On April 12, Viktor Orbán’s sixteen years of illiberal rule came to an end in Hungary. Opposition leader Péter Magyar defeated Orbán in a landslide victory, securing a two-thirds majority in parliament. Analysts in Hungary and abroad are now busy trying to make sense of what configuration of developments made it possible to unseat a leader widely celebrated in global right-wing circles for transforming Hungary into a textbook case of illiberal authoritarianism. I have learned a great deal from these analyses, but after spending years researching and writing about anti-regime media activism in Orbán’s Hungary, I found that the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart put it most succinctly: “The people of Hungary stood up and said, ‘Fuck this.’” He is right. But explaining how Hungarians reached this point may help preserve this moment of hope and transform it into a stronger conviction where autocrats can be ousted and that resistance is not futile. Magyar was able to defeat Orbán because he built on the sustained investment of individual activists and collectives who never stopped protesting democratic backsliding in Hungary from the moment Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP alliance rose to power in 2010. Without this steadfast civilian activism, Magyar could not have channeled widespread anger into the broad, unlikely coalition he forged—a center-right political formation that nonetheless embraces liberal values and left-leaning social policy. As the Orbán government expanded its grip on legacy media and transformed it into what political observer Ben Rhodes described as “Fox on steroids,” the opponents of the Orbán regime turned to counter-billboards, street art, internet memes, theater, and political podcasts to restore a sense of sanity and to push back against relentless culture wars targeting immigrants, feminists, and LGBTQIA+ people. In the process, they proved the lie of the government’s fear-mongering campaigns warning Hungarians that only Orbán could save them from being conscripted and sent to die in Ukraine.
Magyar did not emerge from what political podcasters called “the old opposition”—politicians paralyzed by their conviction that the Fidesz-KDNP coalition could not be defeated in regular elections, because the electoral system was rigged and government propaganda had brainwashed Hungarian voters. Magyar is the ex-husband of Judit Varga, Orbán’s former minister of justice, who resigned alongside president Katalin Novák after independent journalist Balázs Kaufmann revealed in early 2024 that Novák had pardoned a man who had covered up for the principal of a state orphanage who sexually abused young boys under his care. The scandal was staggering, and public outrage swept through the country. Magyar then gave a long interview to the independent podcast Partizán, insinuating that he possessed information about senior Fidesz politicians significant enough to bring the government down. While that information ultimately did not topple the Orbán regime, the interview ignited Magyar’s meteoric rise: as of today, it had been viewed 2.9 million times in a country of 9.5 million people. Capitalizing on the pervasive illiberalism-fatigue and the hope deficit that had demoralized millions of Hungarians, Magyar organized demonstrations that drew crowds of more than 100,000. In the seven weeks before the 2024 European Parliamentary and municipal elections, he visited 191 settlements across the country’s nineteen counties. In the 2024 European Parliament elections, the opposition won ten seats, seven of which went to Magyar’s Tisza Party, while Fidesz won eleven. The opposition also made significant gains in the concurrently held municipal elections.
But Magyar did not stop. He continued delivering speeches, talking to people, and asking about their local concerns. He brought gifts to orphanages at Christmas and delivered firewood to elderly residents in tucked-away villages. He visited public hospitals with a thermometer in hand during the sweltering summer months, recording temperatures that exposed the lack of air conditioning, infrastructural decay, and near-catastrophic conditions in Hungary’s healthcare system—the product of fourteen years of defunding and the systematic diversion of EU funds into vanity projects, among them a 3,865-seat soccer stadium, which doubles as an architectural showpiece built next to Orbán’s childhood home in a village of just 1,800 inhabitants. Most importantly, Magyar’s travels across the country catalyzed the formation of what became known as Tisza islands, which are the grassroots civil cells of the Tisza Party. Composed of between five and fifty people, these groups evolved into local care communities whose members looked out for one another and stepped in during times of need, performing the social work that Orbán’s government had long abandoned in favor of personal enrichment. For instance, when a children’s emergency hospital was closed in a mid-sized city, Tisza activists organized a shuttle service to transport children and their parents to the nearest hospital. These civil groups, whose number had exceeded 2,000 by July 2025, also invited social scientists to give presentations, helping residents understand why their living conditions were deteriorating while Orbán flew to soccer matches by helicopter and his childhood friend had become Hungary’s wealthiest entrepreneur.
Magyar and his campaign team had no magic formula for snapping the country back from the propaganda-induced fear, distrust, paranoia, and pessimism the Fidesz-KDNP government had been cultivating since 2010. Instead, Magyar listened to people and empowered them to take local matters into their own hands. Community-building was not an abstract ideal or a social media project for the Tisza Party. It was the party’s animating core. Tisza’s demonstrations always ended with Magyar asking participants to join hands, quite literally encouraging Hungarians to forge new social bonds. People brought Hungarian flags, and rallies closed with the crowd singing the national anthem together. Community-building, in other words, moved along a continuum from the local to the national, and the Tisza Party paid deliberate attention to reclaiming national symbols from a government that had long acted as though it held a monopoly on Hungarian national identity, and that vilified its opponents as enemies of the nation. All of this testifies to Magyar’s political talent and charisma. Yet his success would not have been possible without the foundation of sustained civilian resistance, whose effects were amplified by two further developments. First, Hungarians had grown numb to run-of-the-mill hate campaigns as the government kept ratcheting up its propaganda to incite ever greater fear and hostility. Second, the corruption and greed of Fidesz politicians proved boundless, producing a steady stream of whistleblowers with eye-opening revelations such as that the government had deployed the child sexual abuse unit of the national police to smear Tisza Party activists, and that the Hungarian military was so chronically underfunded that service members had to purchase their own equipment and weapons if they hoped to be combat-ready.
