What Orban’s Defeat Means for the Rest of the World

On Saturday, the day before the Hungarian election, I went to Puspokladany, a run-down town of about 16,000 in northeastern Hungary, for the penultimate rally of opposition leader Peter Magyar. Though the region has traditionally been a stronghold of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz Party, the square where Magyar spoke was overflowing; there seemed to be at least 1,000 people, many of them teenagers and young families. Over and over, Magyar beseeched the crowd, “Do not be afraid!” The crowd, in turn, broke into a chant: “We are not afraid!”

I asked a woman I met in the crowd, Mariann Szabo, to explain Magyar’s words: What had people been afraid of? An elementary school teacher and mother of two, Szabo said........

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