Orbán’s defeat may signal shift in Europe’s far-right, illiberal tide says Michael Ignatieff

For Michael Ignatieff, intelligence that Viktor orbitán’s 16-year find in republic of hungary had amount to an end was reason enough to raise a glass.

“My wife is Hungarian,” the former Liberal Party of Canada leader told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. €œWe did a bit of drinking last night when the result became clear.”

Ignatieff is a professor of history at the Central European University where he served as rector until Orbán forced the university out of Budapest in 2018, prompting it to relocate its headquarters to Vienna. The relocation was part of Orbán’s broader ideological campaign against the university’s founder George Soros, whom he accused of undermining the country by supporting liberal institutions and backing refugees and migrants.

On Sunday, Hungarian voters ousted, Orbán, the long-serving prime minister, rejecting his authoritarian policies and the global far-right movement he came to symbolize in favour of pro-European challenger Péter Magyar.

Maygar, a former Orbán loyalist, has promised to rebuild Hungary’s ties with the European Union and NATO, which frayed under Orbán’s rule.

Ignatieff spoke with Köksal about his reaction to the election, and what Orbán’s defeat and Magyar’s victory could mean for geopolitics. Here is part of that conversation.

Michael Ignatieff, given what you and your colleagues experienced during Orbán's time in office, is today cause for celebration?

Oh, no question. We felt bitter and bruised by being expelled from a country where we had been. We were proud to think we were the best university in the place and to be thrown out and sent to Vienna was, was tough. So it's a great morning. 

You returned to Hungary just last week, as I understand it. What struck you upon your return? 

We went to a Peter Magyar rally in our little town, which is where my wife was born. And the forecourt of the railway station was completely packed. The mood was electric. The crowd was young. I had a strong sense of momentum. But there was, at that point — this is three, four days before the election — a lot of tension. The country is very, very divided. It was a very bitter campaign with the Orbán team throwing a lot of fantastic allegations out that if Magyar won, he would lure the Hungarian people into war in Ukraine. Nobody could figure out what that could possibly mean. But the scare tactic was out there. And so we had a feeling that Magyar had the momentum, but I think no one anticipated a victory of this size right across the country.

You brought up Ukraine. [Magyar] has said that everyone knows Ukraine is the victim in the war with Russia and that he hopes Putin will be forced to end it. Ultimately, what do you think this victory might mean for Ukraine? 

I think it's going to make it easier for Europe to get the financing — the €90 billion package ($146 billion Cdn) of financial supports that they've been trying to get through — to get that to Ukraine now will be easier with Magyar in the office. There's no question Orbán was Mr. Putin's closest ally and friend in Europe. So it's a very good day for Ukraine and a bad day for Putin… Zelenskyy played it carefully, didn't seek to provoke Orbán. I'm much more optimistic about Ukraine's chances now. 

It's also a bad day for the Trump administration. They sent JD Vance here last week. They sent Marco Rubio, some time before. They tipped the scales very heavily in favour of Orbán, but it had the opposite effect. 

And you said ahead of the election … that this kind of a victory would suggest that authoritarian illiberalism in Europe was going into reverse, as you put it. Do you think that that is actually a marker of that? 

I hope so, and the wish is father to the thought. A wise American politician once said, ‘All politics is local.’ And that's as true in Europe as it is in Canada or the States. The French election is next year. There's an authoritarian, illiberal challenger. Does Orbán's defeat set them back? Yes, a bit, but it's a year ahead and we just don't know how that'll play out. In Germany, there's an AfD, which is a right-wing party at the edge of the constitutional order. I think in the end, these elections are decided by the voters in each country. 

But what I do think has happened is that Orbán was the most influential purveyor of the story that history was favouring illiberal authoritarianism. He famously said at one point… to the Western Europeans, “We used to think you were our future, now we think we are your future.” That sense of historical momentum that Orbán was better at conveying than anybody else, I do think that rhetoric is much more damaged today than it was before this election. 

I wonder what you think it will actually mean for Hungarians, Magyar's victory, because as you well know, his break with Orbán is quite recent. Is he really going to be that different? 

His campaigning was different. He spent two years showing up in small villages and small towns on the back of a truck and talking first to 10 people, then to 20, then 40, then last Thursday, it was 500. So he's built a movement from the bottom up and he's made some promises that I think he's really going to be forced to hold to. He's promised, for example, to run only two terms and then quit. He's promising relief from permanent rule. He's made some promises about restoring the independence of the judiciary, making the media free, and crucially for us, leaving universities alone. I think it's going to be pretty easy for his electorate to hold him to those promises.

It is true that he's a centre-right politician. He's not a liberal. He's very clear that he's a conservative, but he's constitutional conservative with a sense that Orbán took the Hungarian political system almost out of constitutional decency and he wants to restore the country back to right-conservative constitutional decency. 

Will the university move back? 

I don't think so. We're happy in Vienna, but we have a campus still in Budapest, and so my hope is it will be the last Austro-Hungarian institution left. 

What do you think the relationship between Hungary and the U.S. Will look like now, given what Magyar has said and given we know what the position of the U S. Administration has been? 

It's not going to be buddy-buddy. I think the deep linkages between the MAGA movement and Hungarian think tanks and institutions that Orbán founded, that's not gonna be sustained. That'll break. It'll be the relationship between a predatory hegemon on one hand and a small Eastern European country that probably wants to keep its distance and keep its margin of maneuver and doesn't have any illusions that it's going to get an especially warm welcome in the Oval Office. 

Journalist

Audio produced by Livia Dyring. Q&A edited for length and clarity.

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