Hungary’s Voters Just Fired a Crook —Too Bad JD Vance Still Worships Him

Viktor Orbán is a crook who turned Hungary from a free-market success story into an authoritarian crony state that cozied up to Putin’s Russia.

I have followed Orban for years. His Fidesz party launched in 1988 was a straight-up classical liberal outfit that fought communism for open society, rule of law, and low taxes. By 2010 the party grabbed a two-thirds supermajority and Orbán went full strongman. He rewrote the constitution overnight, packed the constitutional court, forced judges into early retirement, and handed loyalists nine- and twelve-year terms in every oversight body. The Cato Institute just documented the wreckage: Hungary dropped from 31st to 67th on the Human Freedom Index, now dead last in the European Union (EU). Private pension savings worth 10 percent of GDP got nationalized. Hundreds of companies in banking, energy, and telecom were seized or muscled into sale to regime buddies. All of it was explicit policy. Orbán himself said prior center-right governments failed because they never built “their own” loyal capitalists. Economic growth lagged behind Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria despite pouring in EU subsidies equal to 4 percent of GDP some years. And he cozied up to Russia the whole time. This is not conservatism. It is textbook big-government overreach that destroys markets and individual liberty.

Peter Magyar, the adversary who just beat Orbán and now serves as Prime Minister, seems to stand for the original free-market principles Orbán abandoned. But the jury is still out on him. We are hoping he is the real deal, but we need to make sure he follows through and doesn’t turn out to be simply Orbanism without Orban.

JD Vance flying to Budapest to stump for the crook was simply out of his mind. Orbán spent sixteen years blocking the EU, cozying up to Russia, and thumbing his nose at the United States while his cronies looted the place. We do not need that model here. I have warned for years that executive power grabs, whether Trump-style tariffs without clear congressional authority or Orbán-style court packing, shred separation of powers and invite the exact corruption we see in Budapest. American conservatives should reject this illiberal nonsense, demand minimal government and equal treatment under the law, and cheer the new Hungarian leader who proves you can still win on the principles that once made Fidesz great. Anything less sells out the free-market legacy we claim to defend.