While Hungary is not such an important country, if Orban is going to lose the election, this is going to affect dramatically also the behavior of other new right parties in Europe.

Nobody who is not in Europe these days can imagine how important this election is for many other places.

Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer and today we are talking about one of the most consequential elections in the world this year.

Hungarian Prime Minister and Trump BFF, Viktor Orban.

He faces his toughest political challenge in 16 years in power.

With just days to go until the April 12th parliamentary elections, can the strongman leader who has relied on patriotic rhetoric and splintered opposition fend off his former protégé, the young and charismatic Peter Magyar.

And if he cannot, could Orban's political demise spell the end of far-right populism in Europe?

Spoiler alert.

Not so fast.

Joining me to preview the Hungarian elections and to discuss the politics and geopolitics of Europe at this pivotal moment, political scientist and Central Europe expert, Ivan Krastev.

Don't worry, I've also got your puppet regime.

[phone ringing] Hello, Europe.

Just calling to tell you that we do not need your help in the Strait of Hormuz.

We are glad to hear this, sir.

Ja, same here.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is investing in the future, working to create an impact in advanced recycling and in emerging technology companies that will help shape tomorrow.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... - Gather around children, and you will hear a tale of a long time ago in a land far away.

The day, October 13th, 2025.

Nicholas Maduro was sleeping soundly in his miraflores bedroom.

Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei enjoyed a working breakfast with his clerics at his Tehran compound, probably, and eight dazzling pieces of the French crown jewel sat safely under lock and key at the Louvre.

Oh, and for some reason, we were all angry at Sydney Sweeney for wearing jeans.

And in Cairo, President Trump stood on a red carpeted stage flanked by 30 world leaders and international representatives to inaugurate the first ever Gaza Peace Summit.

But about half an hour into that speech, his attention strayed from the Middle East to the leader from Budapest, standing far to his right.

Oh, Viktor, where is Viktor?

Viktor, Viktor, we love Viktor.

Viktor, I call him.

You know, I put the little accent on it.

You are fantastic, all right?

I know a lot of people don't agree with me, but I'm the only one that matters.

I endorsed him the last election he had, and he won by 28 points.

So you're gonna do even better this time.

I have two hard truths for POTUS.

First, the accent is actually on the last name Orban, not on Viktor.

And second, your endorsement is not in fact the only one that matters in Hungary because already in October, 2025, Prime Minister Viktor Orban's political future was very much in doubt.

For 16 years, Orban has dominated Hungarian politics by rewriting rules, by consolidating power, and by turning the country into what many have called an electoral autocracy.

Along the way, he has positioned himself as Europe's leading nationalist, populist, and Donald Trump's closest ally on the continent, all the while cozying up with Russia and China.

But today, his veneer of invincibility is cracking.

Latest polling suggests that Orban's main challenger, Peter Magyar, could outscore him by as much as 11 points on April 12th in what may be Europe's most consequential parliamentary election of the year.

Magyar, formerly one of Orban's closest allies, has succeeded with a hybrid message of anti-corruption and pro-transparency.

But he's also enough of a nationalist and a social conservative to peel away disillusioned Orban voters.

His meteoric rise has upended Orban's usual playbook, which relies on a splintered opposition and a monopoly on patriotic rhetoric.

And now with word that U.S.

Vice President J.D.

Vance will be making a last-minute stop in Hungary in the last few days of the election, it's become clear that the Trump administration is doing everything it can to keep Orban's political life alive.

But it may just be too little and too late.

That said, Orban's political demise, if it comes to pass, will not spell the demise of the far right in Europe, not by a long shot.

Nationalist parties are currently in power in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Italy, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden.

Elsewhere, they are polling strongly.

France's National Rally, Germany's AFD, Poland's Law and Justice Party, and the United Kingdom's Reform Party among them.

Together, they command roughly a quarter of the electorate across the European continent.

Economic stagnation, declining real wages and rising housing costs continue to squeeze younger generations across Europe, and they push them into the warm embrace of the far right.

Joining me to talk about the upcoming Hungarian elections and Europe more broadly, political scientist, Ivan Krastev.

He joins me today from his office in Sofia.

Ivan Krastev, wonderful to see you on the show.

My pleasure.

So I wanna start with talking about Hungary.

You've met with Viktor Orban.

He gets a lot of attention in the United States, primarily because President Trump likes him.

What do we not understand in the States about Viktor that you think we should?

- Listen, Orban is an extremely important figure for the far right in my view.

