I was expecting a lot when I travelled to Budapest in March to get a sense of the political climate ahead of the parliamentary elections on 12 April 2026: from Orbánists painting the opposition leader Péter Magyar as a warmonger eager to send Hungarian youths to die in Ukraine to Orbán’s foes portraying him as the Hitler of the 2020s. I would have been quietly disappointed if covering Hungary’s famously free but unfair elections had not provided the entertainment of some historically inaccurate political exaggerations.
However, one thing I did not anticipate was the ‘Ken-ification’ of the two leadership candidates surfacing in every exchange I had with party insiders on both sides of the contest, as well as with the academics, journalists, and strangers I bumped into on the Széchenyi Chain Bridge. By Ken-ification, I am referring to Ken, the embodiment of performative and hyper-masculine posturing, ultimately void of substantive identity and force of character, as portrayed by Ryan Gosling in the 2023 movie adaptation of the Barbie doll franchise. One Orbán loyalist told me that Magyar’s biggest political barrier was his toxic masculinity, fragile ego, and inability to live the life of an honourable man. Those living in glass houses should not throw stones, I thought to myself. Similarly, politicians I spoke to often referenced Orbán’s ego being bigger than some of his body parts but smaller than the fear of the identity crisis he would enter if he were to lose; one unverified story circulating in Budapest holds that he had to undergo psychiatric treatment in Austria after his 2002 defeat.
One reason I should not have been surprised by any of this is that, for Péter Magyar, the Ken-label is almost painfully accurate – young, clearly attentive to his looks, charismatic, and compelled to step into the political spotlight after a very public divorce from Judit Varga, his high-achiever ex-wife and former justice minister. More importantly, Orbán has risen to become the epitome and role model for the world’s populist Kens, otherwise known as strongmen, over the past sixteen years, attuning his electorate to the Ken-ification of politics. Ironically, it is this very Ken-ification that helps explain why Magyar’s conservative and moderately pro-European Tisza party managed to deliver such a resounding defeat to Orbán’s right-nationalist Fidesz party.
After fighting his way back to power in 2010, Orbán turned Hungary into Europe’s foremost ‘illiberal democracy’ – a concept that combined Western freedom of speech and liberalism with a heavily engineered electoral system and government-controlled public media and institutions. In Hungary, members of parliament are elected in a mixed system, where 106 seats are allocated in first-past-the-post voting and 93 mandates are divided according to proportional representation. A ‘winner compensation’ mechanism ensures that the winner of the district candidate’s margin of victory is effectively double-counted. In the past, this has allowed Orbán to gain two-thirds supermajorities with less than half the popular vote in 2014 and 2018.
Deeming himself safe from losing power, Orbán abandoned manifestos in 2014, announcing that his only campaign message was going to be ‘Folytatjuk’ (‘We will continue’). Just like Ken builds a house in which only other hyper-masculine Kens are welcome and can thrive under the veneer of preserving their right to existence, Orbán aligned himself with other strongmen like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, posing as the sole protector of Christian Europe. He cultivated an image of nationalist patriarchal leadership, building a geopolitical ‘Mojo Dojo Casa House.’
With a record voter turnout of 79.6% in April’s parliamentary elections, Magyar and Tisza ejected Orbán from office, securing a supermajority of 138 seats – a majority more comfortable than any achieved by Fidesz in the past. Orbán’s resounding defeat in what may well prove to be the most consequential election in Hungary’s post-communist history thus sends the strongman playbook into a profound identity crisis–one that should deliver three important lessons to all aspiring populist Kens and their political challengers.
The first lesson concerns the paradox of illiberal democracy: no matter how much you engineer elections in your favour, you can still lose them—especially if you don’t keep your illiberalism to yourself. On a systemic level, Orbán left no stone unturned: aggressive gerrymandering, rewriting campaign finance laws, and directing public money into a vast, government-aligned media conglomerate. Appointing Fidesz loyalists across public institutions, from courts and the central bank to the presidency, was another strategy to out-engineer the rule of law and institutional independence. However, all the while, he balanced these efforts with a veneer of democracy. Despite their structural unfairness, Hungarian elections under Orbán have always been largely free and transparent. Freedom of speech has remained intact.
