Peter Magyar
"It's nice to have a strong man running your country." That's what Donald Trump once said about Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary. One indication of his political strength is that he has been Prime Minister since 2010, which makes him the longest serving Prime Minister in Europe.
But that could be ended by the parliamentary elections coming up on April 12, because polling shows that Peter Magyar is leading Orban in the race to become the next Prime Minister. Magyar is a former Orban loyalist in Orban's Fidesz party who now leads the opposition party Tisza.
If Orban loses, that would signal the collapse of the international right-wing movement for populist nationalism because Orban's illiberal regime in Hungary has been the model for that movement. That explains why Trump and Vance have endorsed Orban for reelection, and why Vance has been visiting Hungary to support Orban. There are reports that Vance will appear with Orban at a campaign rally in Budapest a few days before the election. Trump and Vance are desperately worried that Orban's defeat would be a crushing blow to the international MAGA movement.
But Magyar's victory would be just the final nail in the coffin for Orban's regime, which has been in decline for years now. There are at least three signs of that decline. Orban's policies for strengthening Hungary's families have failed to raise the female fertility rate. Orban's promotion of a "Christian Hungary" has failed to revive Hungarian Christianity. And, finally, huge numbers of Hungarians have been voting with their feet against Orban's regime by emigrating to Western European countries that offer them a better life than what they can have in Hungary. The fact that these emigrants are going to those European nations that rank high on the Human Freedom Index confirms the argument of Francis Fukuyama that most human beings today regard the liberal social order that secures human freedom as the best regime.
THE ILLIBERAL STATE
As a young student and lawyer, Orban was originally a liberal anti-communist. In 1988, he was one of the founders of the Alliance of Young Democrats (with the acronym FIDESZ), which challenged the Hungarian Young Communist League. In 1989, Fidesz became a political party that supported the overthrow of the communist regime in 1990.
In 1989, Orban studied at Oxford University on a research fellowship funded by George Soros, the Hungarian-born philanthropist whom Orban now denounces as the conspiratorial funder of liberal causes in Eastern Europe.
1990, he left Oxford early so that he could return to Hungary to run in the first post-communist parliamentary elections. He was elected a Member of Parliament, and he became a leader in Fidesz.
In 1994, after Fidesz lost the parliamentary elections badly, Orban decided that if he was to have any chance of becoming Prime Minister, he would have to move Fidesz away from its center-liberal position and towards the sort of right-wing populism that had propelled Silvio Berlusconi to become prime minister of Italy (Higgins 2025; Szelenyi 2022). He was willing to change his political principles if he thought that would help him win votes and gain political power. And, indeed, he became prime minister in 1998. But he lost the general election in 2002.
In 2010, Orban returned as prime minister, and this time, he wanted to make sure that he would remain in power for many years. He began silencing or taking over media outlets that he considered hostile to Fidesz. He had the government fund an elaborate propaganda apparatus serving Fidesz. He wrote a new constitution that would make it difficult for his opponents to win control of the parliament. He removed the civil service protection for many government employees, and replaced them with his loyalists. He also took control of the courts so that he could appoint judges loyal to him.
All of this supported what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (2002, 2010) have called "competitive authoritarianism." Somewhere between a fully authoritarian regime and a fully democratic regime, a competitive authoritarian regime has multiparty elections, but they are not completely free and fair, because the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the electoral playing field against the opposition, and basic civil liberties are restricted to make it hard for the opposition to challenge the ruling party.
Under competitive authoritarianism, opposition forces can compete seriously for power. And, occasionally, the opposition can win an election, and the incumbents lose. But this regime is still not fully democratic, because the ruling party uses its power over the government to attack opponents and co-opt critics.
These three regime types are distinguished by the kind of countervailance--power checking power--that they allow. A fully authoritarian regime allows little or no countervailance. A fully democratic regime allows strong countervailance. A competitive authoritarian regime allows weak countervailance.
In a speech in 2014 that attracted attention around the world, Orban explained that "the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state." He said that this would break away from the principles of liberal democracy that had dominated the global regime (including Hungary) from 1990 to 2010. Beginning with the global financial crisis of 2008, he argued, it had become clear that the Western liberal social, economic, and political order based on the principle of individual freedom had failed. This created an opening for newly emerging global powers based on illiberal nationalism--nations like Singapore, China, India, Russia, and Turkey.
