Gavin Jacobson: You have argued that, while Viktor Orbán’s ideas were rooted in traditional conservatism, his methods for entrenching power were novel. What did his illiberal democracy actually consist of?

Ivan Krastev: In some sense he is in the Hungarian conservative tradition – he genuinely believes that sovereignty requires a cohesive national community. For him, Hungary was the biggest loser of the twentieth century, which is why it cannot afford to lose in the twenty-first. That “Trianon trauma” – the loss of two-thirds of Hungary’s territory after the First World War – is embedded in him, as it has been embedded in Hungarian politics more broadly for over a century.

But in other ways he operates outside of that tradition. He has the mind of a hedge fund manager: he thinks that because the state is small, you have to take high risks in order to achieve high rewards. Orbán envied the old communist elites because they had built a genuine deep state, while liberalism, he thought, had remained a surface phenomenon, preoccupied with top-down electoral procedures.

So he set about creating a new kind of party-state, one that controlled the economy not through nationalisation but through friendly companies, and that placed great emphasis on controlling universities and educational institutions. Don’t forget that Orbán wrote his master’s dissertation on Gramsci, and takes the idea of cultural hegemony very seriously. He always believed that the Hungarian right remained in opposition because universities and the media were controlled by his enemies.

What role does foreign policy play here?

People normally read him as Trump’s ally, and there is something to that – he bet on Trump’s victory in 2016 much earlier than almost anyone else, and invested heavily in that relationship. But his worldview is actually quite distinct. He believes that the West is in decline and the East, particularly China, is in the ascendant. His economic policy was built entirely on that wager. Over the last three years, China has invested more in Hungary than in Germany and France combined.

I’m curious to know why you think China invests so heavily in Hungary – a landlocked country with a small market.

Because what Orbán was selling China was his veto in the European Union. You cannot understand the Hungarian model without the EU. Orbán’s was a regime built on both EU funding and on anti-European rhetoric, all the while attracting non-European allies, whether China or Russia, on the basis that Hungary was the one member state willing to veto EU measures that Beijing or Moscow found inconvenient.

How innovative was this as a form of statecraft?

This model worked for 16 years. What made it particularly creative was that Orbán constructed an illiberal regime out of the elements of liberal democracy. Brussels struggled to challenge the restrictive media laws he introduced in 2010, for example, because Hungary argued that every single article had a precedent in the media law of another EU member state. Creating an illiberal order from liberal building blocks – that is what made him genuinely different.

But ultimately, he stayed too long. He had positioned himself as a rebel, and to some extent he was one, particularly during the migration crisis in 2015-2016. But rebels don’t age well. After Trump came to power, Orbán’s private correspondence with Putin, in which he expressed his desire to be a mouse to the lion of Moscow, was leaked – and the image he had so carefully constructed collapsed.

Orbán seemed like a central figure in the illiberal revolution in central and eastern Europe, which is one of your great subjects. Could you talk about the nature of that revolution and its origins in the end of the Cold War?

Nineteen eighty-nine is normally recounted as a liberal revolution, and it was. But it was also a nationalist revolution. There was a coalition between liberals and nationalists who, for different reasons, both wanted to leave the Soviet empire and join the West. But they had different ideas about what kind of West they were joining.

The liberals were drawn to the post-sovereign liberal EU – open borders, rights, pluralism. The nationalists, by contrast – and this was as true of Poland under Jarosław Kaczyński as it was of Hungary – had been dreaming of a specific version of the West: more conservative, strongly anti-communist, nationalist rather than internationalist, religious rather than atheist, family-oriented rather than permissive. The West of the 1950s, essentially.

In the 1990s, the nationalists had a problem: they lacked a language for their belief system. Nationalism was so heavily associated with the Yugoslav wars and Milošević that emerging politicians like Orbán, who from around 1994 began his divorce from liberalism, found it difficult to identify with any part of the ideology. So through the decade they were largely muted.

The deeper resentment stemmed from the fact that the post-1989 transition from communism was experienced by many in the East as unidirectional. The West was not going to change; the East was going to imitate it. You could either migrate individually – move to Germany, Austria, study abroad – or migrate collectively, by joining the EU. Leaders like Orbán display the resentment of the second-generation immigrant: the sense that your identity is not respected, that it goes unrecognised.

During the migration crisis, when Orbán placed himself at the centre of European politics, his message was simple: the East is not going to imitate the West anymore. Now the West is going to imitate us.

To make that case, didn’t Orbán have to become something more than a Hungarian politician?

