The defeat of Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party in Hungary’s parliamentary election shouldn’t be seen as a shock. Opinion polls had long pointed in this direction. Nor should the outcome be divorced from a simple political reality: sixteen consecutive years in power, twenty in total, is an exceptionally long tenure by the standards of Central and Eastern Europe. Fatigue with familiar faces is inevitable, and psychologically understandable.
Yet the result contains a paradox. Orban’s defeat appears, in some ways, to confirm the very trend he has come to embody: the primacy of the national agenda, “my country first.” In recent years…
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