More than three-quarters of Hungarians who voted for Péter Magyar in last month’s election want his government to do more to address the climate crisis, and more than 70% want him to protect LGBTQ+ rights, a poll found. The numbers land in the middle of a political transition that ended Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power, but the old apparatus is not exactly packing up and leaving. Magyar’s opposition Tisza party won a supermajority, and the new prime minister will be sworn in on Saturday, weeks after the results set off celebrations in Budapest and Brussels.
Who Gets the Mandate
The poll suggests that the people who backed Magyar are not simply signing up for a managerial сменa at the top. About 77% of Tisza voters polled said they supported an ambitious climate policy, while 71% supported, or somewhat supported, the new government protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ people, an area that experienced dramatic rollbacks under Orbán. Pawel Zerka of the European Council on Foreign Relations, which commissioned the polling, said: “That was my biggest surprise in this polling. There is a very clear mandate for the new government to have a more progressive stance. But it depends on whether Magyar looks at his own voters or the overall electorate, as the Hungarian public is much more divided on this.”
That split matters because the new government is stepping into a country where the public mood, the party system, and the state machine are all pulling in different directions. Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s populist rightwing Fidesz party, has a conservative background and avoided any pronouncements on progressive issues on the campaign trail, possibly for fear of providing fodder for the estimated 80% of Hungary’s media that is controlled by Fidesz loyalists. The media landscape itself is a reminder that elections do not happen in a neutral vacuum; they happen inside a heavily managed information order.
What the Poll Says, What Power Allows
The actions Magyar and his government are planning to take on the climate and LGBTQ+ rights remain vague, despite more than two years of campaigning and a 240-page election manifesto. The poll also offered a glimpse of other ways the government is likely to be pulled in several directions: although voters overwhelmingly said they were looking for change, they remained split on issues that are critical to the EU, such as support for Ukraine and the need for Hungary to curb its dependence on Russian energy.
While 64% of those polled said they expected the new government to improve relations with Kyiv, support for the Ukrainian war effort remains low, with 24% backing the idea of Budapest providing financial support for Ukraine and 12% backing the provision of military support. More than half of those surveyed, 52%, were opposed to halting the country’s Russian energy imports. The hierarchy of priorities is clear enough: people want change, but not at the cost of energy dependence or a new round of imposed sacrifices from above.
“Péter Magyar’s landslide victory was a vote for domestic change, not for a geopolitical U-turn,” Zerka said. “While Hungarians are ready to turn the page on years of corruption and isolation, they have drawn clear red lines around their country’s energy independence and national security – realities that will need to be respected by leaders in Brussels.”
Brussels, Funds, and the Old State in New Clothes
The findings suggest that the EU’s efforts to reshape its relationship with Hungary, long strained by Orbán’s efforts to paint Brussels as an enemy of the Hungarian people, will, in part, hinge on whether Magyar is first allowed space to focus on domestic change, even as the bloc races to work with him on unlocking billions in frozen EU funds. Zerka said: “The dilemma is that Brussels would want to use the opportunity for a broader U-turn. But if they push for these things too hard, they might divert the attention of the new administration and also risk breaking the neck of the new prime minister by placing him in a position where he would be seen by the Hungarian electorate as somebody who was forced by Brussels to accept unpalatable compromises.”
That is the reform trap in plain sight: the promise of funds, the pressure of institutions, and the threat that any government seen as too obedient to Brussels will lose legitimacy at home. The state may change faces, but the leverage remains concentrated in the same hands that dispense money, set conditions, and call it partnership.
He pointed to Poland as a cautionary tale, where Donald Tusk’s popularity has ebbed as political polarisation prevents him from carrying out changes voters had hoped for. This risk is moderated, however, by the 79% of respondents who said they expected the new government to improve relations with the EU, with 73% saying they were confident that Hungary would gain access to the frozen recovery funds.
However, Fidesz continues to wait in the wings, with 52 seats in Hungary’s 199-seat parliament and its potential power leveraged by the many party loyalists that remain in the state, media and judiciary. “Viktor Orbán still has ways to control the situation, at least partly through his people at various levels of state institutions,” Zerka said. “So while there are good reasons to celebrate today, there are also equally good reasons to be cautious about the coming months.”
In a separate Guardian opinion piece, Cas Mudde wrote that Viktor Orbán’s crushing defeat in last month’s Hungarian election has led to an outbreak of democratic optimism and speculation about the decline of the far right, but said readers should be careful not to draw the wrong conclusions. He said Orbán was in power for an exceptionally rare 16 years and that his defeat was not a rejection of his far-right policies, certainly not his anti-immigration policies, which are largely supported by the incoming prime minister, Péter Magyar, but of the country’s dire economic situation and the allegations of massive corruption under the Orbán regime.
Mudde said Magyar’s victory was not so much an endorsement of his policies as a consequence of his campaigning outside traditional opposition strongholds in the most strategic constituencies in an extremely disproportional electoral system. He said the European far right has lost its unofficial leader but is not in decline, noting that far-right parties remain in government in the Czech Republic and Italy and lead the polls in Austria and France. He said the mainstreaming and normalisation of far-right actors and ideas continue unabated, citing Giorgia Meloni’s Italy as a mandatory pilgrimage site for politicians who want to present themselves as tough on immigration, and said the European People’s party is now openly collaborating with far-right parties to pass legislation in the European parliament while still openly flirting with Meloni.
Mudde also said that as long ago as the 2024 EU elections, the EPP was adopting far-right scepticism towards the climate crisis and environmental protection in an effort to keep dissatisfied farmers from jumping ship to the far right. He said Donald Trump is at the moment “toxic” for the far right, although this had no significant effect on the Hungarian election, but that this toxicity is not static. He said Trump helps the European far right simply by being the US president, because whenever the president of the most powerful country in the world says something, it is by definition not politically marginal. He said much of what Trump says is normalised and rationalised in the discourse of mainstream media and politicians, and that similar arguments become more difficult to marginalise in the European context.
Mudde said European far-right leaders can seem moderate in comparison because Trump is so extreme, and that this endless comparison helps politicians such as Meloni. He said Meloni is helped by the implicit sexism of many observers, who assume that women are less extreme and ideological than men. Mudde concluded that none of this is meant to take anything away from Magyar or from the Hungarian people who opposed and ousted Orbán, particularly the many leftwing Hungarians who voted for a rightwing politician to save democracy, and said Orbán’s defeat should be celebrated without generalising and simplifying.