--- title: "Moscow Loses Its Most Valuable Ally: What Orban's Defeat Means for Ukraine" description: "Any alien monitoring Earth could have been forgiven for thinking Hungary was one of the most important nations in existence. Ahead of the country's elections on Sunday, the coverage from legacy media was enormous, equalled only by the cascade of interest on social platforms like X. Nor was it just the media. US Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both travelled to Hungary to campaign for incumbent prime minister Viktor Orban, following a trail set by leaders of populist parties in France and Germany. President Donald Trump dialled into a rally of Orban's Fidesz party to tell Hungarians to support their leader. More covertly, there were multiple reports of Russian attempts at election interference as the Kremlin tried to sway the vote in Orban's favor.\n\nGiven that Hungary is a small, poor nation of just ten million people, this outsized attention at times seemed absurd, like watching the whole world get worked up about the internal politics of Paraguay. And yet the alien's assumption would have been correct. Despite its size and weak economy, events in recent years had conspired to turn Budapest into one of the most important capitals in the entire western alliance.\n\nThe reason is structural. Hungary belongs to two organizations, NATO and the European Union, that allow any member to veto major decisions. Almost every other member uses that power only rarely. Budapest, under Orban, came to treat its veto as a weapon, derailing major decisions and repeatedly plunging much of Europe into crisis. On Sunday, the voters of that tiny country swept Orban from power, and in doing so handed the Kremlin one of its sharpest defeats of the entire war.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Viktor Orban lost Hungary's election in a landslide, with challenger Peter Magyar's Tisza Party projected to win a parliamentary supermajority of 138 seats, the biggest landslide for any Hungarian politician since Orban's own first major victory in 2010.\n- Hungary's power came from its EU and NATO veto: Budapest blocked Sweden's NATO membership for almost two years, created sanctions carve-outs for members of Putin's regime, and delayed a ninety billion euro loan to Kyiv that Budapest had already agreed to.\n- Magyar is no Ukraine enthusiast—he opposes sending weapons to Kyiv—but his pro-Europe agenda makes dropping the veto on the ninety billion euro loan all but certain, since the European Commission has tied it to unfreezing billions in frozen Hungarian funds.\n- Campaign revelations pointed to deep Hungarian coordination with Moscow, including reports that Budapest offered to share internal EU documents with Russia and a leaked Orban-Putin call in which Orban offered himself \"at your service.\"\n- The structural flaw remains: NATO and the EU still decide major questions by unanimity, leaving both institutions vulnerable to the next obstructionist who exploits the veto.\n\n## A Tiny Nation With Outsized Power\n\nTo understand why the world's leaders descended on Budapest, you have to understand the math of the veto. Hungary is a net receiver from the European Union, meaning the Orban regime was kept afloat by money flowing from taxpayers in richer countries. That money was then used to campaign ferociously against European values while trying to undermine the bloc from inside. It was an arrangement that infuriated European capitals, but it was the veto, not the budget transfers, that gave Budapest its leverage.\n\nIn NATO, that leverage famously meant blocking Sweden's membership bid for almost two years. In the European Union, the impact was far greater. There, Budapest helped create sanctions carve-outs for members of Vladimir Putin's regime, delayed vital loans to Ukraine, and generally turned every single summit into an apocalyptic game of chicken. For European leaders this was a source of constant, grinding irritation. A small, poor nation of two percent of the EU's population had learned to hold the entire bloc hostage.\n\n## The Ninety Billion Euro Gamble\n\nFor Ukraine, the irritation was something closer to an existential threat. With the United States no longer providing direct support, instead allowing partner nations to buy American kit and donate it to Kyiv, Ukraine became utterly reliant on Europe to stay in the fight against Russia's invasion. That reliance turned Budapest's veto into a loaded gun pointed at Kyiv's survival.\n\nThe clearest example was Orban's recent veto of a ninety billion euro loan to Kyiv. The veto was striking for two reasons. First, Budapest had already agreed to the loan. Second, the package was specifically engineered so that not a single penny of Hungarian money would be included. Orban blocked it anyway. The stakes were so high that the veto threatened to collapse Ukraine's entire war effort, holding the survival of a nation of tens of millions hostage to the obstruction of one man.