The defeat of Viktor Orbán carries an очевидent geopolitical dimension. For sixteen years, he had established in Hungary a model for the far right in Europe and the United States. Donald Trump himself had drawn inspiration from it. This model, described as an “illiberal democracy,” was gradually evolving toward a form of authoritarian regime. Its fall therefore also constitutes a new symbolic defeat for Trump. Orbán’s regime had become deeply unpopular. This unpopularity is particularly strong among those under 30: 65% of them voted for the opposition Tiza party, and only 15% for Orbán. There is a strong generational divide: young people suffer from structural unemployment, and emigration in search of work is high. Other converging factors explain Orbán’s predictable defeat. As early as the 2010s, he clearly displayed his ambition to transform Hungary. As Steve Bannon, ideologue of the MAGA movement, pointed out, he was “a Trump before Trump.” The first step in this transformation was control of the media: today, nearly 85% of Hungarian media are under government influence. After public media, the few remaining independent private outlets were gradually targeted. Young people were able to access alternative information through the internet. The judiciary has lost all independence. It is the primary target of far-right governments, along with the press. ...

In mid-March, Romania, together with Austria, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, signed a letter addressed to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and to the President of the Council, António Costa, calling for an urgent revision of the deadlines set by the energy transition plan. This issue, seemingly highly technical, brings together a group of states with specific interests: some display a clear hostility toward European institutions in their current form (the most extreme case being that of Viktor Orbán, who has based his electoral campaign on AI-generated videos portraying the EU and Ukraine as public enemies); others have direct economic interests, linked to the nature of their energy consumption or to infrastructure projects, which are largely incompatible with the timelines adopted at the European level. ...