On Sunday, voters ousted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s populist right-wing government. In a landslide victory, Peter Magyar’s Tisza, a center-right party, won 53 percent of the vote, compared with 39 percent for Orban’s Fidesz party. In his 16 years in power, Orban had been a role model for aspiring authoritarian leaders far beyond Budapest. His regime had lasted as long as it did because it was extremely adept at rigging the electoral system and stoking polarization in society. Yet those very strengths proved to be its undoing.

An electoral system that rewarded the largest party with a disproportionate number of parliamentary seats meant that a capable challenger could decisively turn the tables on the incumbent government. The stark polarization of society made a united opposition party easier to forge. And Orban’s unusually long tenure made it impossible for him to escape responsibility for the failures of governance and management that plagued the country.

Magyar, a former Fidesz member turned critic, and the Tisza Party used Orban’s own record against him. They united pro-democracy forces, turned the division Fidesz had manufactured against Orban himself, and focused their campaign on the incumbent government’s corruption and failure to fix deteriorating public services and high inflation. Their success holds lessons for opposition parties in competitive authoritarian systems around the world.

ENGINEERING DOMINANCE

The first pillar of Orban’s success was an electoral system that maximized the number of parliamentary seats that his party earned in elections. Fidesz gerrymandered districts, extended the franchise to (mostly conservative) Hungarians living abroad, and established a mixed voting system that allocated a disproportionately large number of parliamentary seats to the party that won the highest share of the vote—even if it only achieved a plurality rather than an outright majority.

To comprehend the effect of these changes, one need only to look at election results. In 2010, when Fidesz first came to power, the party received 53 percent of the vote and earned a two-thirds majority in parliament. Four years later, after many of the electoral changes took effect, it received only 45 percent of the vote—but the margin of its supermajority in the parliament was essentially unchanged, allowing Fidesz to pass legislation, amend the constitution, and appoint party loyalists to important positions, all without having to even consult opposition parties.

Orban also managed to polarize Hungarian society with successive waves of fear-based rhetoric. Fidesz........

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