The election outcome in Hungary is a big deal. Tisza, a political party formed in 2024 with a relatively charismatic founder and leader, Péter Magyar, defeated the 16-year regime of Fidesz, the party led by Viktor Orbán, the pin-up boy of the global ultraright wing.
Orbán was contending for a fifth successive win for Fidesz and a further four-year term as prime minister. He had previously been ousted from power in the 2002 election and was defeated again in 2006. He undertook publicly that when he was returned to office, he would ensure he would never again be defeated.
True to his word, on regaining power in 2010 Orbán set about crushing independent media, beating up on the universities, packing the courts with his supporters, gerrymandering electoral districts and stamping down on the displays of independence and freedom that followed the fall in 1990 of the Berlin Wall.
Since 2014 monitors have judged all Hungarian elections, including the recent 2026 poll, to be “free but not fair”. In other words, on election day voters were free to exercise their choice of candidate despite every attempt by the incumbent party to undermine the environmental conditions that make for a fair election.
Orbán was rewarded for this by his party’s triumph in three consecutive elections. However, in the 2026 poll Fidesz was swamped in an outcome that saw Tisza achieve a two-thirds majority, large enough to overturn many of the antidemocratic measures introduced by Orbán in his long grip on power.
What lessons can the rest of the world learn from the Hungarian experience?
First, “it’s the economy, stupid”. Add to this wise aphorism “and corruption”, particularly when the scale and character of corruption are deemed, not unreasonably, to be major contributors to economic hardship and inequality. Hungary’s economy regularly achieves the lowest growth in the EU and is judged the most corrupt in the multinational body. ANC, take note — your opponents have.
Second, and possibly the most gratifying take-home, is the resilience of democracy demonstrated by the Hungarian election outcome. Orbán pioneered the concept of “illiberal democracy”.
Essentially, this means a governance system in which the trappings of democracy are retained but the substance is degraded. So the illiberal democrat permits the previously independent media to appear but ensures that his allies control it; he permits notionally independent courts but packs them with his supporters; he enables centres of knowledge like universities and think tanks but ensures that they are tightly supervised.
However, Hungary demonstrates that the jewel of democratic governance — periodic elections — is not easy to rig. As long as voters can cast secret ballots in favour of the candidate of their choice, the final, decisive step in the democratic process isn’t easy to control. The autocrats in charge have to be willing and able to go the full Vladimir Putin hog — jailing opponents, stuffing ballot boxes and “miscounting” — if they want to eliminate the power of a secret ballot.
Donald Trump and the shell of the Republican Party should take note of this lesson. But so too should we South Africans. Here, attempts to discredit the Electoral Commission (IEC) have increased with each passing election, despite the conspicuous lack of any supporting evidence. It’s no coincidence that it’s the EFF and the MK party that complain most loudly, with the EFF concerned about the decline in its voting share and MK smelling power if only the IEC got out of the way.
Jacob Zuma famously proposed that there should be separate boxes for each party, and the voters should place their ballot papers in these boxes. Here’s a homespun autocrat who’s prepared to go the whole Putin hog and then some.
However, while the EFF has, by questioning the credibility and integrity of the IEC, attacked a key environmental condition for a fair election, it has also assisted in further democratising the election through its campaign to register unregistered voters. As far as I know, it’s the only major party enthusiastically pursuing this.
Voter abstention and apathy are major threats to democracy in South Africa. In the most recent general election only 39%-40% of the total voting-age population and 58.6% of registered voters actually voted. If this downward trend continues, we’ll find that the government will have been voted in by less than 20% of the voting-age population — hardly a robust democracy.
Third, there are some tentative lessons about small and middle states. For example, a large swathe of the voters of every country, and maybe particularly small states, are clearly acutely sensitive to threats to their sovereignty. While all states must cultivate their relationships with large economies, they need to manage these relationships carefully.
Orbán clearly enjoyed his long sojourn in the colons of Trump and Putin, and he may have believed this would elevate his status as a global statesperson, but his enthusiasm was clearly not shared by Hungarian voters. It shouldn’t have been surprising that a country that had persistently demonstrated — at great cost — its opposition to the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact would, like Ukraine, resist the deadly embrace of Russia.
On the other hand, Orbán’s rise and fall demonstrates the ability of a small state to punch way above its weight. His ability to do so was abetted by Hungary’s membership of the EU, particularly by the requirement that its major decisions require unanimity, a provision that extended Orbán’s power to influence the EU’s policies and actions significantly. And this, a country of 10 million people, representing a tiny proportion of the EU’s population and economic output. We could teach the EU a thing or two about the South African concept of “sufficient consensus”.
Though we have long lost the global cachet we enjoyed in the years following 1994, our intervention via the International Court of Justice in the Palestinian genocide exemplifies a middle state acting independently on the world stage. Our government did not ask permission from any state, large, middling or small, to take this important step. It was simply driven by the application of solid humanitarian principles. As a result, we have incurred the wrath of one great power, the US. But it is the US whose credibility on the world stage has suffered, largely due to its unconditional support for Israel.
Meanwhile, the Hungarian people and we have enhanced our dignity, and I’ll take that. As brilliant political scientist and memoirist Lea Ypi reminds us, “There is something about the human spirit … that withstands all attempts at offence, injury or humiliation. We call it ‘dignity’.”
• Lewis, a former trade unionist, academic, policymaker, regulator and company board member, was a cofounder and director of Corruption Watch.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.