\n\nThis was the role Hungary had built for itself, an international weight far beyond what its size and wealth could justify. And it was only part of the picture. Orban had also worked to place himself at the center of an international, populist conservative movement, one that drew adherents from across the globe: Javier Milei in Argentina, Andrej Babis in the Czech Republic, and the Republican party under Donald Trump.\n\n## A Landslide Fought on Pocketbooks\n\nFor all that international weight, Sunday's election was fought and won almost entirely on domestic issues. Challenger Peter Magyar did not wrap himself in the Ukrainian flag or campaign on Europe and NATO. He won by hammering pocketbook concerns: Hungary's stubborn inflation and crumbling infrastructure, joined to a biting critique of Orban's personal corruption.\n\nThe result was a projected parliamentary supermajority of 138 seats for Magyar's Tisza Party, the biggest landslide for any Hungarian politician since Orban's own first major victory back in 2010. The symmetry is hard to miss. The man who rose on a wave in 2010 was swept out by one of comparable force more than a decade and a half later.\n\nEven if voters were thinking about nothing more than high prices and low wages, the consequences will be felt across the entire West. The Hungarian electorate, focused on its own household budgets, has reshaped the politics of one of the world's biggest conflicts almost as a byproduct.\n\n## Why a Skeptic's Win Helps Kyiv\n\nHere is the paradox. Peter Magyar is not the kind of figure to pump his fist and shout \"slava Ukrajini.\" A longtime insider of Orban's Fidesz party, Magyar has been open about the fact that he does not support sending weapons to Ukraine, is not keen on the country joining the EU, and has criticized Volodymyr Zelensky for his verbal attacks on Orban. So why predict a major improvement in Kyiv's position?\n\nThe first reason is Europe. Magyar's vision is of a Hungary that sits at the heart of the EU, cooperating with its neighbors rather than skulking in the wings shaking its fist like a pantomime villain. In practice that mostly means restoring the rule of law and stamping out Orban-era corruption. But it also means dropping Budapest's veto on the ninety billion euro loan, something the European Commission has explicitly tied to unfreezing billions of euros in funds for Hungary. Given Magyar's pitch about reestablishing normal relations with Europe, allowing the loan to proceed is almost a given, and that loan is vital, because Ukraine's coffers will soon run empty without it.\n\nIt is worth being precise about the stakes. Kyiv would not necessarily have gone bankrupt had Fidesz won. European leaders quietly briefed that they were preparing contingencies behind the scenes should Orban return to power. But Magyar's win has swept away a major obstacle to future funding and ended a Hungarian threat to veto sanctions on Russia, sanctions that all 27 European nations must unanimously vote to renew every six months.\n\n## The Domino Effect on Bratislava and Prague\n\nOrban's defeat is likely to soften the threat from other European capitals tempted to undercut Kyiv. Two current EU leaders fall into the Orban camp on Ukraine: Andrej Babis in the Czech Republic and Robert Fico in Slovakia.\n\nBabis has always been the lesser worry. His anti-Ukraine rhetoric was never particularly sharp, and it mostly seems aimed at extracting concessions, such as a guarantee that no Czech taxpayer money would be used in the ninety billion euro loan. Fico is a different beast. Polls show that huge numbers of his party's voters approve of Russia and disapprove of Ukraine, and the Slovak premier had threatened to keep blocking European initiatives even if Orban lost.\n\nThe scale of Orban's defeat makes that substantially less likely. For all his bluster, Fico has a history of eventually lining up with the rest of the EU when crunch time comes. Orban's massive rejection by voters may well be in the back of his mind, given that Slovaks are due to go to the polls next year. And then there is always Article Seven, the nuclear option that allows the EU to suspend a member state's voting rights.\n\n## The Article Seven Shadow\n\nArticle Seven changes the calculus in Bratislava in a specific way. A member state cannot veto Article Seven being applied against itself, which would be absurd even by EU standards, but the other 26 nations must agree unanimously to invoke it. For years there was an unspoken assumption that Slovakia would shield Hungary, and Hungary would shield Slovakia, each providing the protective vote the other needed.