Inside the election that could spell the end of MAGA

On Friday, much of the news was focused on peace negotiations with Iran, with Vice President JD Vance heading to Pakistan to lead the U.S. delegation. But many Americans might not be aware of where Vance just left: an election in Hungary that, according to renowned historian Timothy Snyder, could herald the end of the MAGA movement.

On Sunday, Hungary will hold parliamentary elections that will determine whether Viktor Orban — the country’s current prime minister, who has ruled with an increasingly iron fist since 2010 — will retain or be removed from power. A star of the international far-right, Orban has famously turned Hungary into an “illiberal” democracy in which elections theoretically exist but are not fair, and where the state and social functions are dominated by “oligarcho-fascism.”

Orban’s successful quest for personal power, one-party rule, and strict conservative social controls has made him a revered figure among the American far right, aligning him with President Donald Trump, Vance, and the GOP, and garnering him top billing at CPAC. So intertwined have the political right of the U.S. and Hungary become, that Vance just appeared at a series of Orban’s campaign rallies, hoping to energize the authoritarian’s flagging electoral support.

Like Trump and Vance, Orban believes in the “politics of eternity,” in which one man rules indefinitely. And while he is “good at the politics of endless grievance,” Hungarians are aware that their standard of living has fallen under his leadership, and of the rampant corruption and crumbling institutions that plague the nation. Then the country’s right-wing party was hit by a child sex abuse and cover-up scandal, and quiet dissent erupted into massive public protest. As a result, a new opposition party soared in popularity, and it now appears that Orban could lose.

Snyder points out that not only would this mean the loss of one of Trump’s most important global allies and evidence that illiberal policies don’t work, but it could also herald the end of MAGA.

“The most important consequence for Trump and to Vance of Orbán’s defeat would be the revelation that history is not in fact going in a single direction,” writes Snyder, “that their power, or the power of people like them, is not assured for all time.”

A central aspect of the far-right mentality is the idea that its authoritarian mission is somehow destined to be.

“In their view of themselves,” says Snyder, “they are not of course the creatures of historical structure: the power of oil money; the psychology of social media, the perversion of wealth inequality. As they see matters, they are beyond history now, beyond historical change, beyond the actions of the peoples in whose name they rule.”

But such a major loss would reveal the fallacy of this ideology. The far-right, MAGA, and leaders like Orban, Trump, and Vance do not represent the “end of history” as they would like to think.

“They are wrong,” writes Snyder. “History goes on. Just as Hungary once offered the international oligarchical far right the confidence that a formula had been found, it now offers to men such as Vance and Trump the anxiety that voting might actually make a difference, that democracy might actually turn out to be more than a slogan, that unpredictable change is still possible, that the future is open.”

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