Historically, Orbán had no choice but to walk this tightrope. In 2010, he made his way back to power in ardent opposition to police violence at the 2006 protests against the Socialist-Liberal coalition under Ferenc Gyurcsány. The resulting unwillingness to cross autocratic red lines in a high-profile, public manner has since defined Fidesz’s public DNA. Despite banning LGBTQ parades in 2025, Orbán’s government refrained from interfering with them when they happened. The fact that the government withdrew a Russian-style foreign-agent bill last year, following public outcry, despite being able to easily pass it in parliament, tells a similar story. Cancelling the elections or responding to defeat with violence, as has been speculated in the media, was therefore never a realistic political choice for Orbán. In other words, a populist, illiberal-democratic strongman ultimately relies on upholding a veneer of democratic legitimacy.
Magyar’s campaign made that impossible. Originally a Fidesz insider, serving in the Prime Minister’s Office and as a Hungarian diplomat to the EU, Magyar broke with Orbánism in February 2024, following the government-facilitated cover-up and pardon of a child-abuse case. Within a matter of weeks, he became Hungary’s most prominent opposition figure, speaking out about government corruption and nepotism. Magyar took to social media, launching his political rebellion against Orbánism on the Partizán YouTube channel—the closest thing Hungary has to an independent mainstream medium. This exposed Orbán’s subtle autocratic practices and fractured his image as the patriarchal protector of the Hungarian nation and culminated in record-breaking voter mobilisation. While Orbán had all the structural might, this might no longer looked “right” to the electorate that ousted him. In the Barbie movie, Ken loses control of Barbieland because he gets distracted by a petty turf war with rival Kens. Not dissimilarly, Orbán had to learn the hard way that choosing metaphorical fist fights with the EU over keeping his autocratic and corrupt practices at home out of the public eye cost him the election.
Second, no matter how strong (a man) you are, the economy is stronger—especially when it’s weak. For most of his reign, Orbán got away with sustaining Hungary’s cronyism. Reportedly, 14% of all state tenders since 2010 have gone to just thirteen businessmen closely associated with Orbán. However, this has only become a political problem for the Prime Minister since 2022. Until then, Hungary was the poster child of post-communist economic recovery, and real GDP growth consistently outperformed the eurozone average and Eastern European peers. It did not matter that a select few were benefitting disproportionately from corrupt wealth because economic upward mobility could be felt from Budapest to the Hungarian heartlands.
However, following the stagflationary shocks of the covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hungary’s economy has struggled to bounce back, with annual real GDP growth contracting by 0.8% in 2023 and flatlining at 0.5% in 2024 and 2025. History offers no shortage of examples where a darkening macroeconomic picture has evicted democratic incumbents’ from office. This can be seen across decades, from Jimmy Carter’s stagflation-doomed 1980 campaign in the US to the UK Tories being wiped out in the 2024 election amid the cost-of-living crisis.
One may excuse Orbán for believing that he would remain untouched by this fate, not only because of his electoral engineering but also because he seemed to defy the historical pattern of growing unpopularity, considering rising inflation in 2022. As inflation rates were rising across the eurozone in 2022, governments’ popularity in polls almost uniformly dropped. One notable exception was Orbán’s approval rating, which kept rising. However, an important lesson to learn from history is that if you defy historical precedent once, this certainly does not mean you can escape it twice. In 2022, Orbán successfully employed the populist strongman playbook, running and winning his spring election almost entirely on the narrative of protecting his people from being dragged into the war in Ukraine and the EU’s efforts to ‘fuel’ it through military and financial aid. Geopolitical fears took centre stage, relegating economic grievances to the sidelines.