\n\nWith Hungary now likely to trend in a more normal direction, that mutual shield is gone. The threat of Article Seven will hang over any future Slovak decision to veto EU foreign policy. Fico can no longer count on a friendly government in Budapest to block any move against him. The veto system that Orban weaponized now contains a mechanism that could be turned against his remaining allies, and that is a sobering thought for any leader contemplating obstruction.\n\n## The Kremlin's Lost Puppet\n\nThe second reason Magyar's win is a win for Kyiv is starker still: the Kremlin just lost its most valuable puppet in the whole of Europe. If that sounds harsh, consider the stories that emerged during the campaign, stories that did not so much suggest collusion as dump receipts and hard evidence on the table.\n\nThere were reports that Hungary's foreign minister had offered to share internal EU documents with his Russian counterpart via the embassy in Moscow. There were accounts of EU leaders holding their tongues in key European Council meetings because they knew the Hungarians would report everything said directly to Moscow. Most embarrassing of all was a leaked transcript of a call between Orban and Putin, in which Orban declared, \"In any matter where I can be of assistance, I'm at your service,\" before comparing himself to a \"mouse\" helping the Russian \"lion.\"\n\nNone of this proves Putin was directing Hungarian foreign policy from the Kremlin, and there is no claim here that Orban was a double agent grown in a Moscow lab. But it shows a level of coordination that goes well beyond an independent foreign policy in the mould of bloody-minded NATO states like France. It suggests Budapest was actively working with a nation that much of the EU and NATO consider their greatest threat. It is hard to imagine that leaders in the Baltics, for example, will be willing to forget such a betrayal. Over the course of the war, Budapest had evolved into something closer to an ally for Moscow, and Magyar's landslide has most likely snatched that ally away.\n\n## What Changes, and What Does Not\n\nTempering the optimism is a dose of realism: do not expect any immediate, direct impact on the course of the war. A failure to supply the pre-agreed ninety billion euro loan would have been catastrophic, but the intent was always to circumvent the Hungarian veto if necessary. And Hungarian support for Russia was always more of the obstructionist, \"weaken the EU and NATO from within\" variety than anything that would cause Putin's war effort to collapse without it.\n\nEven so, there will be consequences. Under the constant threat of Hungarian veto, Ukraine has been unable to make long-term financial plans against the worst case. That should no longer be an issue. And it is hard to overstate the erosion of the pro-Putin populist right's standing in Europe, with its standard-bearer now robbed of his stage and his leverage. For anyone who supports Ukraine, or simply the concept of a united Europe, Orban's departure into opposition was a moment to savor.\n\n## Reform or Die\n\nThis being WarFronts, the story cannot end on a positive note. The end of Orban's government means the end of sixteen years of obstructionism for Europe as a whole, but the issues that made his games possible have not gone away. NATO and the EU still take major decisions on the basis of unanimity, in effect handing a veto to any country, no matter how small, that might want to destroy these institutions from the inside.\n\nConsider how strange the whole saga has been. The European Union is home to about 450 million people, of whom fewer than 10 million live in Hungary. And yet, on the existential question of supporting Ukraine against Europe's biggest threat, the entire process could be held up by one man. One man, representing a little over two percent of the European population and barely one percent of the EU economy, could use his veto to shape the lives of hundreds of millions. Giant nations like Germany, nuclear powers like France, and rising military leaders like Poland all had to set aside the interests of their own people and waste time and treasure trying to convince this one little man to let them do what they needed to do.\n\nPut that way, is it any wonder a figure like Orban emerged, someone who saw the obvious weak points of a veto system and exploited them for all he was worth? Orban may now be heading into opposition, but so long as the structures that enabled him remain in place, the EU and NATO will always be vulnerable to another obstructionist, another leader who uses the mandate of a tiny home country to control the destiny of nearly half a billion Europeans. With Magyar, Europe now has a perhaps never to be repeated chance to reform or die. The only question is whether the continent's leaders have the nerve to take it.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### Who won Hungary's election and by how much?