Orban’s loss in Hungary has ripple effects for Trump

U.S. president had backed incumbent, but the Iran war has weakened his sway.

- By NICHOLAS RICCARDI AND MATT BROWN

SUPPORTERS of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban rally in Budapest last week.

(JANOS KUMMER Getty Images)

The big election over the weekend was in a small European country nearly half a world away from Washington, but the defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has significant reverberations in the United States.

That's because President Trump and many U.S. conservatives have long embraced Orban, who has become an icon among the global right for his anti-immigrant stance. The American president’s agenda has striking parallels with the way the Hungarian leader used the levers of government to tilt the media, judiciary and electoral system to keep his party in power for 16 years.

Trump supported Orban’s reelection bid and even dispatched Vice President JD Vance to Budapest last week — in the midst of the Iran war — to stump for the incumbent.

Orban’s loss was a reminder of how the war has diminished Trump’s ability to help allied politicians overseas, as well as of the limited ability of leaders to use their power to sway voting in their direction in an age of worldwide discontent over incumbents of all ideological stripes.

“Oppositions can win despite a tilted playing field,” said Steven Levitsky, a politics professor at Harvard and coauthor of the book “How Democracies Die.” “Democracies are facing many challenges in many parts of the world, but so are autocracies.”

Orban's defeat has immediate global implications because he was the European leader closest to Russian President Vladimir Putin and had blocked European Union aid to Ukraine, which is defending itself after Russian’s 2022 invasion.

His fall was celebrated on Sunday by both Democrats and Republicans, some of whom criticized their own administration for such overt support for the Hungarian leader.