You Don’t Have to Go Home, But You Can’t Stay Here

Some additional thoughts on the electoral defenestration of Viktor Orban:

Orban’s arguments were seized upon by “traditionalists” in Russia, who argued that the West was attempting to destroy Russia’s particular cultural heritage—a combination of Orthodox Christianity with traditional, authoritarian political and economic structures.

And despite cutting his teeth on anti-Soviet politics in the 1980s and 1990s, and demonstrating a wariness of Russia after his initial electoral victory in 2010, Orban eventually embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strategic and cultural ally. After 2022, Orban acted as Putin’s right-hand man in Europe, slowing aid to Ukraine and the accession of Finland and Sweden into NATO.

Indeed, in 2026, Orban campaigned directly against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, claiming that Zelensky was interfering with Hungary’s electoral process and intended to drag Hungary into war with Russia. Orban also made specious claims about Kyiv’s supposed abuse of Hungarian minority groups in Ukraine.

In the United States, Orban earned fans all over the political right, including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. The idea of illiberal democracy appealed to the president and his inner circle, who have long expressed a disdain for both the process of liberal democracy and for “globalists” who threaten to unsettle traditional racial, gender, and family hierarchies.  

For his American backers, support of Orban was Culture War Through the Lens of Foreign Policy. For Russia it was that as well, but Russia also had practical reasons for supporting Europe’s biggest spoiler of support for Ukraine.

Other thoughts:

• Orban’s message for MAGA
• Orban was also China’s best friend in the EU
• Genuine excitement in Budapest over Orban’s defeat
• How to break an illiberal regime
• A Ukrainian perspective on Orban… and a word of caution about Magyar’s prospects.
• JD Vance’s much deserved humiliation
• Of course Orban helped fund CPAC... quite likely with funds funneled from Moscow

And if I may digress a bit here… I have grown increasingly frustrated with people who refer to themselves as foreign policy Realists, both inside and outside of academia, and much of my frustration is exemplified by the question of Orban. A group of think tankers who refer to themselves as Realists (I call this group “Pop Realists”) has either ignored or downplayed Magyar’s victory, largely for three reasons. First, they struggle with the fact that states care a great deal about regime type in other states; it is a core presumption of Realism (especially its Pop variety) that regime type is largely a secondary consideration for evaluating foreign policy. Second, Orban’s defeat undermines the argument that Europe has grown tired of supporting Ukraine. Much as in the United States, attitudes on Ukraine follow ideological lines in Europe, which is why support for Ukraine in the US dropped dramatically among Republicans following the Zelensky-Trump Oval Office Summit and recovered just as dramatically after it became clear that Trump would continue to support Ukraine. Most Pop Realists fancy themselves to be Restrainers (this is itself a reaction to Neoconservatism and the Iraq War) and a) blame the US for the war, and b) believe Ukraine should in some form be abandoned.

Finally, the support of both the Trump and Putin administrations (but especially the former) gave to Hungary undermines the idea that these two countries are operating according to rational-realist as opposed to ideological logics. Modern international relations Realism was founded as a reaction to the excesses of interwar liberal optimism. There is an extent to which the Realist critique of this liberalism was on solid ground; Kellogg-Briand was pernicious nonsense in a world where half of the great powers were dissatisfied and had no interest whatsoever in renouncing war as a tool of statecraft… which happened to be the same world in which the “liberal” great powers ruled vast swaths of the world at the barrel of a gun. Similarly, the mechanics of the League of Nations were fundamentally unsound for handling the problems that the members of the organization expected. The Realists (most prominently EH Carr and Hans Morgenthau) were less trying to demonstrate the essential nature of international politics than decrying the fact that liberal states were getting it wrong. But the Realist Reaction, such that it was, went too far, and today amounts to little more than a dismissive sneer of the idea that liberal internationalism might mean anything at all to foreign policy. To great extent, ideology that is not liberal internationalism is invisible to Realists… which is why they struggle mightily to successful anticipate and interpret the foreign policy actions and imperatives of Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America.

Genuine Realist scholars often understand that Realism is an explanatory model that can’t explain everything, and (to differing degrees) appreciate the limitations of the model. Pop Realist Think Tankers believe Realism is a Holy Writ that can explain international relations and (just as importantly) explain why Liberals Are Wrong about Everything. The former can (sometimes) be engaged with, the latter are safe to ignore.

Photo Credit: By Elekes Andor – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=187550168