But there are two other possible lessons to draw from the Hungarian election that should be more sobering for opponents of the right-wing populist turn in politics, here in America and elsewhere in the world.
The first is that winning an election is only the beginning. Now Péter Magyar will have to reckon with what you might call the Fidesz deep state, the partisan loyalists that Orbán’s party placed throughout the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the media and elsewhere to entrench Fidesz’s hold on power. As Yascha Mounk points out in a valuable post-election piece, dealing with this reality presents a Hobson’s choice. If the incoming government doesn’t aggressively purge these individuals, then they can be expected to act as an entrenched opposition force thwarting, disrupting and undermining that government’s effectiveness. But if they do conduct a wholesale purge, then they’ve established a precedent that this is the normal thing for new governments to do—a precedent that will no doubt be followed by future governments, whether led by Fidesz or by some other party. In other words, either way one casualty of Fidesz’s rule might be the idea that certain parts of the government and civil society should be professional, and therefore formally non-partisan and independent. […]
The other possible lesson from Hungary, and it should be sobering indeed, is that trouncing right-wing populism, as opposed to squeaking out a narrow and evanescent victory against it, may require moving considerably further to the right than center-left parties imagine.
Before founding Tirsza, Magyar was a loyal member of the Orbán regime. He broke with Fidesz over an outrageous incident of corruption, and he ran on the government’s disastrous economic record. But with the important exceptions of relations with Europe and with Russia—Magyar promises to restore Hungary to Brussels’s good graces and to end the Hungarian veto of European loans to Ukraine—in policy terms Tirsza has promised a great deal of continuity. Magyar is an immigration restrictionist, a social conservative on issues of sex, gender and sexuality, favors expanding incentives for childbearing—all mainstays of Fidesz’s ideological positioning. The new government promises more competence, an end to corruption, a focus on domestic problem-solving, and restored relations with the rest of Europe. It does not promise a revolution in values. That proposition is what won a landslide.