There is a particular stillness that settles over a country when one man has ruled it long enough for his fingerprints to appear not only on every institution, but on the very psychology of the nation. Hungary knows that stillness too well. Viktor Orbán has spent the better part of a decade and a half transforming a parliamentary democracy into something closer to a curated ecosystem, one in which every organism, from the courts to the media to the electoral machinery, is cultivated to ensure his continued flourishing. He has staged, managed, and micromanaged the system so thoroughly that even calling Hungary an “illiberal democracy,” his preferred euphemism, feels overly generous.
And yet, something curious is happening. It is as though the fortress he built, brick by bureaucratic brick, has begun to hum with faint internal tremors. For the first time in years, Hungarians are letting themselves imagine that the next election might not be a foregone conclusion. That Orbán’s long era, equal parts theatre, nationalism, grievance, and patronage, could be approaching an end. That Hungary might, at last, re-enter the currents of Europe instead of stubbornly swimming against them.
To understand why this moment feels different, one must first acknowledge Orbán’s extraordinary talent for survival. Few leaders in Europe are as deft at weaponizing resentment. Orbán makes politics feel primordial: someone is always coming, always invading, migrants, Brussels bureaucrats, George Soros, “gender ideology,” the West, the East, the liberals, the globalists, pick any villain and he has turned it into a reliable energy source. But the trick has begun to wear thin. Even populism ages. The slogans that once ignited crowds now feel like a talk radio program nobody bothers to switch off, because they barely notice it’s playing.
Ordinary Hungarians, teachers, farmers, young professionals fleeing to Berlin for economic dignity, are living with the consequences of Orbán’s governance, and it shows. Inflation has bitten deeper than national pride can cushion. Corruption scandals leak into the open with numbing regularity. Orbán’s foreign policy tightrope walk, particularly his intimacy with Vladimir Putin, has become harder to justify in a Europe scarred and shaken by Russia’s war on Ukraine. Even many of Orbán’s once-reliable supporters now watch him with a subtle, quiet irritation, the way one might regard a cousin who cannot stop embarrassing himself at family dinners.
And then there is Europe, watchful, impatient, quietly hoping but publicly cautious. For years, the Hungarian prime minister has positioned himself as Europe’s enfant terrible, the man who could turn every EU summit into a hostage situation. But by now, Orbán’s theatrics have crossed the threshold from charming nuisance to structural threat. Brussels has learned his moves, and some countries have tired of his monologues. If Hungarians decide to change course in the upcoming elections, it will not simply be a national correction; it will be a continental one. The ripple effects could be enormous. Hungary could swing back from being Europe’s cautionary tale to becoming a case study in political restoration.
Still, it would be naïve to pretend the system Orbán built will simply hand over the keys. His electoral machine remains a masterpiece of slow, careful distortion. Gerrymandered districts, a tightly gripped media landscape, and a public sphere soaked in government messaging together form a kind of democratic hologram, something that looks like a competition but behaves more like a ritual. Dismantling this architecture will take not only a vote, but stamina from citizens who have been told for years that resistance is futile.
Yet here we are, on the threshold of an election that feels strangely electric. It is increasingly clear that no matter how cleverly a leader rigs the chessboard, politics eventually returns to something elemental: exhaustion. Even authoritarian-leaning rule requires currency, hope, fear, anger, aspiration and Orbán has spent nearly all of it. Hungarians may finally be reaching that collective fatigue from which revolutions, restorations, and unexpected electoral shifts are born.
The opposition, fragmented though it often is, does not need to be perfect; it needs only to embody the possibility of difference. That possibility alone has begun to activate something in the national imagination: curiosity. What would a post-Orbán Hungary look like? More importantly, what would it feel like? A country that has lived under the same political atmosphere for so long can forget the psychic exhilaration of air that suddenly changes temperature.
The promise of the next Hungarian election is not that it will magically undo the years of democratic decay. It won’t. But it could begin the long, difficult process of rebuilding the habits of accountability, independence, and civic confidence, habits that any democracy, even a wounded one, can relearn. Europe, similarly, would gain more than a symbolic victory. It would regain a partner that has long drifted into the orbit of strongmen and self-styled saviours.
Perhaps that is why, for the first time in a long while, the sense of stillness in Hungary no longer feels permanent. It feels anticipatory.
Change in politics is like weather: it begins subtly, quietly, in shifts of pressure that most of us only recognize in retrospect. Orbán’s Hungary has been a long winter. But winter cannot rule forever.
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