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The fall of Trump’s favorite dictator—and what comes next.

With the midterm elections underway and the MAGA movement primed to face a reckoning of its own making, the Democratic Party is beginning to wrestle with the question of how to rescue the country from authoritarianism. Hungary—where, in April, voters ousted the long-standing far-right strongman Viktor Orbán, along with most of the members of parliament from his Fidesz party—offers insights into the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

As a journalist and author who has covered Donald Trump’s mobster-style leadership in both its 1.0 version and its more extreme 2.0 form, I believe that Hungary’s example is apropos, especially given Trump’s admiration for Orbán and his personal endorsement of the autocrat’s failed reelection campaign. So this summer, I traveled to Budapest, the capital of Hungary and long the heart of resistance to Orbánism, to see how the new government, under Prime Minister Péter Magyar, is faring in its attempts at re-democratization after nearly two decades of autocratic rule.

My first stop was the radio station Klubrádió, one of the few Hungarian media outlets that remained independent during Orbán’s final term in office. Even as Orbán expanded his control over state media as part of his project to unravel the country’s democracy, Klubrádió bucked this assault and provided a vital platform to a new generation of political leaders.

The station is housed in an elegant and eminently Mitteleuropean stone-fronted building near Budapest’s Heroes Square. A vast open space, the square is home to several huge statues of military heroes from Hungarian history riding on horseback, including the country’s founding monarch and his successors in what became a 1,000-year kingdom, as well as towering figures in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a dual monarchy that united Hungary and Austria into a huge, ethnically diverse Central European mega-state. At the end of World War I, that mega-state splintered into numerous smaller ones. Hungary veered toward fascism and, in the post–World War II era, became a Soviet satellite state. The country liberalized with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989, but this period of democracy would prove to be a brief interlude before Orbán and his Fidesz party won power in 1998 and, more durably, again in 2010.

During his five terms in office—four of them consecutive—Orbán succeeded in gerrymandering districts to lock in majorities for Fidesz. He also gained control of the judicial system, which then rubber-stamped Fidesz policies; stifled the free press; and handed the reins of the economy to Fidesz-affiliated oligarchs. Orbán’s actions made the words on the plaque in front of the grandiose, neoclassical Museum of Fine Arts especially poignant. They were from a sermon that Pope John Paul II had given in the country two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: “Be 
mindful of the blessings that freedom, which you have definitively secured, means for your future. Cherish it and make good use of your liberty.”

At Klubrádió’s airy, plant-filled third-floor offices, György Bolgár has just finished his live call-in radio show, Let’s Talk About It, which he hosts every weekday afternoon. It was on this show that, in 2024, a relatively unknown politician, then-43-year-old Péter Magyar, nourished his political ambitions. In the spring of that year, during the darkest days of Orbán’s iron rule, Bolgár invited Magyar for an interview. A former Fidesz insider, Magyar had recently begun criticizing the government in online comments, catching the attention of Hungarians desperate for the country to reclaim the democratic potential unleashed in 1989. Unlike Orbán, who had consistently refused to appear on the program, Magyar accepted the invitation and soon became a regular guest. He hammered home the need to end the culture of cronyism and corruption that had enabled Orbán’s inner circle to enrich themselves at the public’s expense, and to invest more in education, transportation, and healthcare. He explained that in order to do so, a new government led by Magyar and his upstart Tisza Party would need to access the €16 billion in European Union funds that Brussels had frozen as a response to Orbán’s autocratic rule.

Magyar’s anti-corruption, pro-democracy message arrived at exactly the right moment for Hungarians eager for a political reset. That he was youthful, telegenic, and supremely self-confident didn’t hurt either.

The host of Let’s Talk About It understood all too well that Magyar was far from left-wing. On some key issues, including immigration, Magyar’s policy proposals largely mirrored Orbán’s intolerant approach. That wasn’t a surprise, since Magyar had spent his early career as a Fidesz insider: For nearly a decade, he’d lived in Brussels as a diplomatic liaison to the EU, and for many years he was married to Judit Varga, Orbán’s pliant minister of justice. But talking with him week in and week out, Bolgár came to believe that Magyar had experienced a road-to-Damascus conversion regarding the need to scrub the political system clean of Fidesz’s corruption.

“It’s a people’s party” was the way that Bolgár described his guest’s vision for Tisza, which had been a small and powerless opposition party until Magyar joined it in 2024. Magyar was promising a genuine social compact with the people and a return of decency to politics. “His intention is to restore some kind of balance,” Bolgár tells me. Even the name of the party, an acronym in Hungarian for “Respect and Freedom,” signified a desire for a fresh start after Orbán.

To defeat the then-61-year-old autocrat, Magyar knew he needed to build an ideologically diverse coalition united around the popular disgust with Fidesz’s corruption and cronyism, as well as the economic malaise triggered by Orbán’s fight with the EU; a burgeoning scandal over the presidential pardon of someone who had attempted to cover up years of sexual abuse by the director of a children’s home in rural Hungary, which belied Fidesz’s claim to be the party of family values; and the regime’s escalating assault on the rule of law and freedom of the press. “He understood the political opening here,” Bolgár says. “He was convincing. He provided something no other opposition politician could provide in the first 14 years of the Orbán regime: He could provide hope.”

In the months that followed his initial interview, Magyar appeared regularly on the Klubrádió show, and in the spring of 2026, he pulled off what many regarded as something close to an election miracle. With 80 percent of the country’s voters flocking to the polls—enough to swamp all of Fidesz’s gerrymandering efforts—the new Tisza Party leader ousted Orbán and established himself as a model for anti-autocratic movements around the world. “It [was] really astonishing,” Bolgár says. “Nobody would have believed it.”

Bolgár knows firsthand the costs of living under an autocratic ruler bent on........

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