Published by The i Paper (16th February, 2026)
The video posted on social media last week was a sinister echo from the past, from those days when Russia’s spooks used surveillance and sinister tricks to ensure its satellite states in eastern Europe stayed loyal to the Kremlin. A slim man, clad in a crisp white shirt and sharp blue suit, spoke to the camera as he accused his own country of targeting him in a secretive sex and drugs sting.
He denied using drugs, admitted to consensual sex with a former girlfriend, and warned that his nation’s security services were being used in a bid to destroy his campaign to oust their unpopular prime minister.
This dramatic moment showed the nastiness of the most important election taking place this year in Europe. Peter Magyar, the Hungarian opposition leader who is substantially ahead of long-term prime minister Viktor Orban in the polls, accused rivals of deploying shameful KGB-style tactics just days before the start of his election campaign this week.
He was responding to a widely-circulated image of a bedroom along with the message “coming soon” – suggesting a video would soon follow – that was posted on a website purporting to belong to an ally. “I am a 45-year-old man and I have a regular sex life with an adult partner,” said Magyar calmly.
Even this was a loaded comment by Magyar since he launched his party Tisza after a government-linked child abuse scandal that forced two top government officials – the then president and Magyar’s former wife, who was serving as justice minister – to quit in 2024.
The covering up of horrific abuse at a children’s home helped to corrode public trust in Orban’s team. And this created the opening for Magyar, a one-time loyalist, to build up his new centre-right party quickly and mount a strong challenge to the odious leader whose “illiberal democracy” became the model for the divisive wave of nationalist populism that has infected Europe and the United States over the past decade.
Bear in mind that Hungary – scene of these shocking events – is a member of the European Union. Yet it was no surprise that the day after Magyar’s statement, Donald Trump posted enthusiastic praise for Orban on social media, claiming that this man who has ruled Hungary since 2010 was “a strong and powerful leader” who fights for his country “just like I do” and was “delivering phenomenal results”.
Nor that the president’s poodle Marco Rubio travelled to Budapest in a show of support for Orban following the US Secretary of State’s soft-soap selling of the White House’s destruction of the liberal post-war order on our continent, which was applauded by deluded European leaders at the Munich Security Conference.
Orban is, after all, the pro-Russian leader who created the template for Trump and all the president’s populist disciples. His regime is routinely hailed as an inspiration by hard-right ideologues with its admiration for autocrats, scapegoating of refugees, hostility to Muslims, talk of civilisational decline, targeting of LGBT citizens, attacks on globalisation, stifling of the media, enrichment of cronies and creeping erosion of democratic checks on power.
Such is his significance that the academic James Orr, senior adviser to Nigel Farage and mentor to the vile US vice-president JD Vance, saluted Orban as a “counterexample to the ideology in my own country that rejects national pride and heritage” while praising Hungary’s approach to the war in next-door Ukraine that is subverting European support for Kyiv’s survival.
This is why Hungary’s election in April is so consequential in the struggle to salvage democracy amid a rising tide of populism. Here is a stagnating country that shows the dismal failure of this brand of politics while exposing how self-serving nationalist leaders love to talk about “the people” just as their family and supportive cronies grow obscenely rich. The watchdog Transparency International has labelled it the most corrupt EU country in recent years, falling to its lowest ranking in the latest index to sit on a par with Burkina Faso, Cuba and Tanzania.
Magyar – sidestepping culture wars and shrugging off what he terms a “tsunami of lies” about his character – is leading polls with his upstart party by concentrating his fire on the sputtering economy, surging cost of living, ceaseless sleaze and deteriorating public services.
Orban was, all too typically, a shapeshifting egotist on his march to power. After attending Oxford University on a scholarship funded by populist hate figure George Soros, he set out in post-Communist politics as a liberal voice who secured Nato membership in his first term between 1998 and 2002.
After losing office, he returned as prime minister in 2010 and began talking about his creation of “illiberal democracy” as he and his circle changed the electoral system to their advantage, stacked the judiciary, cracked down on liberal bodies, battled Brussels and recently bickered with Kyiv over Ukraine joining the EU. “The era of liberal democracy is over,” he declared portentously in 2018. “We will build a 21st-century Christian democracy.”
Trump has tried to help his pal, with torrents of praise and stunts such as exemption from sanctions supposedly being imposed on any nations buying Russian oil. And analysts suggest Magyar must win by at least four percentage points to overcome electoral manipulation.
But while Orban and his patsy media outlets pretend the country’s future is bright, increasing numbers of voters can see the reality behind their propaganda. Hungary has become the poorest EU nation on some metrics and its population is shrinking; ironically, this is a country in need of migrants to inject some dynamism and help balance its ratio of pensioners to younger citizens.
Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation – the Washington think tank that drew up the blueprint for Trump’s appalling second term – insists we should all learn from Orban’s reign, describing Hungary as the model for a vision of “modern statecraft”. And he is right. Hungary shows in starkest terms the dark, destructive and divisive reality of hard-right populism.
Let us hope it can restore liberal decency in place of democratic backsliding and apparent Soviet-era trickery in two months’ time.