Peter Magyar, leader of centre-Right Tisza party, says prime minister ‘just congratulated me on our victory’

James Crisp. Milla Cartwright in Budapest

Published 12 April 2026 11:56pm BST

Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s pro-Russian prime minister, conceded defeat on Sunday, bringing an end to his authoritarian 16-year rule after an election seen as Europe’s most consequentialthis year.

Peter Magyar, the 45-year-old leader of the centre-Right Tisza party, won a landslide victory and promised to repair relations with the EU and Nato, which were badly strained by Mr Orbán’s blocking of policies helpful to Ukraine.

In the campaign, the Fidesz party leader accused Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, of plotting with Mr Magyar to drag Hungary into the war.

“Together we have freed Hungary,” Mr Magyar told a delirious crowd of supporters on the banks of the Danube, “My friends you have worked a miracle. Hungary has written history.”

Sir Keir Starmer hailed Mr Orbán’s defeat as a “historic moment, not only for Hungary, but for European democracy”.

The Prime Minister, said on X: “Congratulations MagyarPeterMP on your election victory.

“This is an historic moment, not only for Hungary, but for European democracy. I look forward to working with you for the security and prosperity of both our countries.”

Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, wrote on X: “Trump, Putin, Farage… your boy took a hell of a beating.

“Congratulations to the people of Hungary for showing that populist extremists can be defeated – even despite Donald Trump’s best efforts.”

Sir Ed also mocked JD Vance, the US vice-president, about his intervention in the campaign. Mr Vance endorsed Mr Orbán during a visit to Budapest earlier in April.

Sir Davey said: “Has anyone noticed that wherever JD Vance goes, he just makes a mess.

“In Munich he insulted European allies. In Greenland he turned everyone against Trump. And now he’s helped Viktor Orbán lose re-election.

“Maybe better to spend more time on the couch VP?”

President Donald Trump endorsed the eurosceptic Mr Orbán before Sunday’s vote, urging Hungarians to give the nationalist, a darling of Maga conservatives, a fifth consecutive election victory.

He sent JD Vance, the US vice-president, who accused the EU of meddling in the vote, to Budapest in the final week of the campaign to boost his hard-Right ally’s chances. Instead, Hungarians turned out in record numbers to end the premiership of the EU’s longest-serving leader in a vote closely watched in Moscow, Kyiv, Brussels and Washington.

“The result is clear. I congratulated Tisza but we will never give up,” Mr Orbán said.

Mr Magyar walked through the crowds, shaking hands and holding aloft Hungary’s flag to the booming strains of My Way by Frank Sinatra and a Hungarian folk song called Spring is Coming, which has become a campaign anthem.

After he took to the stage in front of a crowd waving Hungarian and EU flags, with the country’s imposing neogothic parliament buildings lit up behind him, he said: “Truth triumphed over lies.”

He said: “Fellow Hungarians, countrymen, we have done it. The Tisza party and Hungary have won the elections. Not by a small but by a very large margin.”

Declaring Hungary had taken its country back, he said Budapest would now be “a strong ally of the EU and Nato”.

“Russians go home,” the torch brandishing crowd chanted.

After Mr Magyar stood for a patriotic song, the party got under way to the strains of Queen’s anthemic ballad We are the Champions, with the jubilant crowd enthusiastically singing along.

More than half of Hungary’s 7.53 million voters had cast their ballots by noon local time. By 5pm, turnout had hit 74 per cent, more than the total turnout of 69.59 per cent at the last election.

Mr Magyar, a former Orbán ally, hailed it as the largest turnout since the first elections after the fall of communism in 1990 and said he had won the largest mandate in Hungary’s democratic history. With just under 97 per cent of votes counted, Tisza was on course to win 138 seats in Hungary’s 199-seat parliament with Fidesz taking 55.

Tisza is on course to get a two-thirds majority, which will give Mr Magyar the power to undo Mr Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” and make sweeping reforms to institutions stuffed with Fidesz loyalists. Mr Magyar warned that “puppets of this regime must leave public life”.

He called on them to leave before they were fired, adding “this regime is over”, as he promised to restore democratic institutions.

“Go to jail, go to jail,” the crowd chanted.

Mr Orbán, 62, angered EU and Nato allies by vetoing a €90bn (£78bn) loan to Ukraine, obstructing policies helpful to Kyiv, buying Russian oil and gas and maintaining close ties with Vladimir Putin.

They were furious after it was revealed Hungary shared details of EU meetings with Moscow in the weeks before an election marred with reports of Russian meddling and disinformation campaigns. Mr Orbán had also railed against EU sanctions against the Kremlin.

“France welcomes the victory of democratic participation, the Hungarian people’s commitment to the values of the European Union, and Hungary’s commitment to Europe,” said Emmanuel Macron after speaking with Mr Magyar on the phone.

Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, and Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary-general, also congratulated Mr Magyar. “I look forward to the cooperation for a strong, secure, and above all united Europe,” said Mr Merz, who had accused Mr Orbán of “disloyalty” for vetoing the loan over a row over a damaged Russian oil pipeline with Ukraine.

“Hungary has chosen Europe,” said Ms von der Leyen, whose executive has frozen billions in EU funds over Mr Orbán’s erosion of democratic standards.

The count was continuing on Sunday night, with more than half of the votes counted, when Mr Orbán conceded defeat in a surprise move. Almost all opposition parties had withdrawn from the race to clear the way for Mr Magyar to maximise the chances of finally unseating Mr Orbán.

Opinion polls had consistently given Tisza party a lead over Mr Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party but a divisive campaign had been marred by accusations of vote-buying and electoral fraud.

As the news of Mr Orbán’s concession broke, Tisza supporters cheered and embraced in cosmopolitan Budapest away from Fidesz traditional rural heartlands. Many reached for their phones to call family and friends or wiped away tears.

Stalls sold beer and food including traditional Hungarian Langos flatbreads to the flag-bearing crowds. Almost all were Hungarian tricolours but one man carried the EU flag alongside his national banner.

Above them was a poster bearing a quote by a poet closely associated with the 1848 revolution against Hapsburg rule. “Now or never,” the slogan read with “or never” crossed out.

“I’ve never been this happy in my life,” Bence Kis, 27, a lorry driver told The Telegraph.

“We’ve been waiting for this for two years now” said students Eszther Toth and Luca Nemeth, both 21.

Mr Magyar, 45, burst onto the scene two years ago after breaking with Fidesz. He was previously married to Mr Orbán’s justice minister. Now out of politics, she has accused Mr Magyar of domestic abuse, which he has denied.

It certainly hasn’t harmed Mr Magyar’s chances that his surname means “Hungarian”. He wants to convince Brussels to release €17bn that was frozen because of concerns over Mr Orbán’s erosion of the rule of law. The money is much needed in a country with a struggling economy.

EU diplomats have warned that is not a foregone conclusion. One told the Telegraph Mr Magyar would be an improvement on Mr Orbán but would not turn Hungary “into Luxembourg” overnight.

He will be more pro-EU and more anti-Russian than Mr Orbán. But in a sign that Fidesz’s relentless anti-Zelensky propaganda has had an impact, he is unlikely to immediately drop Hungarian opposition to Ukraine one day joining the EU.

Mr Magyar made the economy and corruption the central issues of his campaign, accusing Mr Orbán of hollowing out public services such as healthcare and enriching his cronies in rigged contracts.

He accused Mr Orbán of making Hungary one of the poorest countries in the EU. But he had not repudiated Mr Orbán’s socially conservative policies of Christian nationalism as he targeted wavering Fidesz voters who like them.

Eighty per cent of the media in Hungary is said to be controlled by Fidesz, with newspapers and television stations owned and run by its loyalists. In a bid to pierce the blanket of government propaganda across the countryside, Mr Magyar campaigned relentlessly in small villages in Fidesz heartlands in a grass-roots campaign he married with a canny and combative social media game.

He largely ignored Budapest, where he was certain of victory, and pointedly held his final rally in wavering Fidesz stronghold Debrecen, where he said he attracted up to 30,000 supporters.

At the last election in 2022, polls predicted victory for a pro-EU candidate but Mr Orbán won a landslide victory in an apparent vindication of his “illiberal democracy”. The populist “bad boy of Brussels” clashed repeatedly with the EU.

Mr Orbán has stuffed the courts and judiciary with his political appointees. His “gay propaganda” law which forbids the depiction or promotion of homosexuality to under-18s in schools, televisions and films drew fierce criticism from his fellow EU leaders.

He has also regularly battled EU judges over draconian anti-migrant laws which breach European asylum regulations but his socially conservative policies have been an inspiration to Maga Republicans.

During his tenure Mr Orbán, who was endorsed by other eurosceptic hard-Right leaders such as France’s Marine Le Pen, changed electoral rules to benefit Fidesz. He has also made it easier for ethnic Hungarians living abroad, who largely favour Fidesz, to get citizenship and vote by post.

He cut the number of parliamentary seats from 286 to 199, redrew district boundaries and redrew them again in 2025, amid accusations of gerrymandering.

Mr Orbán co-founded his party Fidesz in 1988 as a liberal movement when he was part of the student anti-communist movement. He made his name in a 1989 speech at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the leader of the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

Speaking in Heroes Square, he demanded free elections and that Soviet troops leave Hungary.

In 1998, he won his first general election at the age of 35. He was the first post-Cold War prime minister in the former Iron Curtain bloc not to have been a member of the communist party.

After losing the next two elections, he returned to power and began his transformation from freedom fighter to poster boy for illiberal democracy, praising Putin’s Russia as a model for Hungary in 2014.