For years, I confess, there was something almost fascinating about Viktor Orbán. Not for what he said - which was quite predictable - but for what he did. He had achieved something that many had been trying to do for a long time without success: emptying democracy without needing to destroy it.
It was, in a way, a rather refined work of political engineering: no coups d'état, no tanks in the streets, no scandalous bans. Just a patient reconfiguration of the system: elections are held, but where losing becomes increasingly improbable; media exist, but where dissent is diluted; institutions remain standing, but with their content carefully altered. A imitation democracy. A substitute. And the most disturbing thing is that for a long time it worked.
That is why his defeat is not simply a bad electoral night. It is something else: the moment when the trick stops working. And when the trick stops working, the magician loses something more important than power: he loses credibility.
The big idea and its exportable success
Orbán understood before many that the problem with democracy was not winning elections, but the possibility of losing them. And he decided to correct that “design flaw”.
The method was as simple as it was effective: not to eliminate the system, but to tilt it. Change rules, occupy institutions, domesticate checks and balances, concentrate economic power in allies. All legal. All gradual. All defensible in public with a phrase that is repeated like a mantra: "the people vote".
And yes, people voted. What wasn't said is that they voted on a tilted field, with designated referees and with an increasingly predictable outcome. That's not exactly a dictatorship. It's something more uncomfortable: a democracy hollowed out from within. And precisely because of that it was so attractive.
The Hungarian model of competitive authoritarianism, in which formal but deeply unbalanced elections are held, versus consolidated authoritarianism, which eliminates or empties any real competition for power of content, did not stay in Hungary. It became a reference.
For the European populist right, it was a roadmap: how to consolidate power without renouncing electoral legitimacy. For the US political ecosystem closest to Trumpism, it was proof that the system could be stretched much further than it seemed. For some Latin American leaders, it was simply confirmation of something already known: that institutions are more malleable than the manuals say. And then there was the ideological wrapping: the culture war.
Orbán turned politics into a permanent identity conflict. Nation, immigration, traditional values, sovereignty… all of it against an enemy as diffuse as it is useful: Brussels, the elites, the media… and, of course, the omnipresent “wokeism”. A concept elastic enough to serve for almost everything and, above all, to avoid getting into uncomfortable details. It worked. It mobilized. It simplified… until it was no longer enough.
When reality stops fitting the narrative
All these systems share an implicit promise: less democracy, but more effectiveness. Less noise, more results. The problem is that this promise has an expiration date.
In Hungary, it began to be noticed when the economy stopped accompanying: inflation, loss of purchasing power, weaker growth, and a detail that is not minor, such as the European funds that lubricated the system for years began to be blocked.
That is where the narrative begins to have problems. Because reality, although it communicates worse, insists more. You can control the discourse, but not the purchase price. You can dominate the media ecosystem, but not everyday discontent. And when daily experience contradicts what you are told, the system enters a dangerous phase: people start to disconnect and a system based on control paradoxically needs people not to disconnect too much.
That's where the real problems begin. Corruption didn't appear suddenly. It was always there. It was part of the mechanism, but for a long time it was perceived as something diffuse, almost structural. Until it stopped being so.
When citizens begin to see that political power and wealth accumulation go hand in hand, and that this relationship does not include them, tolerance evaporates. The network of loyalties stops looking like stability and starts looking like extraction. The system no longer protects, the system takes advantage. And at that moment, not even the best media control is enough. The system stopped looking protective. It started looking parasitic.
The system failure and the unexpected variable
Here Orbán makes the same mistake as so many before. When you control too much, you end up seeing too little. Reducing criticism, filtering information, surrounding yourself with loyalists… all of that stabilizes in the short term, but it makes the system blind. And a blind system can function for a long time… until it suddenly stops. Hungary seemed solid. Until it stopped seeming so. And then someone appeared who didn't fit.
The opposition had been denouncing the obvious for years: to denounce, to alert, to warn, without results. Because, in part. it played within the framework that Orbán himself had designed.
Péter Magyar breaks that mold for an uncomfortable reason: he comes from within. It is not easy to label him, nor to demonize him, nor to integrate him into the usual narrative and turn him into an enemy. And that allowed him to do something very dangerous for power: speak to people who did not listen before. He did not promise a revolution. He did not propose a frontal ideological clash, because ideologically they differed in nothing. He offered something much more destabilizing: normality. Institutions that work, corruption that is prosecuted, predictable relations with Europe. Nothing epic. Precisely because of that, effective.
The underlying problem: the model stops seeming inevitable
For years, Hungary has been the favorite example of those who maintained that liberal democracy was exhausted. There was the example: a more controlled, apparently more stable system, a preview of the future. Now that argument has a crack. If the model works so well, why has it lost? And if it can lose, to what extent is it really a model?
The answer is not that illiberalism is impossible. It is something more uncomfortable: it is not infallible and in politics, the difference between the inevitable and the questionable changes everything: when a system stops seeming inevitable, it begins to be questioned even by those who supported it.
Orbán's defeat is not confined to Budapest. In Europe, it introduces doubt in those who saw this path as a safe option. In the United States, it questions the idea that a democracy can be strained and manipulated indefinitely without consequences. In Latin America, it reopens an old debate: how much can a political system be hollowed out before it stops responding. And, incidentally, it dismantles a rather widespread illusion: that cultural war is enough to govern. It mobilizes, yes. But it does not replace reality.
Europe, the Aftermath and the Uncomfortable Conclusion
For the European Union, Orbán's departure is an evident relief. Less blocking, less blackmail, more room to maneuver, but it is also an uncomfortable reminder: the problem was not just Orbán. It was that the system allowed Orbán to exist for so long. Celebrating the defeat is fine. Avoiding repetition would be better.
And that's where the difficult part begins. Or just ask Poland. Without a doubt, Magyar will clean up the system established by Orbán: heads will roll, there may be legal proceedings to modify what has already been done, and, at least initially, it will be less combative in Brussels and more inclined to make concessions in Hungary's interest. But dismantling an illiberal system is not simply doing the opposite. It implies rebuilding eroded institutions without falling into the same power logics: broad majorities, temptation to intervene quickly, pressure for immediate results. It is surgery, not an alternation.
The risk is not just failing. It is doing so in a way that validates the illiberal argument: that everyone ends up playing the same way. Because here is the key: illiberalism is not dead. It has lost this battle and has lost it significantly. But it has not disappeared. Its causes are still there: distrust, inequality, democratic fatigue, simplification of political conflict. What it has lost is its aura of invulnerability. And that matters, but it is not enough.
What needs to be done
If something Hungary makes clear is that these systems are not defeated only with speeches nor with moral alarms. They are defeated when reality passes them the bill… and when there are credible alternatives.
And here comes the less epic, but more necessary part. Faced with illiberalism, it is not enough to be outraged. We must do things that are much less flashy and much more difficult: more transparency in political decisions, so that power cannot hide behind the narrative. Less Cainism, because few things do more work for illiberalism than fragmented democracies incapable of cooperating. More institutional reinforcement, even if it is slow, not very profitable in electoral terms, and does not provide immediate headlines or votes. More democratic leadership, the kind that assumes costs instead of avoiding them. And, above all, more citizen participation. Because these systems thrive when people withdraw and begin to fail when people return.
Hungary has shown that a democracy can degrade little by little and also that it can recover. But between one thing and the other there is a fundamental difference: the second requires effort, leadership, and awareness, virtues increasingly scarce in current politics.