He plays the same role like Fidel Castro used to play for the left in the 1970s.

So very few people know where Hungary is, but they have the feeling that this is the place where the real conservative revolution is happening.

What is interesting about Orban is, first, he's been in power for a long time, 16 years now.

Secondly, what is important for him is that he's the institutional, the ideological, the financial hub of European new right.

He's the person if you are right-wing or far-right government somewhere and you're losing the elections and people want basically to put you in court for something that you do, the place to get an asylum is going to be Hungary.

If you are a far-right party that wants to run on the elections, you can keep your bank account, your money in the Hungarian bank.

And also Viktor Orban really invested a lot in the relations with Magyar movement.

He put a lot of money in his project with the Heritage Foundation.

He became probably the only European leaders that many of the Magyar voters who are not interested in Europe at all know the name.

- Now, I understand the fact that he's become a standard bearer for those leaders.

It's less clear why that has meant that he's been aligned both with the Russians and with the Chinese.

And I'm wondering, and I know that those are very different reasons and alignments, but I'd love to hear a bit of your thoughts on that.

- Yeah, this is a great point, because normally when people in America think about Orban, they believe that there is somebody who really is betting on Trump and on the United States.

And this is not true.

Economically, the major bet of the Hungarian government is China.

For the last several years, Chinese investments in Hungary is higher than the Chinese investments in Germany and France together.

And the major reason why they invest in Hungary, a place where basically there is no access to the sea, this is a very small country, 10 million people, very small economy, is that Mr.

Orban is ready to veto in the European Union any type of anti-China economic policies.

And in the case of Russia--this is, by the way, part of the paradox.

Mr.

Orban made his political career in 1989.

He was the Hungarian leader, and he was a young man asking the Soviet troops to leave Hungary.

And this was his high moment back then.

But now he basically made the dependence on Russian oil and gas very important, almost the definition of Hungarian sovereignty.

And the most important for developing these relationships was that Mr.

Orban defined Brussels as the major challenge and the major threat to Hungarian sovereignty.

So as a result of it, basically betting on Russia, betting on China, betting on Trump was the way for him to tell his voters, you are the only sovereign nations in the European Union.

Unfortunately for him, this story basically can turn sadly on the elections on April 12th.

Now, do you think that his ideological roots, are they structural?

Are they attached to something in his background or are they more opportunistic?

I'm wondering, is he more, in your view, a right-wing populist in the manner of Castro on the left or is he closer to Trump?

- He's an interesting story.

Mr.

Orban comes from a very humble background.

He comes from the countryside.

He comes from a family which was not interested in politics.

He was interested in football, and his major hero was the soccer player.

It was not a politician.

But what is interesting with the passing of time, I do believe he internalized his own conservatism.

And there is a lot of type of a 19th century type of Hungarian conservatism.

As you know, after World War I, Hungary was one of the big losers of kind of reshaping of European politics.

Hungary lost a lot of land, and a lot of Hungarians ended up living outside of Hungary.

So his major appeal always was 20th century was so bad for Hungary that we cannot be the loser also in the 21st century.

From this point of view, he's closer to President Putin than to President Trump, because, honestly speaking, President Trump is not particularly rooted in the American history.

I don't believe that he's particularly interested in any of his predecessors.

While for Viktor Orban, he is very much about Hungary, Hungarian history.

He goes back and back to this great time of Hungary.

So he's very much a classical European nationalist, very different than kind of this much more postmodern stories.

And also what is interesting about him, it is talking about opportunism.

If you listen to him, and if you see, for example, this very strong anti-migration, for example, rhetoric that make him a major European figure during the 2015 crisis, you're going to imagine that almost no foreigners can be found in Hungary.

But if you're going to see which was the European Union member state that gave most work permits for people to come to work, in 2018 it was Hungary.

So from this point of view, there is a basic conservative instinct.

There is a lot of conservative ideology, but he can be very opportunistic.

And because of the fact that there is a lot of labor shortages on the Hungarian side, he's much more flexible on this story.

Where he's not flexible is that he believes that Hungarian democracy basically is an ethnic project.

So foreigners can come, they can work, but they're never going to be allowed to vote.

And this is the major issue that you can see also around the elections.

The opposition totally is running on social and economic issues.

And Mr.

Orban is totally running on a kind of a big picture, major international politics, talking about war in Ukraine, talking about the relations with the United States.

So he ended as a globalist.

He ended as the one who is basically much more interested in global politics.

