Mashadipati: A Hungarian defenestration

After 16 years in power, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was unseated in elections yesterday. The result was a huge relief for Europe and a blow to Donald Trump and the global right wing, who’d strongly backed Orbán. Bloomberg Budapest bureau chief Thomas Escritt was on the scene and sends us this dispatch. Plus: The age of the overeducated barista, and managing a recession without a safety net. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

The partying in Budapest went on almost until dawn, with people of all ages dancing, singing and waving banners to celebrate the downfall of a man who, for many, is the only leader they’ve ever known. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister for 16 years, had been handed a resounding electoral defeat at the hands of one of his former acolytes.

Orbán had made himself a favorite of the global right wing by rejecting what he called the decadence of the West and aligning himself with both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. And he’d managed to stay in power through four terms by manipulating election rules, packing the courts with allies, gerrymandering electoral districts and seizing control of the mass media. But in the end, not even that was enough to overcome voter dissatisfaction with flagging growth, decaying public services, a foreign policy stance that seemed set to drag the country out of the European Union, and concerns about rampant cronyism and corruption.

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY - APRIL 14: Peter Magyar, lead candidate of the Tisza party, speaks to the media the day after the sweeping Tisza victory over rival Fidesz in Hungarian parliamentary elections on April 14, 2026 in Budapest, Hungary. The win paves the way for Magyar to replace current Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who yesterday conceded defeat. Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images — Magyar on Monday.

Instead, voters swept 45-year-old Peter Magyar into office, giving his Tisza party—a broad group assembled with the express aim of toppling Orbán—more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. A member of Hungary’s ruling elite as recently as 2024, Magyar is no liberal, and he largely avoided campaigning on cultural matters. Instead, he promised to crack down on corruption, reclaim stolen public property, end the canoodling with Putin and recommit to the EU.

And he endlessly excoriated Orbán for his utter lack of morality, his lying and his attempts to sow fear among the populace. Hungarians spent years under “Goebbelsian, North Korean-style propaganda,” Magyar told reporters on Monday. “The kind of propaganda that didn’t contain an ounce of truth, that tried to keep our parents and grandparents living in terror.”

On Sunday evening, Magyar promised to govern for all Hungarians, and that seems to have been enough for the thousands of people dancing to everything from disco to dubstep on the banks of the Danube. “I feel European, and he’s European,” said Domokos Borsosfoldi, a 22-year-old student, echoing the sentiments of Hungarians who say there’s a more important axis than simply left versus right.

Ultimately, Orbán’s Fidesz party was laid low by the growing divergence between its messaging and voters’ lived reality. In the final weeks, Orbán’s campaign pumped out endless messages on all media channels, making a bogeyman of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, insisting the Ukrainian president would drag Hungary into his war with Russia. But voters were consumed by other worries, such as the crumbling health-care system and the country’s growing estrangement from its European neighbors, which meant, among many other concerns, that their children were no longer welcome on student exchanges in Europe.

Orbán’s emergence as an icon of the global right wing and his championing of what he calls “illiberal democracy,” has given Hungary an outsize profile on the world stage. So his defeat should sting his admirers: If someone who’d entrenched himself so deeply can be pushed from power, what does that mean for his foreign imitators, from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Trump?

Magyar’s supermajority will give him the power to rewrite the constitution and purge the system of the loyalists Orbán placed at chokepoints throughout the Hungarian state apparatus. But he must step carefully, taking control of an economically vulnerable country at a time of unprecedented global instability. The economy remains tightly woven around Orbán’s political machine, so unwinding state ties to companies run by his cronies will be no small feat. And it all must happen fast, as voters are desperate to see a return to growth after three years of economic stagnation. One easy step will be ending Orbán’s blockade of a €90 billion ($105 billion) loan from the EU to Kyiv, which Magyar promised to do on Monday, though he said Hungary might not participate in the loan.

That, in turn, should restore EU funding to Hungary, which had been frozen because of concerns about cronyism in the Orbán system. But he also said he would ask Orbán to reverse Hungary’s policy, since he’ll continue to serve as acting prime minister for several weeks. “It’s going to be at least a month before a Tisza government is formed,” Magyar said. “I told Orbán that if any issues involving international issues arise he should call me. He has my number now.”

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Meet today’s growing class of underemployed college graduates, the term economists use to describe young people stuck in a job that doesn’t require the degree they earned. They made up almost 43% of US graduates age 22 to 27 as of December 2025, up more than 3 percentage points for the year and the highest rate since the pandemic, according to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. That’s a significant increase over just 12 months, though the rate still tracks below those logged during the Great Recession.

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