\n\nPeter Magyar and his Tisza Party won in a landslide, with a projected parliamentary supermajority of 138 seats. It was the biggest landslide for any Hungarian politician since Viktor Orban's own first major victory in 2010. The symmetry is striking: the man who rose on a wave in 2010 was swept out by one of comparable force more than fifteen years later.\n\n### Why did such a small country have so much influence over Europe?\n\nHungary is a member of both NATO and the EU, organizations that allow any member to veto major decisions. While most members rarely use that power, Orban's Budapest treated the veto as a weapon, blocking Sweden's NATO membership for almost two years, creating sanctions carve-outs for members of Putin's regime, and delaying vital loans to Ukraine. A country representing barely two percent of the EU's population was able to hold the entire bloc hostage.\n\n### What was the ninety billion euro loan, and why did Orban's veto matter?\n\nThe loan was designated for Kyiv at a time when Ukraine was utterly reliant on Europe to keep fighting, with the United States no longer providing direct support. Budapest had already agreed to the loan, and the package was specifically engineered so that not a single euro of Hungarian money would be included. Orban vetoed it anyway, threatening to collapse Ukraine's entire war effort. The European Commission has explicitly tied the loan to unfreezing billions in funds frozen for Hungary.\n\n### What evidence emerged of Hungary's coordination with Russia?\n\nCampaign revelations included reports that Hungary's foreign minister offered to share internal EU documents with Russia via the Moscow embassy, accounts of EU leaders staying silent in key European Council meetings for fear Hungary would relay everything directly to Moscow, and a leaked transcript of a call between Orban and Putin in which Orban declared he was \"at your service\" and compared himself to a \"mouse\" helping the Russian \"lion.\"\n\n### Does Orban's defeat fix NATO's and the EU's vulnerability to vetoes?\n\nNo. NATO and the EU still take major decisions by unanimity, which hands a veto to any willing member regardless of size or economy. Orban is heading into opposition, but the structures that enabled him remain in place. The article argues that Europe now has a perhaps never-to-be-repeated chance to reform those structures before the next obstructionist discovers and exploits the same weakness.\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/orban-defeat-moscow-loses-its-most-valuable-ally.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/orban-defeat-moscow-loses-its-most-valuable-ally datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/RBRcPXSmISk/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 5ee24ba6297a2c353e433d02feb0b79c9c32b7a85a63a185cfc6653ddaa77de2 tokens: 4228 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/orban-defeat-moscow-loses-its-most-valuable-ally.md.summary.md --- Any alien monitoring Earth could have been forgiven for thinking Hungary was one of the most important nations in existence. Ahead of the country's elections on Sunday, the coverage from legacy media was enormous, equalled only by the cascade of interest on social platforms like X. Nor was it just the media. US Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both travelled to Hungary to campaign for incumbent prime minister Viktor Orban, following a trail set by leaders of populist parties in France and Germany. President Donald Trump dialled into a rally of Orban's Fidesz party to tell Hungarians to support their leader. More covertly, there were multiple reports of Russian attempts at election interference as the Kremlin tried to sway the vote in Orban's favor. Given that Hungary is a small, poor nation of just ten million people, this outsized attention at times seemed absurd, like watching the whole world get worked up about the internal politics of Paraguay. And yet the alien's assumption would have been correct. Despite its size and weak economy, events in recent years had conspired to turn Budapest into one of the most important capitals in the entire western alliance. The reason is structural. Hungary belongs to two organizations, NATO and the European Union, that allow any member to veto major decisions. Almost every other member uses that power only rarely. Budapest, under Orban, came to treat its veto as a weapon, derailing major decisions and repeatedly plunging much of Europe into crisis. On Sunday, the voters of that tiny country swept Orban from power, and in doing so handed the Kremlin one of its sharpest defeats of the entire war. ## Key Takeaways - Viktor Orban lost Hungary's election in a landslide, with challenger Peter Magyar's Tisza Party projected to win a parliamentary supermajority of 138 seats, the biggest landslide for any Hungarian politician since Orban's own first major victory in 2010. - Hungary's power came from its EU and NATO veto: Budapest blocked Sweden's NATO membership for almost two years, created