Hungary’s election will reverberate across Central Europe. From Based in Bohemia.
By Rob Cameron
Viktor Orban is worried.
There’s a real chance his entire edifice of “illiberal democracy” will come crashing down on Sunday.
The latest polls for Hungary’s 12 April elections show challenger Peter Magyar with a 10- to 15-point lead. Some even as high as 20 points.
Many think this is the end of Orban’s 16-year run in office.
Signs of desperation are there.
J.D. Vance was in Budapest this week to “help” Orban in the final days of the campaign. A brief “Donald you’re on speaker” call to the Oval Office is unlikely to have persuaded many voters.
Thinly veiled allegations of Ukrainian traces in a supposed plot to plant explosives on a Serbia-Hungary gas pipeline were dismissed by Serbia’s own intelligence services.
My BBC colleague Nick Thorpe writes that Orban’s government has been accused of mass voter intimidation in a new documentary, The Price of a Vote. Pro-government voices dismiss the film as opposition propaganda.
The depth of collusion between Budapest (and more recently Bratislava) and Vladimir Putin’s regime has been laid bare by investigative outlet VSquare and others.
The Hungarian government filed espionage charges against the VSquare investigative journalist who uncovered the evidence of Kremlin interference.
Free But Not Fair?
Other analysts, however, say the Kremlin links are already so obvious to most Hungarians, the revelations will have little effect on voting intentions. The real scandals are domestic, they say.
Many, meanwhile, warn that Orban has spent 16 years rewiring Hungary’s political system precisely to deal with such a challenge to his reign.
The election, they say, will be “free but not fair.” They think European liberals could wake up to a shock on Monday morning.
And even if Magyar does win, they say, he needs to win big. He’ll need a two-thirds constitutional majority to loosen Orban’s iron grip on Hungary, which is not limited to the prime minister’s office.
That is the real contest in this election, it seems.
Whichever way it goes, other European leaders will be watching closely. And none more so than Robert Fico in Slovakia and Andrej Babis in the Czech Republic.
“The biggest threat to Russia is a free, independent, and democratic Ukraine, because the Russian people would see that this is possible,” says Martin Poliacik, a former member of parliament and political consultant affiliated with the opposition Progressive Slovakia party.
“There’s a very similar pattern between Slovakia and Hungary,” Poliacik told me.
“The biggest threat for Fico is a pro-European Hungary, because then Slovaks would see that this is possible, that Fico’s not going to be there forever.”
“Fico, meanwhile, will lose his closest ally and also his diplomatic representation toward both Trump and Putin,” he went on.
The Slovak leader has already threatened to continue blocking the EU’s 90-billion-euro loan to Ukraine if Viktor Orban is no longer in a position to do so.
Poliacik is sceptical that Fico has either the physical stamina or the team behind him to become the new Orban.
Swinging Pendulum
However, Poliacik warns that even if Peter Magyar succeeds in unseating Orban on Sunday, what follows may not be very stable or long-lasting.
“I think it’s really hard to stay in power in Europe right now,” Poliacik says.
“Every status quo is hard to keep,” he says. “No matter whether the governments are liberal and pro-European, or pro-Russian and more autocratic, it’s hard to keep power once you’re in. It’s like a swinging pendulum.”
Andrej Babis knows the swinging pendulum better than anyone.
He formed what was technically his third administration in December 2025, this time a coalition between his “catch-all” (read: populist) ANO, the conservative Eurosceptic Motorists party, and the hard-right anti-immigrant SPD.
Opponents say they’re already unpicking the stitching of the Czech Republic’s liberal democratic fabric: independent, publicly funded broadcast media, a vibrant non-profit sector, and a human rights-based foreign policy.
Critics claim their aim is to replace it with something more akin to Fico’s Slovakia or Orban’s Hungary.
A Lighter Shade of Orban
Whether Babis and his coalition allies succeed on that front is yet to be determined. But the conventional wisdom is that losing the EU’s populist-in-chief in Budapest will weaken their hand. Retaining him will strengthen it.
Jindrich Sidlo, political commentator and journalist at Seznam Zpravy, says the situation in Prague is a bit more nuanced.
“Babis realized during his first term as prime minister that he can’t control the country the way Orban can,” Jindrich told me over coffee near Prague’s Novy Smichov shopping center.
“Orban has governed much longer, has very different electoral results, there’s no Senate in Hungary, and he was able to shape the electoral system to his advantage,” he went on.
“That’s something Babis may envy, but I think he now understands it’s not realistic in the Czech Republic. Even changing the electoral law requires agreement between the Chamber [of Deputies, the lower house] and the Senate – you can’t force it through. So Babis is, in that sense, a much weaker version of Orban.”
The new Czech government is already busy mending fences with Fico’s Slovakia; the two countries held a joint cabinet meeting on 31 March for the first time since Babis’s predecessor, Petr Fiala, suspended them.
But Babis is known to want to go further and revive the so-called “Visegrad Group” of Central European countries. The group was instrumental a decade ago in opposing attempts by the European Commission to redistribute asylum-seekers evenly across the EU.
Visegrad, however, has been on life support since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Fiala made clear it couldn’t function with such stark differences over Ukraine (the Poles were already halfway out the door anyway.)
It is, technically, still alive.
An Orban defeat would surely be the end of it.
Rob Cameron is a journalist and broadcaster based in Prague. He is the BBC correspondent for the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This article originally appeared in the Substack newsletter, Based in Bohemia. Republished by permission.
