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New Delhi: A non-work trip to Budapest, just three weeks before the general election there, was shocking for someone travelling from India.

Being a neighbour to Hungary on the V-Dem index of electoral autocracies (this year particularly close – Hungary is just a rank above India) lent me to expect a flurry of Orbans on billboards in the capital. The Modi government spends millions of Indian public money to have his visage plastered all over, so where was Viktor Orban?

You could be mistaken into thinking that it was actually Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and the European Union chief, Ursula von der Leyen, contesting the election. Adorning all pillars and walls in the city, Orban’s chief challenger, the ex-Fidesz partyman and now incumbent prime minister Peter Magyar was on the Fidesz posters.

Orban had retreated. Picture-wise, at least. Targeting and villainising opponents seemed a better bet. The implication was that Hungary would be dragged into the Ukrainian war and  significant amounts of tax money would go towards fuelling Europe’s support for the war between Ukraine and Russia, a PhD student from Chile studying in Budapest told me.

The 79.5% voter turnout, the highest since 1989, has overwhelmingly voted to oust Orban.

Only Hungarians were voting in this election, but the 16-year Orban regime ending has implications for well beyond the borders.

In Europe, as Orban’s campaign itself has unintentionally pointed to, his departure marks the uprooting of the strongest basecamp that far-right parties in the continent had banked upon, to........

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