And this is why it's interesting how these elections are going to end up for him.

But there is one thing that probably, particularly the Americans who are not following Europeans on a daily level cannot understand, is that, while Hungary is not such an important country, if Orban is going to lose the election, this is going to affect dramatically also the behavior of other new right parties in Europe.

This is going to be true for how the Czech governments are going to believe, how the Slovak government is going to believe.

This is, of course, going to impact incredibly European policy towards Ukraine, because now Orban is vetoing $90 billion for support of Ukraine.

But also, strangely enough, if Orban is losing, and if President Trump is going to lose the midterm elections, then for the far right, the major story was to what extent they should really subscribe to the Trumpian revolution, and to what extent they should try to have a deal with some of the pro-European mainstream parties and looking for a new European consensus.

Because what is interesting about Orban, all his economic model is based on the assumptions that the common economic space is going to remain.

Listen, the Chinese have an interest to Hungary to the extent that Hungary is a member of the European Union.

If Hungary decides to leave the European Union, then suddenly nobody is really interested in a small market of 10 million.

Yeah, and I mean, look, we've seen those shifts made by the Italians.

They're not talking Italexit.

By, you know, sort of Le Pen and Bardella in France as well.

I mean, you know, Brexit taught, I think, a lot of people on the far right that this doesn't work so well for your economy.

But I want to look ahead to the elections, which are coming very soon in Hungary.

It certainly looks, I mean, he's down pretty big.

It looks like he's going to lose.

At the same time, this does not come across as a leader that's prepared to leave power easily or peacefully.

So I wonder to what extent you think these are going to be fully free and fair elections.

To the extent that they're not, how much of a challenge is that?

And assuming he does lose, as we've seen in the polls by a significant margin, how do you think he reacts?

Listen, it's a great question.

I'm not sure that I can give you the proper answer.

And honestly speaking, I'm not sure that even Mr.

Orban knows exactly how he's going to behave.

First, because he has not lost elections for a long time.

So when you have been winning in four elections in a sequence, it's difficult for you to understand that you're going to believe that you're going to lose the elections.

Poll agencies are giving different results, so he probably still believes that he can make it.

He has a very strong dominance in the media.

He put a lot of effort in social media.

And when you're talking about free and fair elections, elections are not going to be fair to the extent that the government really used a lot of administrative resources.

But what is interesting about Magyar, the major opposition candidate, is that he has a three distinctive characteristics from all other opponents that Mr.

Orban has been seeing over these years.

First, he's not a liberal.

He's a conservative.

He's from Orban's own party.

He was in his party.

He was married for the-basically, the former minister of justice of Mr.

Orban, somebody very close to Mr.

Orban.

And his major message is, I'm going to be conservative, but I will not be corrupt.

Secondly, he's doing really well in some of these same rural areas and small villages, because he was traveling the country.

He was not basically the candidate that is totally relying on social media.

He was basically going and people can touch him.

And certainly, and this is very important, while Orban is a very gifted politician, there's no doubt about this, people exhausted of him.

This is a Orban fatigue.

And you can see it, and you can see it in business circles, and you can see it here and there.

So what is going to happen if he's going to lose the elections?

First, the problem is how big is going to be the loss.

And the Hungarian system is such that in a certain way, you need, for example, for the opposition, they need between four and six points more to be sure that they're going to have a majority.

But if they're going to have between 11, 12 points, they can end up with constitutional majority.

Right.

Yeah.

Which happened basically to Mr.

Orban in 2010.

I'm saying this because if he's simply going to lose the elections and they're not going to be constitutional majority, he decided to stay in opposition for three reasons.

First, he has such a control over prosecutors' office, courts, staff, his own people, and also having President Trump in Washington.

He knows that basically nobody can go against him very much, strongly, personally.

Secondly, he could believe that the new government is going to be seen as weak and ineffective.

But what is going to change is going to be, of course, his auric, his symbolic power.

And he knows that this is going to weaken both his relations to the United States, but also his leadership of a new right in Europe.

This is why for him this is going to be a major decision to be taken.

But don't forget, when people decide to move in a certain direction, if they decided to do it, and we have not seen basically the election results, it's not easy to reverse the results.

You can play, you can get 1%, 2%, 3%.

But what we're going to see in Hungary is either people decided to fear change and stay with Orban, but much more likely if we really believe the policies that they decided to go for change.

And then if he decided to stay against the change, this could be a high cost for him too.

So I don't know how the situation is going to develop.