Previously, Orban observed, the liberal states in Western Europe had been organized around the liberal principle of individual freedom: "With regard to the relationship between two people, the starting point of the liberal organization of society is based on the idea that we have the right to do anything that does not infringe on the freedom of the other party." Here Orban paraphrased the definition of freedom adopted by John Locke--freedom as not being constrained or coerced by others, so long as one does not infringe on the same freedom for others (see Locke, Second Treatise, para. 57).
Notably, Orban did not completely reject this liberal principle of freedom. But he did insist that this would not be the central organizing principle of the illiberal state.
What is happening in Hungary today can accordingly be interpreted by stating that the prevailing political leadership has today attempted to ensure that people's personal work and interests, which must be acknowledged, are closely linked to the life of the community and the nation, and that this relationship is preserved and reinforced. In other words, the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed. And so in this sense, the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not reject the fundamental principles of liberalism such as freedom, and I could list a few more, but it does not make this ideology the central element of state organization, but instead includes a different, special, national approach.
So Orban's illiberal state would secure some individual freedom, but there must also be a "national approach," because "the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community." Here you see why the conservative communitarian critics of liberal individualism--like Patrick Deneen, Roger Scruton, and Rod Dreher--have all made their pilgrimages to Budapest to honor Orban and receive his praises for their promotion of Orbanism in the United States and the UK (Szelenyi 2022). Dreher moved to Budapest in 2022 so that he could be a part of Orban's propaganda operation--particularly, the Danube Institute, a state-backed think tank for disseminating Orban's ideology (Worth 2026).
I should say, however, that the Danube Institute does show some commitment to the liberal principle of open debate and freedom of thought. Their mission statement includes this passage:
Our primary audience is the universe of centre-right intellectuals, political leaders, and public-spirited citizens. But we will also engage our counterparts on the democratic center-left in vigorous and principled public debate on as many occasions as possible and appropriate. We hope to draw upon the best minds of our day across national boundaries in international forums.
A recent example of their commitment to the liberal principle of intellectual freedom and debate is their event debating the question "Is Liberalism a Threat to Religious Liberty?" One of the invited participants was Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University, who is best known for his philosophic and legal arguments for gay rights. His response to the proposed question was to suggest that this was a weird question, because since religious liberty originated as a principle of Lockean liberalism, to suggest that liberalism could threaten religious liberty was nonsensical.
If you peruse the website of the Danube Institute, you can see their concern for thinking through all of the themes of Orban's illiberal state, two of the most prominent being Christianity and family life.
DECLINING CHRISTIANITY
In 2018, Orban declared that Hungary must be a "Christian democracy," and "a Christian democracy cannot be liberal" (Orban 2018). A Christian democracy cannot be liberal because "it gives priority to Christian culture" over all other cultures, and therefore it denies the liberal principle of multiculturalism.
But Orban was vague about what exactly he meant by "Christian culture." Most confusing was his claim that in affirming the importance of Christian culture, he was not affirming any Christian doctrines of faith.
Christian democracy is not about defending religious articles of faith--in this case Christian religious articles of faith. Neither states nor governments have competence on questions of damnation or salvation. Christian democratic politics means that the ways of life springing from Christian culture must be protected. Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them. These include human dignity, the family, and the nation--because Christianity does not seek to attain universality through the abolition of nations, but through the preservation of nations. Other forms which must be protected and strengthened include our faith communities. This--and not the protection of religious articles of faith--is the duty of Christian democracy.
Orban's statement is incoherent. On the one hand, he says that a Christian democracy must be illiberal. On the other hand, he says that a Christian democracy must not enforce any religious articles of faith and must secure the freedom of all "faith communities," which sounds like the liberal principle of religious liberty and toleration.
Christian democracy would be truly illiberal if it meant some form of Christian integralism or theocracy (like medieval Catholicism or 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony). But clearly Orban does not want that. If he doesn't want the state to enforce any religious doctrines, that sounds like liberal democracy. Indeed, Rod Dreher has said that authentic Christianity "can't exist if liberal democracy goes away" (Worth 2026, 36). And as Koppelman pointed out, when the Danube Institute defends religious liberty, they're defending a fundamental principle of Lockean liberalism.