Orbán distinguished himself from other eastern European leaders by thinking beyond his own country. In that sense, he was for the political right what Castro was for the left: a leader of a small, relatively unimportant nation who harboured global ambitions. For years he commissioned opinion polling in European countries. He believed the EU should be reorganised entirely, with Hungary leading one of its blocs. These are ambitions you would normally associate with France or Germany.

Presumably those ambitions were helped by what was taking place in the US?

They certainly began to look more realistic when Trump came to power in 2016. Orbán had supported Trump before most Republican governors did. But I don’t think he was personally mesmerised by Trump. He invested not in the man but in the MAGA movement. And that had concrete consequences: for a long time, he was the only new-right politician actually in power in Europe. If you were a far-right party that needed a loan, a Hungarian bank would give it to you. If you were a far-right intellectual, Budapest would treat you as a genius. Hungary became the institutional, intellectual and financial hub of the European new right – the place where the Trumpian revolution met its European counterpart.

The great irony is that Orbán lost the election as a globalist, even though his entire movement was built on anti-globalism. Look at his campaign: it was almost entirely about foreign policy. He attacked Ukraine constantly, talked about Russia, about Trump, about China. Meanwhile, his opponent Péter Magyar was discussing the healthcare system and the cost of living; he gave few interviews to the Western press. Orbán had become so consumed by global politics that he turned into exactly what he claimed to be fighting. Hungarian voters punished him for it.

To what extent did Orbán’s closeness to China – opening the country up to Chinese investment and essentially transforming it into what some have called a “reactionary electoral state” – contribute to his defeat?

It played a part. But he lost primarily on domestic issues – the economy, standards of living. That was what mattered most.

What is striking, though, is the contradiction at the heart of his position. He built a powerful anti-foreigner politics: “Hungary for the Hungarians.” And of course that sentiment extended to the Chinese. Orbán tried to reframe Chinese investment as a matter of Hungarian sovereignty – we have our own interests, we are treated with respect by the Russians, the Chinese, the Americans. But reality kept breaking through.

Since 2018, Hungary has issued an unusually high number of work permits to foreign nationals. Orban’s explanation was that the national population was shrinking, despite the government investing 5% of GDP on pro-natalist measures. He claimed that he would open the labour market while keeping the political community closed. Foreigners could work in Hungary, but citizenship and political participation were to remain ethnic privileges.

He was importing guest workers in the spirit of Germany in the 1970s, while insisting that Hungary would remain the last redoubt of old Europe: white, and resistant to what he saw as Western decadence. I think he genuinely believed this. It was not purely tactical. But he failed to understand that for the younger generation, that claustrophobic atmosphere was suffocating rather than reassuring.

By the end, the profile of his voters looked very much like that of the old Communist Party in 1989. And therein lies a painful symmetry: Orbán came to the attention of the Hungarian public that year, aged 25, when he called for Soviet troops to leave the country at the reburial of Imre Nagy. Now, amid reports that Russian operatives were arriving in Budapest to help the Fidesz campaign, Magyar used the same slogan at the National Day rally: “Russians, go home.”

How do you understand what JD Vance was doing in Budapest?

You have to see Vance and Trump as leaders of a revolution rather than leaders of a state. If they were simply leading a state, Magyar would be perfectly manageable – neither anti-American, nor anti-Trump, he is slightly more in favour of Europe than Orbán, but shares much of the same conservative consensus, including on Ukraine. He is not exactly Zelenskyy’s greatest champion. But for Vance, Orbán was the face of the Trumpian revolution in Europe. Vance genuinely believes that eastern Europe is like the red states in America, and that the continent is simply one electoral cycle behind the US. If he disregarded the opinion polls and basic geopolitical sense to support Orbán, that is because he was displaying revolutionary solidarity.

Did his regime’s oligarchic tendencies contribute to Orbán’s defeat?

Corruption was a central issue. If you ask the majority of people who voted against him, that is what they cite. Creating an oligarchic class of loyalists and running the country like a private company – that is what drove popular anger. Interestingly, Orbán was quite friendly to large foreign investors who created jobs. The corruption was restricted to politically sensitive sectors – supermarkets, banking and above all in the media, where the party had a total monopoly. People watched a generation of ambitious young Fidesz-connected figures enriching themselves, and they said: enough.

This is also part of why Orbán struggled so badly against Magyar, who came from inside the Fidesz world. Orbán had no idea how to fight one of his own. He tried to paint Magyar as a liberal candidate, but the charge did not stick. When Orbán introduced anti-LGBT legislation – in part to elicit the predictable liberal outrage that would provide the culture-war he needed – nearly half a million people protested. But Magyar was not among them. He said, in effect: that’s not my priority – I care about corruption and the economy. It denied Orbán his lines of attack and left him visibly disoriented.

