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GWYNNE DYER: What Hungary's election means to the U.S. and other populist countries

Viktor Orban was ousted in Hungary, but his supporters - including the U.S. - are now left to wonder what will happen next

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk sent a message congratulating Hungary’s newly elected prime minister, Peter Magyar, for having evicted long-serving populist leader Viktor Orban (aka ‘The Viktator’) from power.

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All the usual welcoming words, but Tusk’s message ended with two slightly mysterious words in Hungarian: “Ruszkik Haza” — Russians Go Home.

There are no Russians in Hungary, apart from occasional visitors, so what was that about?

It dates back to 1989, when a then-youthful student leader called Viktor Orban became an overnight national hero by giving a speech telling the Russians to end their 45-year-old military occupation and go home.

They did go home then, but their influence returned with Orban’s return to the prime ministership. He had previously occupied the office as a conventional conservative in 1998-2002, but he practically invented modern populism — ‘illiberalism’, as he called it — for his comeback in 2010. And this time, the Russians were with him all the way.

Why does Russia care about Hungary?

Hungary’s value to Moscow was its membership in the European Union and NATO, which........

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