Orbán’s fall shakes European illiberalism as new challengers rise in east

The streets of Budapest still echoed with a raw, almost disbelieving euphoria days after the vote. Thousands of young Hungarians packed the thoroughfares as if spilling from a music festival, the roar so loud that a reporter could not hear the voices he was recording without a wireless microphone [A1]. The ousting of Viktor Orbán after sixteen uninterrupted years in power has been received as a catharsis, a moment when the nation believed a corrupt, illiberal apparatus might be swept away as if by a violent gust of wind [A2].

Yet the task facing the victor, Péter Magyar, is immense. Analysts in Warsaw point to Poland’s own halting efforts to dismantle the legal and media machinery of a populist decade [A2]. Orbán’s “illiberal state” was more deeply embedded: partisan judges, captured public broadcasters, a crony economy. Magyar is demanding rapid purges of Orbán loyalists from the state apparatus, and has adopted a tone that is less magnanimous than peremptory [A5]. The outgoing leader, speaking for the first time at length since his defeat, sounded oddly serene, vowing a comprehensive renewal of his Fidesz party and offering restrained criticism of his opponent [A5]. This studied calm did little to arrest a wider continental reckoning: from Madrid to Paris, the defeat has been read as a decapitation blow to the European far-right, reminiscent of the Hollywood trope in which a fallen Apache chief causes the whole war party to disperse [A4].

If Hungary’s vote suggests a liberal pendulum swing, the political weather in neighbouring Bulgaria points in the opposite direction. In Sunday’s snap parliamentary elections — the eighth in five years — the frontrunner is Rumen Radev, a former general and eurosceptic president who stepped down early to seek the premiership [A3][A7]. His hastily assembled coalition, “Progressive Bulgaria,” is polling at 30–40 percent, far ahead of any rival, on a promise to smash a corrupt oligarchy that he himself depicts as a mafia network draped in democratic trappings [A3]. Yet Radev is widely seen as a “Putin sympathiser” who advocates restoring dialogue with Moscow, leading analysts in Moscow to label him a potential “new Orbán” [A7]. The irony is sharp: just as Hungary’s autocrat falls, Bulgaria contemplates electing one of his ideological kin.

The picture is further complicated by Poland, where President Karol Nawrocki has launched a bid to rewrite the 1997 constitution. Declaring that the founding text “is exhausting itself before our eyes,” he called for a clearer separation of executive powers between president and prime minister and signalled his preference for a presidential system [A6]. A special council is to be convened to draft a new basic law. The initiative, viewed from Brussels with unease, reveals a region where the institutional rules of the game remain very much in play.

What emerges across Central and Eastern Europe is not a single narrative but a fractured landscape. Hungary’s liberal counter-revolution is real but fragile, and Orbán, feeling “younger than ever,” intends to remain a force [A5]. Bulgaria may soon test whether the authoritarian model can be reborn under a different flag, while Poland reopens fundamental questions about the architecture of its democracy. The defeat of one illiberal chief has not extinguished the fire; it has scattered embers that could ignite elsewhere.