sanctions carve-outs for members of Putin's regime, and delayed a ninety billion euro loan to Kyiv that Budapest had already agreed to. - Magyar is no Ukraine enthusiast—he opposes sending weapons to Kyiv—but his pro-Europe agenda makes dropping the veto on the ninety billion euro loan all but certain, since the European Commission has tied it to unfreezing billions in frozen Hungarian funds. - Campaign revelations pointed to deep Hungarian coordination with Moscow, including reports that Budapest offered to share internal EU documents with Russia and a leaked Orban-Putin call in which Orban offered himself "at your service." - The structural flaw remains: NATO and the EU still decide major questions by unanimity, leaving both institutions vulnerable to the next obstructionist who exploits the veto. ## A Tiny Nation With Outsized Power To understand why the world's leaders descended on Budapest, you have to understand the math of the veto. Hungary is a net receiver from the European Union, meaning the Orban regime was kept afloat by money flowing from taxpayers in richer countries. That money was then used to campaign ferociously against European values while trying to undermine the bloc from inside. It was an arrangement that infuriated European capitals, but it was the veto, not the budget transfers, that gave Budapest its leverage. In NATO, that leverage famously meant blocking Sweden's membership bid for almost two years. In the European Union, the impact was far greater. There, Budapest helped create sanctions carve-outs for members of Vladimir Putin's regime, delayed vital loans to Ukraine, and generally turned every single summit into an apocalyptic game of chicken. For European leaders this was a source of constant, grinding irritation. A small, poor nation of two percent of the EU's population had learned to hold the entire bloc hostage. ## The Ninety Billion Euro Gamble For Ukraine, the irritation was something closer to an existential threat. With the United States no longer providing direct support, instead allowing partner nations to buy American kit and donate it to Kyiv, Ukraine became utterly reliant on Europe to stay in the fight against Russia's invasion. That reliance turned Budapest's veto into a loaded gun pointed at Kyiv's survival. The clearest example was Orban's recent veto of a ninety billion euro loan to Kyiv. The veto was striking for two reasons. First, Budapest had already agreed to the loan. Second, the package was specifically engineered so that not a single penny of Hungarian money would be included. Orban blocked it anyway. The stakes were so high that the veto threatened to collapse Ukraine's entire war effort, holding the survival of a nation of tens of millions hostage to the obstruction of one man. This was the role Hungary had built for itself, an international weight far beyond what its size and wealth could justify. And it was only part of the picture. Orban had also worked to place himself at the center of an international, populist conservative movement, one that drew adherents from across the globe: Javier Milei in Argentina, Andrej Babis in the Czech Republic, and the Republican party under Donald Trump. ## A Landslide Fought on Pocketbooks For all that international weight, Sunday's election was fought and won almost entirely on domestic issues. Challenger Peter Magyar did not wrap himself in the Ukrainian flag or campaign on Europe and NATO. He won by hammering pocketbook concerns: Hungary's stubborn inflation and crumbling infrastructure, joined to a biting critique of Orban's personal corruption. The result was a projected parliamentary supermajority of 138 seats for Magyar's Tisza Party, the biggest landslide for any Hungarian politician since Orban's own first major victory back in 2010. The symmetry is hard to miss. The man who rose on a wave in 2010 was swept out by one of comparable force more than a decade and a half later. Even if voters were thinking about nothing more than high prices and low wages, the consequences will be felt across the entire West. The Hungarian electorate, focused on its own household budgets, has reshaped the politics of one of the world's biggest conflicts almost as a byproduct. ## Why a Skeptic's Win Helps Kyiv Here is the paradox. Peter Magyar is not the kind of figure to pump his fist and shout "slava Ukrajini." A longtime insider of Orban's Fidesz party, Magyar has been open about the fact that he does not support sending weapons to Ukraine, is not keen on the country joining the EU, and has criticized Volodymyr Zelensky for his verbal attacks on Orban. So why predict a major improvement in Kyiv's position? The first reason is Europe. Magyar's vision is of a Hungary that sits at the heart of the EU, cooperating with its neighbors rather than skulking in the wings shaking its fist like a pantomime villain. In practice that mostly means restoring the rule