I don't believe that he should personally feel kind of that this losing elections is going to lose everything.

But of course, losing elections psychologically is going to have an incredible impact on European politics.

Nobody who is not in Europe these days can imagine how important this election is for many other places.

Now, Ivan, I see that Vice President Vance is planning his trip right before the elections to Hungary to meet with the prime minister and to put his finger on the scale.

Do you think that trip is helpful or does it undermine Orban in the eyes of the Hungarian electorate?

>> We're going to know the answer to this question on the election night, but this is the problem which basically the new right in Europe is facing.

Is Trump bringing votes or basically is anti-Trump bringing votes?

And particularly in the moment when there is a war which is not particularly popular in Europe, you can see that many people are claiming that the way in Iran was also one of the reasons why for Meloni was so difficult to go on the referendum, because being aligned with Trump, particularly after Greenland, particularly after the war is not popular.

On the other side, Hungary is a small country, and of course, taking Vance there is showing how important you are.

As you know, the Russians also make it very clear how strongly they stand behind Orban.

I'm saying this because also for President Trump and for President Putin, Orban losing is going to be their personal loss.

In a certain way, this is going to affect them, because till now, President Trump was quite successful betting on some of the Latin American elections.

He bet on his allies, and his allies won.

If he's going to bet on his oldest and probably best known ally, Mr.

Orban, and if Mr.

Orban is going to lose, then basically being backed by Trump is going to be much less valuable than it was.

So before we close, I'd like to ask you at least a couple of questions about how this war in Iran is affecting Europe, Eastern Europe.

I mean, obviously it has been useful for Putin.

He is making a lot more money.

His sanctions, many have been suspended by the Americans and it's harder to get a lot of American weapons to go to Ukraine via Europe when they're needed urgently in Iran.

What's the effect?

What's the concrete effect that we've seen over the first month of this war on the Europeans?

Listen, first, Europeans understood that for Trump they don't matter.

They learn about the war from their TV sets.

Secondly, it was very much clear that compared to Iran, Ukraine, which is so important for the Europeans, is a no priority for Trump.

Secondly, now the Russians get a certain leverage over Trump, because they are the ones keeping certain relations with the Iranians and the more the war goes.

This is important, and while the last weeks it is very kind of fashionable to talk about middle powers, we should also start to talk about middlemen, because one of the things that is important in all this new constellation is the people who are negotiating Russian-Ukraine war on the American side, and people who are negotiating war in Iran are the same people.

So, as a result of it, Europeans feel very vulnerable, plus high energy prices are highly destabilizing for the European Union.

It's a really, in a way, Europe is one of the major losers of the war.

The war is not popular.

Listen, Iran was, Iranian regime was never popular in Europe.

People didn't like it.

In many countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, there is also quite strong anti-Islam sentiments.

But at the same time, people are not clear what President Trump wants to achieve.

And also after Venezuela, when you have this kind of a magic easy victory, people have the feeling that they don't know the direction in which President Trump will go.

And he was not particularly popular in Europe anymore.

But in my view now, he's much more problematic also for the new right.

They don't know to stay with him, to leave him.

They don't understand him anymore.

They had the feeling that they're on the same page, and now they're not sure.

Ivan Krastev, thanks for joining today.

Thank you for inviting me.

Now to Puppet Regime, where we cash in on any of the credibility that we may have earned from you during the first 20 minutes of this episode.

Roll that tape.

Hello Europe.

Just calling to tell you that we do not need your help in the Strait of Hormuz.

We are glad to hear this, sir.

Yeah, same here.

- We do need help in the Strait of Hormuz.

But you just said you did not.

We did not until you said you wouldn't.

Also you did not ask us when you did and you are asking us now that you don't.

German is so confusing.

Anyway, I changed my mind.

The help is on the way very strongly.

What?

- Is the help in the room avec nous right now?

Oh.

- Very cute.

So this is how you treat us after we spent all those years protecting you because you're so stupid and weak?

Hormuz is a simple problem that can be solved very safely.

Surely a totally stupid country would not be able to solve it alone, huh?

Exactly!

That's... Oh, I see what you did there.

I see what you did there.

Very clever.

Hey, Pete, how much hope are we going to need to take Greenland?

That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, but you have your own former boss that you want to dethrone, so we're looking at you Magyar.

Check us out at GZEROmedia.com [music] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is investing in the future, working to create an impact in advanced recycling and an emerging technology companies that will help shape tomorrow.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And...