Front Left

04/26/2026

Peter Magyar’s campaign did not involve demonizing Hungary’s LGBTQ+ community in any way, nor did it involve any of the scapegoating tactics the world now associates with Viktor Orbán’s style of politics. Magyar focused laser like on the massive corruption of Orbán’s Hungary. Magyar, in short, campaigned on bringing back the rule of law. However, though Magyar avoided culture war politics, he is himself a conservative. In the analysis of his victory over Orbán, it is easy to overread the significance of this fact for the struggle we face in the United States today, for example by concluding that to defeat American fascism, we also need a center or even a center-right candidate to unify behind.

However, Hungary is an entirely different country than the United States. Hungary is one of the least diverse countries on earth. It is very socially conservative, and not very cosmopolitan. An anti-fascist strategy for Hungary is going to look very different from an anti-fascist strategy for a massively diverse country like the United States. There is just no good reason for thinking that unifying behind a centrist candidate in the United States will be as successful a strategy as it was in Hungary. In fact, there is good reason even from Hungary’s experience, to think that unifying behind a centrist candidate in the United States will not be a successful American anti-fascist strategy.

Polls showed that 65% of Hungary’s eligible voters under 30 voted for Magyar. So, a vital moral from Hungary is that it is essential to mobilize the youth vote. There is just no reason at all to believe that a center right candidate in the United States would mobilize the youth in any way similar to the way Magyar mobilized the youth in Hungary. As we can see from the No Kings rallies, American youth do not seem to be engaged to go out on the streets for a general message urging them to return to the status quo. As Juliana Birkencamp wrote in a letter to the New York Times, “[y]oung people by nature desire to reform, rectify, reshape. We want to tear down the existing structures we deem unjust and build better ones in their place…[w]hile the notion of restoration is a noble one, it simply does not motivate people my age in the same way the promise of radical change does. It implies a return to the status quo, and for a generation that considers the status quo one of great injustice, it is fundamentally unpalatable.”