of law and stamping out Orban-era corruption. But it also means dropping Budapest's veto on the ninety billion euro loan, something the European Commission has explicitly tied to unfreezing billions of euros in funds for Hungary. Given Magyar's pitch about reestablishing normal relations with Europe, allowing the loan to proceed is almost a given, and that loan is vital, because Ukraine's coffers will soon run empty without it. It is worth being precise about the stakes. Kyiv would not necessarily have gone bankrupt had Fidesz won. European leaders quietly briefed that they were preparing contingencies behind the scenes should Orban return to power. But Magyar's win has swept away a major obstacle to future funding and ended a Hungarian threat to veto sanctions on Russia, sanctions that all 27 European nations must unanimously vote to renew every six months. ## The Domino Effect on Bratislava and Prague Orban's defeat is likely to soften the threat from other European capitals tempted to undercut Kyiv. Two current EU leaders fall into the Orban camp on Ukraine: Andrej Babis in the Czech Republic and Robert Fico in Slovakia. Babis has always been the lesser worry. His anti-Ukraine rhetoric was never particularly sharp, and it mostly seems aimed at extracting concessions, such as a guarantee that no Czech taxpayer money would be used in the ninety billion euro loan. Fico is a different beast. Polls show that huge numbers of his party's voters approve of Russia and disapprove of Ukraine, and the Slovak premier had threatened to keep blocking European initiatives even if Orban lost. The scale of Orban's defeat makes that substantially less likely. For all his bluster, Fico has a history of eventually lining up with the rest of the EU when crunch time comes. Orban's massive rejection by voters may well be in the back of his mind, given that Slovaks are due to go to the polls next year. And then there is always Article Seven, the nuclear option that allows the EU to suspend a member state's voting rights. ## The Article Seven Shadow Article Seven changes the calculus in Bratislava in a specific way. A member state cannot veto Article Seven being applied against itself, which would be absurd even by EU standards, but the other 26 nations must agree unanimously to invoke it. For years there was an unspoken assumption that Slovakia would shield Hungary, and Hungary would shield Slovakia, each providing the protective vote the other needed. With Hungary now likely to trend in a more normal direction, that mutual shield is gone. The threat of Article Seven will hang over any future Slovak decision to veto EU foreign policy. Fico can no longer count on a friendly government in Budapest to block any move against him. The veto system that Orban weaponized now contains a mechanism that could be turned against his remaining allies, and that is a sobering thought for any leader contemplating obstruction. ## The Kremlin's Lost Puppet The second reason Magyar's win is a win for Kyiv is starker still: the Kremlin just lost its most valuable puppet in the whole of Europe. If that sounds harsh, consider the stories that emerged during the campaign, stories that did not so much suggest collusion as dump receipts and hard evidence on the table. There were reports that Hungary's foreign minister had offered to share internal EU documents with his Russian counterpart via the embassy in Moscow. There were accounts of EU leaders holding their tongues in key European Council meetings because they knew the Hungarians would report everything said directly to Moscow. Most embarrassing of all was a leaked transcript of a call between Orban and Putin, in which Orban declared, "In any matter where I can be of assistance, I'm at your service," before comparing himself to a "mouse" helping the Russian "lion." None of this proves Putin was directing Hungarian foreign policy from the Kremlin, and there is no claim here that Orban was a double agent grown in a Moscow lab. But it shows a level of coordination that goes well beyond an independent foreign policy in the mould of bloody-minded NATO states like France. It suggests Budapest was actively working with a nation that much of the EU and NATO consider their greatest threat. It is hard to imagine that leaders in the Baltics, for example, will be willing to forget such a betrayal. Over the course of the war, Budapest had evolved into something closer to an ally for Moscow, and Magyar's landslide has most likely snatched that ally away. ## What Changes, and What Does Not Tempering the optimism is a dose of realism: do not expect any immediate, direct impact on the course of the war. A failure to supply the pre-agreed ninety billion euro loan would have been catastrophic, but the intent was always to circumvent the Hungarian veto if necessary. And Hungarian support for Russia was always more of the obstructionist, "weaken the EU