Moreover, if Christianity supports "the preservation of nations," as Orban says, does that mean the preservation of nations with diverse religious traditions? Europe has some predominantly Muslim countries--such as Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Turkey--and in some cases, these Islamic traditions go back to the Middle Ages. So it would seem that Orban's nationalism would have to allow for Islamic nationalism. But then Orban's Christian democracy has been interpreted by many of his supporters as a defense of Christian Europe against Islam.
Another problem here is that by insisting that the state must not enforce any religious doctrines, Orban implies that religious freedom should include freedom of thought for atheists. The fundamental religious doctrine of monotheism is "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth" (the Apostle's Creed), and if Orban does not think the state can enforce belief in that doctrine, then he must think that atheists are free from persecution.
So in saying that Christian democracy supports Christian culture but not Christian doctrines, Orban implicitly endorses the kind of atheistic religiosity promoted by conservatives like Roger Scruton, who want to enjoy the religious feelings that sacralize a national culture but without the religious belief in the real existence of God outside the human mind. (The vacuousness of ritualized Christian culture without Christian belief was manifest three years ago in the coronation of King Charles III as the Christian King of Great Britain.)
But in the long run, believing in the importance of Christian culture without believing in the truth of Christian doctrines fails to slow the decline of that Christian culture. We can see that in Orban's Hungary.
According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, the majority of Hungarians do not identify themselves as religious. In the census of 2022, 42.5% identified themselves as Christians, 1.3% as non-Christian religious believers, 16.1% as not religious, and 40.1% refused to answer. Since it's unlikely that religious believers would refuse to answer the question, those who did refuse are probably not religious. That means, then, that 56.2% of Hungarians do not identify themselves as religious. And since most of the houses of worship in Hungary reportedly have few people attending, we can assume that most of those who identify themselves as religious are not devout believers.
If creating a Christian democracy in Hungary means that at least a majority of Hungarians are serious Christians, then Orban has failed to achieve that.
But that doesn't mean that Christianity cannot rebound in Hungary. The number of Catholics and Reformed Protestants has dropped by about one half in 20 years. But Hungary's fastest growing Christian church is the Hungarian Faith Church, which is a charismatic Pentecostal form of Christianity. With its headquarters in Budapest, it has over 150,000 members, of which over 70,000 are in Hungary. In a nation of 9.8 million people, those are impressive numbers when you consider that this church was founded as recently as 1979 by seven Hungarians. Notably, Orban's son Gaspar Orban converted in 2014 to the Faith Church, and he has even become a minister in the church who claims to have received revelations from God and witnessed miraculous healings.
As I have argued, Christianity originated as a charismatic or Pentecostal form of religion rooted in animistic shamanism. Animism was the first religion, and shamans were its first practitioners. The religious experience of animistic shamanism is the natural seed in the human mind from which all subsequent religions have evolved.
The defining feature of Pentecostal doctrine is the teaching that all true Christians can be filled with the Holy Spirit, and the most prominent gifts of the Holy Spirit include healing, praying, prophesying, and preaching through speaking in tongues. Here we see, once again, Christians becoming shamans who, through extraordinary states of ecstasy, engage with divine entities and provide services like healing and divination.
As long as we have liberal social orders with religious liberty, we will have free markets in religion that will allow the more charismatic Pentecostal religions to gain a growing share of the market because they appeal to the natural human desire for religious transcendence in making contact with the spiritual world through shamanic practices. Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the world, with over 600 million adherents worldwide. So while Christianity in general might be in decline today in Hungary and elsewhere, we can expect a continuing revival of charismatic Christianity.
DECLINING FAMILIES
One reason why Christian culture is so important for Orban is that he sees it as supporting the traditional family with lots of children. And that's important because families having and rearing many children resolves what Orban has said (in a 2017 speech) is "the greatest existential question for European civilization"--Will the drastic decline in Europe's population continue until there are hardly any Europeans left?
In that 2017 speech, Orban lamented that the population of Hungary had declined from 10,709,000 in 1980 to 9,799,000 in 2017, so that in less than 40 years, Hungary had lost almost a million people, which was more than all the casualties that Hungary sustained in World War II.
