Populist leaders around the world are bound to react in shock at the defeat of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban by a former loyalist, Peter Magyar, although it was becoming increasingly clear that his 16-year-old regime was running out of steam. The landslide win of the Tisza party led by the 45-year-old Magyar has shifted the ground in a country that had grown weary of governmental corruption, declining quality of life, and creeping decrepitude in health and education. In the end, the institutions that Orban refashioned and packed with loyalists to serve his cult politics, notably the judiciary, media, and think tanks, failed to shore up his fortunes at the polls. The loudest message that emerges from........

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