Matthew Luxmoore

It's really been seen as a race between the choice of Europe on one hand and Russia on the other.

Well, what's sealed it can really be summed up in one word, the economy.

Orban has really, according to most analysts we've talked to here, focus much less on domestic issues such as falling real wages, inflation, and allegations of corruptions among the party's highest ranks, and much more on foreign policy and this Orban effort quite successful to rally the international conservative movement

notably big connections back to president trump and his administration exactly exactly he's become close allies with president trump who endorsed him last week and sent his vice president jd vance to come and campaign alongside orban and urge hungarians to vote for him as the safest choice and of course that did not make a difference for orban he lost by a landslide and the largest margin

in Hungary's post-communist history since it regained independence in 1989.

Yeah, it's really been seen as a race between the choice of Europe on one hand and Russia on the other.

There have been widespread allegations over the last few weeks that this campaign has been really heating up, that the Fidesz party is cozying up to Russia.

There were leaked telephone calls released in the past couple of weeks where the foreign minister is speaking to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov,

and offering to forward him internal European Union documents and also help him with an effort to get Western sanctions on a Kremlin-linked oligarch's sister removed.

But on the other hand, Magyar has promised to regain funds withheld by the EU because of allegations of democratic backsliding in Hungary, and he's promised to be far more friendly to the European Union.

The thing with Orban, anyone who has been watching him for a while will tell you is you should never write this guy off.

And in his speech yesterday, he said, we will never stop fighting.

Never, never, never.

So that's quite a clear message that he intends to come back.

But how he does that after such a

a huge loss with two-thirds of hungarians voting against him is difficult to see with such a sweeping mandate to make reforms in the country of a two-thirds majority in parliament magyar's hands are untied really and it's a very very different outcome if he had won by a slimmer margin which again would have left the door open for urban to work behind the scenes to

undermine the new government.

Many tech experts I've talked to for this piece say that because Max is not encrypted, it is a way of the Russian government being able to freely monitor what people are discussing online, but also to get their personal data, to get their health data, their financial data, because people will be using this app not just for exchanging messages, but also for making payments to banks, for booking tickets.

appointments with doctors for ordering food and retail online and for all kinds of other services that would allow a government that is following what's happening on the app to get a very, very kind of comprehensive picture of its citizens.

In many ways, the Russian government has been trying to get to this point for the past two decades.