The fall of Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán after sixteen uninterrupted years in power is not merely a routine electoral upset; it is the delayed correction of a political system that had steadily concentrated authority while maintaining the outward rituals of democracy. What has collapsed is less a government than a governing method, one that fused electoral legitimacy with institutional control. Mr Orbán’s Hungary was often described as an “illiberal democracy,” but the label obscured a more practical reality: a system designed to win and keep winning.

Through constitutional changes, media consolidation, and patronage networks, power was embedded deeply enough to appear durable, even inevitable. That inevitability has now been broken by Péter Magyar, a figure whose significance lies as much in his origins within the establishment as in his campaign against it. Mr Magyar’s victory is not a triumph of ideology but of exhaustion. After years of polarisation, economic unevenness, and perceived corruption, a broad coalition of voters, many without shared political instincts, chose rupture over continuity. Record........

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