Who is Péter Magyar, the candidate who ousted Hungary’s Orbán?

Budapest, Hungary (CNN) — When Péter Magyar was growing up during Hungary’s democratic transition, he had a poster of Viktor Orbán pinned to his bedroom wall. At the time, Orbán was a liberal anti-communist who had famously demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary.

Now, Magyar is projected to end Orbán’s 16-year stint as Hungary’s prime minister.

The playing field for Sunday’s parliamentary vote was tilted against Magyar. Observers say Hungary’s heavily gerrymandered electoral system, coupled with a pro-government media landscape, have made Hungary’s elections free but not fair.

For many Hungarians, especially those who have grown up knowing little but Orbán’s rule, the moment has been years in the making.

“We’ve been waiting for this for a long time. A really long time,” said Dora, a 30-year-old attorney – one of thousands of people who gathered Sunday on the banks of the Danube in Budapest to hear the election results.

Fit, sharply dressed and, at 45, some 17 years younger than Orbán, Magyar – whose last name means “Hungarian” – comes from a well-to-do Budapest family. His relatives include lawyers and judges, as well as the former president Ferenc Mádl, who served as president of Hungary from 2000 until 2005, during Orbán’s first term as prime minister.

Magyar’s journey from an Orbán loyalist to his nemesis was swift. Just two years ago, he was a member of the governing Fidesz party and had previously been married to Judit Varga, once one of the party’s rising stars.

The couple lived for about a decade in Brussels, Belgium, where Magyar was a diplomat and Varga worked for a Fidesz Member of the European Parliament (MEP). They moved back to Budapest with their three sons in 2018. The following year, Varga was appointed Orbán’s justice minister – a role she left in 2023 to lead Fidesz into the 2024 European Parliament elections.

That plan was upended by a scandal that rocked Fidesz in early 2024. Hungary’s president at the time, Katalin Novák, had pardoned a former official convicted of helping cover up the abuse of underaged boys at a children’s home. The revelation of the pardon punctured a perception of Orbán’s government, held by many, as the defender of Christian and family values.

“The core of the self-definition of Fidesz is that they are conservative, family-friendly, and they protect children,” Péter Krekó, a political scientist who runs Political Capital, a think-tank in Budapest, told CNN.

To many voters, the pardon scandal exposed the “hypocrisy” of the Orbán project, Krekó said. Varga, also involved in the pardon, resigned, with many seeing her departure as one forced by Orbán.

It was at this moment – when, according to Krekó, there was “huge demand for someone who could challenge Orbán” – that Magyar strode onto the political stage.

In February 2024, Magyar gave an explosive video interview to Partizan, a Hungarian media outlet, accusing Orbán and his allies of “hiding behind women’s skirts” in the pardon scandal. He also used the interview to share information he had gleaned from his proximity to government. “A few families own half the country,” he said in the interview, which has now been viewed nearly 3 million times, in a country of fewer than 10 million people.

Later that year, Magyar joined the Tisza party and quickly rose up the ranks to become its leader?. Under his leadership, Tisza unexpectedly won almost 30% of the Hungarian votes in the European Parliament election in June 2024, making Magyar an MEP.

Suddenly, Hungarians, increasingly tired of Orbán but lacking credible opposition parties, were presented with a viable political alternative. Since then, the party’s membership has ballooned. “Tisza” is an acronym of the Hungarian words for “respect and freedom,” and is also the name of a major river in the country. The party is often referred to as “sweeping” or “flooding” Hungary.

While Orbán’s campaign this year revolved mostly around foreign policy and his relations with world leaders, Magyar’s was rigidly focused on domestic issues, such as the economy and corruption.

Over the past two years, he has also worked to build a direct relationship with voters, visiting scores of towns and cities, and often staying for hours after his speeches to meet local people.

From the outset, corruption was a major theme of Magyar’s electoral campaign. In his Partizan interview, he suggested that Orbán’s self-image as a defender of national sovereignty was “sugar-coating… to conceal the workings of the machinery of power and to acquire immense fortunes.”

Orbán has often used this “machinery of power” to discredit his opponents. In 2022, he kneecapped the candidacy of Péter Márki-Zay by painting him as a dangerous enemy of peace, stoking fear among Hungarians about the war in neighboring Ukraine.

Orbán failed to find a reliable line of attack against Magyar, according to Krekó, the political scientist. Aware of how Orbán’s system works, Magyar was able to “pre-empt” blows before they landed, he said.

In February, for instance, Magyar said Fidesz was planning to blackmail him by releasing a video of him during “an intimate moment with my then-girlfriend,” which it had secretly recorded.

“Yes, I’m a 45-year-old man; I have a sex life. With an adult partner,” he said. “Dear Fidesz cowards, go ahead and bring out everything.” So far that sexual kompromat, if it exists, has not been made public.

Magyar also made it hard for Fidesz to paint him as a liberal. When Orbán, as part of his years-long efforts to demonize the LGBTQ movement, banned the Budapest Pride march last year, Magyar refused to take the bait. In a carefully worded statement, he avoided mentioning the movement by name, saying instead that Orbán’s government aimed to “instill fear and divide us,” and stressing that Hungary needed a prime minister who would “protect and represent all Hungarians.”

He has been similarly cautious on Ukraine, which Orbán has also vilified. Magyar in essence refused to discuss foreign policy during his campaign, to avoid being depicted as the sort of liberal European politician that Fidesz has long attacked.

Magyar’s near-silence on Ukraine has led some to speculate that his Hungary, like Orbán’s, will obstruct European Union efforts to support Kyiv. But Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, said many in Brussels understood that Magyar was simply aiming to deny Fidesz ways to attack him.

“They understand Magyar will be a totally different proposition,” Rahman told CNN. “Magyar is not Orbán. He’s not in the populist, nationalist mold.”

Magyar will hope for better relations with Brussels since the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, is currently withholding around €18 billion ($21 billion) of funds for Hungary over concerns about its democratic backsliding under Orbán. The freezing of those funds – equivalent to around 10% of the country’s national output – has deepened Hungary’s economic malaise.

Many Hungarians, even those who oppose Orbán, remain somewhat wary of Magyar, Krekó said before his victory was announced.

“He put together a very broad camp from the rather conservative right to the hardcore liberals and leftists,” he said. “The vote for Péter Magyar is predominantly an anti-Orbán vote.”

Whether Magyar can sustain this coalition remains to be seen. In his campaign, he stressed endlessly that the task of “rebuilding” Hungary would take time. He pledged to unpick Orbán’s illiberal political system “step by step, brick by brick.” That will indeed take time.

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