Hungary Elections: Viktor Orbán Loses Power After 16 Years
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I'm now joined by Shona Murray, who's Europe correspondent with Euronews. Shona, Victor Orban's 16-year reign in Budapest has come to an end. How big was the defeat?
It was a massive defeat, two thirds majority, emphatic support from the whole of Hungary. You should have seen the scenes in Budapest last night. It was like the end of the Soviet Union or akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was really incredible. He had been trailing Peter Magyar for several weeks, but nobody could quite believe him. that this would actually emerge.
How significant was Viktor Orbán's defeat in the recent elections?
I mean, Magyar's lead was into double digits about two weeks ago. But still, even in the days before the election, I was speaking to Hungarian experts and they all just were concerned that somehow Orban would pull it out of the bag by some sort of level of electioneering or some stunt or that there would be votes that would have been bought or people forced to the ballot box and so on. But that didn't emerge.
And in terms of the new or the incoming Prime Minister, Peter Magyar, what do we know about him?
The Magyar is an Orban ally, former Orban ally. He only left Fidesz in about 2023. He left because of corruption, but he'd been there throughout the sort of high peaks of Orban really transforming the country into what he described himself as a liberal state. I mean, Hungary is no longer regarded as a democracy anymore. um so he'd been there when Orban destroyed the separation between the the justice system and the government that where he fired judges uh deployed his own people within the justice system uh fired uh journalists and editors in the state media imposed his own people in place fired directors of museums historical sites you name it just put his own cronies all across the institutions of the state and Maguiar was part of that but
The EU has recently taken action against this illiberalism and has withheld billions and billions of euro, about 20 billion euro at the moment, but more in the past from Hungary in relation to subsidies, whether it's structural funds, cohesion funds and so on. And the country's economy is really slumped because it's so insecure and there's very little investment. So Magyar left Hungary saying that corruption was his issue and that's what he campaigned on. He said that he would fix the country's economy, but also restore Hungary's rightful place at the heart of the European Union and do the reforms to ensure that corruption is no longer there and that the EU will then deliver all that money to Hungary.
Hungary, which is so needed.
So given Orbán's connections with Europe being fractious, I mean, obviously he vetoed or has vetoed this loan, this 90 billion euro loan to Ukraine, obviously his relations with the Kremlin, etc., that have been in the spotlight. So where does this leave those future relations? I mean, where does Maillard kind of see himself in relation to Moscow?
In relation to Moscow, he gave a press conference today and he said that he wouldn't phone Putin, but if Putin phoned him, he would take the call and he would tell him to stop killing people and stop the war. So he rightfully took a position there, unlike Orban, who said there was two sides to the war, that Zelensky is killing Russians and Russians are killing only Ukrainians because they were provoked into the war because of NATO and so on, which we all know is nonsense. And so Magyar is taking the position that Ukraine is the country that has been suffering a territorial conquest and that the war is illegal and totally wrong. That doesn't mean he's going to endorse everything that the EU is doing with Ukraine because the Hungarians don't have huge amounts of money.
So he said that they won't participate in the loan, the 90 billion euro, but he will endorse it and that he will block it. Exactly. That's right. Yeah.
Okay, but is he a kind of a cheerleader for Kiev's kind of accession into the EU or where does he stand on that?
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