The political analyst Wolfgang Munchau observed that if Magyar had defeated a centrist candidate, the headlines would have screamed that another European country was falling to right-wing populism. What do people miss when they frame the result in such a way?

Unlike most of Europe, where liberals are drifting rightwards, Hungary is moving in a liberal direction, at least on democratic process. One of Magyar’s signature commitments is a two-term limit for prime ministers – a genuinely significant reform. Many of his voters are considerably more liberal than he is, particularly the younger generation. There will be an opening of the system. But to claim this as a victory of liberalism over illiberalism is to read into it something that isn’t quite there.

In a paradoxical way, it resembles 1989. By the time the democratic forces defeated the communists, their adversaries had already adopted a range of liberal policies. Now you have a victorious candidate who shares the broader conservative consensus on various subjects. When it comes to migration, for instance, there is not much to separate Orbán and Magyar. What differs is the language – and in the age of Trump, language matters.

What happens to the intellectual infrastructure Orbán built – the think tanks, fellowships, institutes and magazines like The European Conservative?

It depends on what Orbán wants to do after leaving office. The fact that he conceded so gracefully may itself be a strategy – to retain a presence in European political life, to stay relevant, to keep the infrastructure alive. Much of this intellectual ecosystem was not directly funded by the state, but rather through a network of private and semi-public companies that Orbán nurtured. So Magyar cannot simply turn off a tap.

Some of these institutions will be dismantled. Others may survive, though without access to government support they may strike out in a different position. What is clear is that Orbán did not help himself by destroying every liberal institution he encountered. Expelling the Central European University in 2018, for instance, was a mistake. He cannot now, in his post-office life, claim to want a genuine contest of ideas, since he spent 16 years shutting down such contests.

For his voters, none of this infrastructure mattered. It was built for his global project, for his European ambitions. The Chinese, interestingly, were the shrewdest players in all of this, because they kept their distance, never made a show of involvement, and will probably emerge from this transition with their interests largely intact. The Russians, by contrast, apparently wanted to be visible in Orbán’s campaign, almost as if they had invited themselves. I don’t believe it helped him. Given Vance’s intervention, we will now see how Trump processes a loss. He doesn’t like losers. Will he see Orbán as a loyal ally, or simply as a failure? The fact that the American administration had not yet congratulated Magyar as of this morning, while the Russians had already signalled their readiness to work with him, tells you something.

You predicted that an Orbán loss would have “an incredible psychological impact” on European politics. Now that it’s happened – has the response matched the significance you anticipated?

Absolutely. Europe is in a profound crisis of confidence – energy prices, the questioning of NATO, the rupture with Washington. Into that climate, this result arrives like a second 1989. Ursula von der Leyen said as much – “you did it again”. The sense that the future does not inevitably belong to the populist right matters enormously for European morale.

And there is a geopolitical dimension, too. Magyar’s first foreign visit as prime minister will be to Poland – not Brussels or Berlin or Paris. He is deliberately sending a signal: central Europe has a role to play within the EU, not in opposition to it. That reframes the entire Visegrád dynamic. Robert Fico cannot sustain a radical position on his own because Slovakia is too small and too dependent on Europe. And the far-right parties across the continent that relied on Budapest as their gateway to Washington will find that door has closed.

For a long time, if you led a far-right party and wanted a meeting in Washington, there were only two people who could arrange it: Viktor Orbán and Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has other things on his mind. Now there is no one.

How does the collapse of the US-led international order affect someone like Orbán, or his imitators?

Orbán saw the US, particularly under the Democrats, as an enemy. He believed that in a more rules-based world, a country like Hungary was constrained. By contrast, in a more transactional, leader-to-leader order, a skilled operator could punch far above his weight.

In short, he had a Metternich complex: he believed that a small state with a bold, cynical leader could play the great powers against each other and come out ahead. More specifically, he saw himself as the indispensable middleman – the broker between Washington and the European right, between Brussels and Moscow, between the Western financial system and Beijing. In the age of Trump, where politics had become a matter of personal relationships between leaders rather than rules between states, that positioning seemed to offer Hungary extraordinary leverage. Orbán had made himself, in effect, the switchboard of a new international order.

The problem is that it is very difficult to be Metternich in a democracy, because people do not vote as geopolitical analysts. Foreign policy virtuosity does not put food on the table. As Orbán became so absorbed in global politics, he lost sight of what voters cared about. He became, in the end, the thing he most despised: a globalist. And in Orbán’s Hungary, as he discovered, globalists lose.