What I see as the single most important factor in Orbán’s defeat, however, is the stubborn resilience of Hungarians who never stopped contributing to the resistance against a regime that targeted voters, especially older, rural, impoverished, and less educated Hungarians with divisive propaganda, and that operated as a mafia state: a patron-client system in which loyalty was rewarded with government contracts, tax breaks, and favorable legislation. In my forthcoming book, The Left of Hope: Media Activism in Illiberal Hungary, I document how Hungarians used analog and digital media to fight back. Capturing and converting legacy media into a propaganda apparatus was central to building Orbán’s illiberal regime. But media also proved indispensable to opposing it. Anti-government activists used media not simply to fight illiberalism but to rebuild the commons: the material and immaterial wealth that members of a national community share and steward together, and that the Fidesz-KDNP government had enclosed, devastated, or repurposed as stages for illiberalism’s spectacle in order to consolidate its power. The book analyzes five genres of media activism, each of which I interpret as a new practice of commoning: counter-billboard projects, which generated new political commons by directly responding to the government’s anti-immigration billboard campaigns; street art, which made visible the ways social exclusion is reproduced through deliberately allowing public infrastructure to decay; internet memes, which created openings for women to enter the political domain and contest its patriarchal culture; independent theater, which fostered new cultural commons by reclaiming the category of “national culture” from an ethnonationalist government; and political podcasting, which developed new models for community-funded media that also reimagined what “public” in public service media could mean.
Magyar could not have defeated Orbán without the acts of resilience that kept hope alive in Hungary from 2010 onward. Orbán developed a playbook that other autocrats would go on to adopt in their own countries, but Hungarians also charted pathways out of illiberalism. In the book, I document, for instance, how Hungarians fought back against the Orbán government’s anti-immigration billboard campaigns in the wake of Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis: tearing hate-mongering billboards down with their bare hands and organizing satirical counter-billboard campaigns with messages such as “Sorry about our prime minister” and “Did you know? Since the refugee crisis began, there are more anti-immigration billboards in Hungary than illegal immigrants.” The activist collective known as the Two-Tailed Dog Party (MKKP), which organized those counter-billboard campaigns, also developed street art as a distinctive form of activist practice—one that held the Fidesz-KDNP government to account for devastating public services and enclosing the commons. For the MKKP, creating street art was not only a practice of commoning but also a strategy for rebuilding democracy and cultivating what they called “democratic citizens who are ready to give up wallowing in self-pity and take action.” The MKKP revitalized local communities by drawing people to street art projects. Responding to calls on Facebook, people who had never met came together to repaint dilapidated benches, transforming them into public art, and into mementos of collective action. They built bus shelters and they also sprayed stencil graffiti on the crumbling façade of a public hospital, sending the government an unmistakable message: stop spending public resources on vanity projects and invest in essential public services instead.
Theater, too, emerged after 2010 as a site of resistance to Orbán’s illiberal regime. In the book, I write about Hungary’s most popular independent theater company, Pintér Béla and Company (PBEST), which is not subsidized by the government, unlike Hungary’s repertory theaters, and which engages directly and consistently with contemporary politics in the plays it writes and performs. The company insists that it should not be excluded from the designation of national culture, and that the Orbán government has no right to monopolize that concept. By staging plays that confront the grim realities of life in Orbán’s Hungary, PBEST builds new cultural commons and promotes the principle that culture should be both publicly accessible and publicly provisioned. And finally, defeating Orbán would also not have been possible without the explosion of political podcasting. In the book, I trace the development of Partizán, which by 2024 had become Hungary’s largest independent, community-funded podcast channel, and which happens to be the outlet that first gave Péter Magyar a platform, broadcasting the two-hour interview its founder, Márton Gulyás, conducted with him in early 2024. Since 2014, Gulyás and his team have worked tirelessly to counter and defuse government propaganda through interviews with public intellectuals and politicians, investigative journalism, political analysis, and documentary filmmaking. Their goal has been to prevent propaganda from succeeding in its deeper ambition: trapping Hungarians inside a reality-distortion field where the rules are different and where autocrats feel that if they say something, it will become true.
Funded by community donations and carried out under precarious conditions, these civilian practices of resistance were crucial to Magyar’s victory in the 2026 national election. The labor Hungarians poured into counter-billboard campaigns, street art, independent theater, and political podcasts kept the flame alive through what felt like an endless dark night. It preserved hope through the stubborn insistence that resistance was not futile and that autocrats could be beaten at the ballot box.