and NATO from within" variety than anything that would cause Putin's war effort to collapse without it. Even so, there will be consequences. Under the constant threat of Hungarian veto, Ukraine has been unable to make long-term financial plans against the worst case. That should no longer be an issue. And it is hard to overstate the erosion of the pro-Putin populist right's standing in Europe, with its standard-bearer now robbed of his stage and his leverage. For anyone who supports Ukraine, or simply the concept of a united Europe, Orban's departure into opposition was a moment to savor. ## Reform or Die This being WarFronts, the story cannot end on a positive note. The end of Orban's government means the end of sixteen years of obstructionism for Europe as a whole, but the issues that made his games possible have not gone away. NATO and the EU still take major decisions on the basis of unanimity, in effect handing a veto to any country, no matter how small, that might want to destroy these institutions from the inside. Consider how strange the whole saga has been. The European Union is home to about 450 million people, of whom fewer than 10 million live in Hungary. And yet, on the existential question of supporting Ukraine against Europe's biggest threat, the entire process could be held up by one man. One man, representing a little over two percent of the European population and barely one percent of the EU economy, could use his veto to shape the lives of hundreds of millions. Giant nations like Germany, nuclear powers like France, and rising military leaders like Poland all had to set aside the interests of their own people and waste time and treasure trying to convince this one little man to let them do what they needed to do. Put that way, is it any wonder a figure like Orban emerged, someone who saw the obvious weak points of a veto system and exploited them for all he was worth? Orban may now be heading into opposition, but so long as the structures that enabled him remain in place, the EU and NATO will always be vulnerable to another obstructionist, another leader who uses the mandate of a tiny home country to control the destiny of nearly half a billion Europeans. With Magyar, Europe now has a perhaps never to be repeated chance to reform or die. The only question is whether the continent's leaders have the nerve to take it. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Who won Hungary's election and by how much? Peter Magyar and his Tisza Party won in a landslide, with a projected parliamentary supermajority of 138 seats. It was the biggest landslide for any Hungarian politician since Viktor Orban's own first major victory in 2010. The symmetry is striking: the man who rose on a wave in 2010 was swept out by one of comparable force more than fifteen years later. ### Why did such a small country have so much influence over Europe? Hungary is a member of both NATO and the EU, organizations that allow any member to veto major decisions. While most members rarely use that power, Orban's Budapest treated the veto as a weapon, blocking Sweden's NATO membership for almost two years, creating sanctions carve-outs for members of Putin's regime, and delaying vital loans to Ukraine. A country representing barely two percent of the EU's population was able to hold the entire bloc hostage. ### What was the ninety billion euro loan, and why did Orban's veto matter? The loan was designated for Kyiv at a time when Ukraine was utterly reliant on Europe to keep fighting, with the United States no longer providing direct support. Budapest had already agreed to the loan, and the package was specifically engineered so that not a single euro of Hungarian money would be included. Orban vetoed it anyway, threatening to collapse Ukraine's entire war effort. The European Commission has explicitly tied the loan to unfreezing billions in funds frozen for Hungary. ### What evidence emerged of Hungary's coordination with Russia? Campaign revelations included reports that Hungary's foreign minister offered to share internal EU documents with Russia via the Moscow embassy, accounts of EU leaders staying silent in key European Council meetings for fear Hungary would relay everything directly to Moscow, and a leaked transcript of a call between Orban and Putin in which Orban declared he was "at your service" and compared himself to a "mouse" helping the Russian "lion." ### Does Orban's defeat fix NATO's and the EU's vulnerability to vetoes? No. NATO and the EU still take major decisions by unanimity, which hands a veto to any willing member regardless of size or economy. Orban is heading into opposition, but the structures that enabled him remain in place. The article argues that Europe now has a perhaps never-to-be-repeated chance to reform those structures before the next obstructionist discovers and exploits the same weakness. <!-- youtube:RBRcPXSmISk -->