broadly the same as under Orbán.
It is evident that Magyar did not believe the electorate would be responsive to any meaningful change on these subjects. Since a large portion of the electorate he needed to win the elections would not respond to a different message, he positioned himself accordingly.
Perhaps as younger urban voters, currently the engine of Tisza’s support, become a larger share of the electorate, more open policies will find their way into Hungarian society. But at the moment, the opposition’s message indicates that Hungary is still driven by past grievances caused by the loss of imperial power.
For those in Europe hoping that April 12 marks a turning point, the message from the campaign trail is sobering: you may have got a different government in Hungary, but you will still have to work with the same Hungarian society.
Ines Burrell is a geopolitical analyst and political risk consultant based in the UK.
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