It is still strange to ascribe any deeper meaning to an election in a European country with a population of less than 10 million people. The political fate of Hungary should matter no more to the United States than that of Switzerland or Bulgaria. But we live under the yoke of MAGA, and far-right politicians have been obsessed with Viktor Orbán since he rose to power 16 years ago. J.D. Vance was even dispatched to campaign for the strongman prime minister, who was crushed in an election on Sunday. For Vance, this was yet another humiliation in Donald Trump’s administration — as well as a setback for men like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu who’d hoped the Orbán government would last deep into the future.

Orbán was a lodestar for members of the American far right. Despite governing a very different country, he spoke their language: He was fiercely anti-immigrant and anti-gay, a proponent of Christian nationalism and an enemy of modern cosmopolitanism. No convocation of Trump acolytes was ever complete without praise for Orbán’s Hungary. Among liberal intellectuals, Orbán’s place in the popular imagination was no less outsize. In his various attacks on his nation’s democracy — his takeovers of local media outlets, his warping of the judiciary — he resembled Trump, or what Trump could be if he........

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