The forces of darkness rolled back on Sunday. The mighty combined power of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Donald Trump’s America were defeated in Hungary, as European liberal democratic values triumphed.

The populist-nativist right put their all into keeping Viktor Orbán in power. The US vice-president, JD Vance, mid-war in Iran, took time out to parade his patronage in Budapest, one month after the hard-right US Conservative Political Action Conference took place there. In January, Benjamin Netanyahu appeared in a video endorsing Orbán, with salvoes of support from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen. Herbert Kickl of Austria’s Freedom party declared that “a patriotic wind is blowing across Europe”. Maybe, but not in their direction. Patriotism does not belong to them.

Orbán’s defeat at the hands of the conservative Péter Magyar’s Tisza party weakens them all. Orbán lost despite years of the party-state’s gerrymandering, the constitutional changes, the corruption and the suborning of the media, judiciary and other public offices. Hungarians finally broke free, sending a chill through Europe’s authoritarian right.

Orbán’s Hungary played a key role in the global right. As the investigative climate activists DeSmog put it: “[He] has used a network of state-backed think tanks, media outlets, and conferences to promote his brand of ‘illiberal democracy’ across Europe, including in the UK.”

How perilous the rise of the European hard right has been: it took roughly a quarter of European........

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