In 2026, Orbán avoided economic debates and tried to replicate his 2022 playbook of geopolitical fearmongering. Walking through Budapest, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who featured on Fidesz’s campaign posters instead of Orbán, had threatened to drag Hungarians to the Ukrainian frontlines. However, as those outside Orbán’s inner circle – from small business owners to rural farmers – were now faced with a weak business climate and the prospect of rising energy prices, following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the wake of Gulf War III, geopolitical messaging could not override economic realities. Just as Ken thought that ‘beach’ was a job, Orbán fell victim to the illusion that performative geopolitical muscle flexing could replace political problem-solving.
Third, and perhaps most uncomfortably for the liberal West, in a society in which political culture still suffers from the hangover of Soviet rule, it takes a populist strongman to defeat a populist strongman. For fourteen years, Hungary’s opposition tried to dismantle Orbán’s regime. In 2022, left-wing opposition forces even entered the election as a unified list, running on an explicit anti-Orbán platform and preaching the values of Western liberal democracy. However, they never succeeded in mobilising voters, repeatedly handing Fidesz comfortable supermajorities. Orbán’s complacency in the 2026 campaign, where, once again, he did not feel compelled to publish an election manifesto, is likely a result of these failed attempts to threaten his position, even if mechanisms like the winner compensation had not been in place.
Against this background, it is almost ironic that Orbán failed to see that in Péter Magyar he faced a categorically different opponent – one who, much like him, was neither a left-wing cosmopolitan, nor a technocrat. Instead, a true Hungarian Ken, Magyar hijacked Orbán’s populist strongman archetype with the simple mission to replace the Prime Minister’s complacency with a ruthless campaign strategy. Unlike previous challengers, Magyar understood that political messaging on Western liberal democracy does not appeal to the Hungarian electorate.
As Ervin Czizmadia convincingly argues in The Logic of Hungarian Political Development, since the 1990s, Hungary has increasingly adopted a model-shaping rather than a model-following approach in its relationship with Europe and the liberal West more broadly. Hungary does not aim to transform itself into the next Germany or Britain. Instead, it seeks to maintain traditional Hungarian values and influence the political systems it operates within according to its own national interests. Magyar’s campaign was designed cognisant of this truth: moderately conservative and steering clear of emphatic pro-Europeanism or taking the left’s side in Orbán’s culture war.
Unlike previous Orbán challengers, Magyar realised that he could not win the 2026 election by focusing his campaign on Budapest and other liberal-leaning cities. Instead, he embarked on an eighty-day grassroots campaign tour of Fidesz’s strongholds in 2025, effectively mobilising and swaying rural agricultural, business, and political communities with a mix of socio-culturally conservative and anti-migration messaging and pledges for higher healthcare and education spending. Charismatically portraying himself as a younger, more vibrant and uncorrupted alternative to the status quo online and at his rallies, Magyar also managed to become the kind of strongman political persona the culturally post-communist electorate demands, especially outside the cosmopolitan bubble of Budapest. Meanwhile, Orbán kept interactions with his electorate to a minimum, relying primarily on localised voter-assembly structures rather than articulating a distinct political vision or personally campaigning in the Hungarian heartlands.
Following Magyar’s triumph, European leaders and Tisza’s voters have celebrated the victory as a turning point in Hungary’s history—and rightly so. To keep one of his key campaign promises and unlock €18bn of EU funds that Brussels froze in 2022, citing Orbán’s rule-of-law violations, Magyar has pledged to rid Hungary’s public sector of corruption and limit future prime ministers to two terms in office. Magyar is also likely to drop Hungary’s veto on the EU’s €90bn loan to finance Ukraine’s defence and may help the EU pave the way towards qualified majority voting on foreign policy issues or the issuance of joint EU debt. However, just like his predecessor, Magyar will neither want—nor be able to—escape the shackles of Hungary’s history and geography, defined by energy dependence on Russia, EU scepticism, and deeply entrenched corruption across the public and private sectors. After all, just as Ken is only happy if Barbie is happy, a populist strongman only retains his might if his populus considers it right.
Katharina J. Klotz is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, researching the impact of dual-use technologies on states’ economic and military security strategies. She is also the Europe Analyst at the applied-history advisory Greenmantle, covering European geopolitics and macroeconomics. Previously, she researched the geopolitics of space and quantum technologies at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Oxford China Policy Lab.