Orban announced that "Making Families Strong Again" would be the motto for the Hungarian government's family policies directed to raising the birth rate. He explained:
The technical term for the birth rate is the "total fertility rate" (TFR), which is a measure of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for the ages 15-49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year. So this rate is the number of children a woman would have if she was subject to prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year, and if she survived throughout all her childbearing years.It is important to highlight that the restoration of natural reproduction is a national cause; and it is not just one national cause among many, but the national cause. And it is also a European cause: not just one European cause among many, but the European cause. The goal of the Government of Hungary is to raise our birth rate to 2.1 per cent by 2030, which would be a replacement rate for our society. At present, this figure stands at 1.5 per cent.
If there were no mortality until the end of a woman's childbearing years, the replacement level of TFR would be around 2.0. The replacement fertility rate is close to this for most industrialized countries. For the global average, the TFR at replacement is about 2.33. Here "replacement" means maintaining the present level of population into the future.
Moreover, for human beings to be able to invest so much in their children, they must first invest time and energy in their own education and career development and in the search for suitable mates. Consequently, successful people in modern developed societies must often delay their marriage and having children, and thus the average ages for getting married and having the first child have risen. When women do this, they sometimes reach the end of their reproductive years, and so produce fewer children than they would have desired. It's likely that one reason for the total fertility rate falling below replacement levels is that couples who desire two or three children delay marriage and reproduction for so long that the women reach the end of their physiological fertility sooner than they had expected. Then couples must rely on fertility treatments or adoption to satisfy their parental desires.
One birth every 9 seconds
One death every 10 seconds
One international migrant (net) every 97 seconds
Net gain of one person every 45 seconds
This shows that the mistake make by Orban's Hungary has been in limiting immigration into Hungary. If Hungary had allowed more freedom of movement of immigrants into Hungary, comparable to that allowed by the U.S., Hungary could have had an increasing population.
Now, of course, if Trump's policies for closing the U.S. borders and deporting immigrants continues, this could reverse the century-long trend towards increasing population and bring about the sort of depopulation crisis that has afflicted Hungary.
This supports my argument for open borders and freedom of movement.
DECLINING FREEDOM LEADS TO DECLINING POPULATION
I have pointed to two causes of Hungary's declining population--low fertility rates and low rates of immigration into Hungary. But there's a third cause: the emigration of Hungarians out of Hungary.
According to Hungary's Central Statistical Office, a total of 367,515 Hungarians have officially left the country during the 15 years that Orban's Fidesz government has been in power. This is actually an underestimation because foreign statistics often record nearly twice as many new arrivals from Hungary as Hungarian authorities do departures. Another reason for this being an underestimation is that many Hungarians living abroad retain a Hungarian address. Adjusting for these factors, there could be as many as 640,000 Hungarian emigrants who have left the country. Notably, most of these emigrants are aged 25-49 years old--the prime age for people who could contribute to the economic and social life of Hungary.
What's most interesting about these emigrants is that prefer to emigrate to countries that rank high on the Human Freedom Index. This should not be surprising if one recognizes, as I have argued, that countries ranking high in freedom tend to provide the best conditions for people to live good lives because they have wider opportunities for freely pursuing their happiness.
Here are the five most popular destinations for Hungarian emigrants, with their Human Freedom Index ranking in parentheses: Austria (22), Germany (17), UK (19), Netherlands (9), and Switzerland (1).
By comparison, Hungary ranks 67th out of 165 countries. Previously, Hungary ranked much higher at 26th in 2009 the year before Orban's Fidesz came to power. Hungary's rankings have dropped steadily during Orban's time as prime minister.
So Hungarians are voting with their feet against Orban's illiberalism and for freedom secured in a liberal social order. Declining freedom thus leads to declining population.
This failure of Orban's illiberal Christian democracy confirms Francis Fukuyama's famous argument in 1989 for "the end of history," in which human beings show their natural desire for the freedom--both economic and personal freedom--that comes from liberal democracy.
REFERENCES
Higgins, Andrew. 2025. "Viktor Orban's 'Propaganda State' Is Starting to Show Cracks." New York Times, October 12.
Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2002. "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." Journal of Democracy 13 (April): 51-65.
Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Orban, Viktor. 2014. "Speech at the 25th Balvanyos Summer Free University." July 26. Tusnadfurdo (Baile Tusnad), Romania.
Orban, Viktor. 2017. "Speech at the 2nd Budapest Demographic Forum." May 25.
Orban, Viktor. 2018. "Speech at the 29th Balvanyos Summer Free University." July 28.
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