Hungary’s April 12 vote could reset Brussels’s most annoying habit: relying on Orbán

A vote that Brussels cannot quite ignore

Europe is paying close attention to Hungary’s parliamentary election on April 12, and not just out of habit. The result could shape how the European Union handles foreign policy, defence, energy and migration for years to come.

No member state has disrupted the bloc’s ability to speak with one voice quite like Hungary has under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. That is not exactly a niche achievement.

Over the years, Orbán’s government has refused to join a common EU asylum policy or a shared defence mechanism. It has pushed back against Europe’s move toward energy autonomy built around solar and wind power while continuing to rely on Russian oil and gas. It has also blocked the start of talks on Ukraine’s EU membership and vetoed 90 billion euros, or $105 billion, in low-cost loans for Kyiv.

That is why many observers see the outcome of this vote as bigger than a normal national election. Fidesz, which has governed for 16 years, could either deepen that pattern or finally lose the job of being Europe’s most reliable source of procedural headaches.

Orbán’s veto politics have changed the EU

For some in Europe, Hungary’s role has been a warning about how unanimity can be used as a weapon.

“We have two governments in the EU [Hungary, Slovakia] and another outside it, North Macedonia, which are fanatically Trumpian and at the same time fanatically pro-Russian,” said Angelos Syrigos, a conservative New Democracy lawmaker in Athens, referring to Donald Trump.

“In the European Council [of 27 government leaders], the threat of a veto pushes states to find mutually agreeable solutions. We don’t want vetoes. Orban constantly vetoes things,” he said. He described Fidesz as “a party that is opposed to the way the EU works”.

The point, in other words, is not subtle. Hungary has made itself very good at forcing compromise by refusing to compromise first.

Still, the EU has also learned how to work around that problem when it has to.

At a December 2023 summit, Orbán was asked to leave the room so the other leaders could unanimously declare Ukraine a candidate country. Reports at the time said he was persuaded by a promise to release 10 billion euros, or $11.6 billion, in blocked EU funds.

“[There are] these kinds of ad hoc structures … you just send Viktor out for a coffee when you have a very important decision to make,” said Katalin Miklossy, Jean Monnet Professor in Eastern European Studies at the University of Helsinki. “[EU members] started to become more practical about it.”

She added: “The problem was with the European Union - that we were weak because we were stuck to the rules, playing by the book. So this is now gone.”

Tisza, Magyar and the prospect of a different Hungary

Orbán’s main challenger is Péter Magyar, leader of the opposition Tisza party. Magyar wants Hungary to move closer to Europe, and he has said Ukraine’s membership should be decided by binding referendum.

He also says he would crack down on corruption, which could unlock billions of euros in withheld EU money. And he wants to stop Hungary’s departure from the International Criminal Court.

Polls currently put Tisza at about 50 percent of the vote, roughly 10 points ahead of Fidesz.

That does not mean the fight is over. Fidesz has spent years shaping the political landscape to suit itself, including by gerrymandering constituencies to strengthen its parliamentary majority. Democracy, as it turns out, can be made more durable by redrawing maps.

“There’s the deep state, there’s the legions of corruption, of the oligopoly, the funnelling of money to the close Orban insiders,” said SM Amadae, adjunct professor of World Politics at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

“I would be cautiously pessimistic and say it’s very hard for me to conceive of how this could change. And maybe it’s because we’ve all known of the Fidesz party’s being in power for so long, that it’s a failing of our imagination,” she told Al Jazeera.

The EU’s habit of improvising

Even if Orbán loses, he will not be the only European leader tempted by the politics of obstruction. Analysts point to Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš as other illiberal figures who could adopt a similar role.

But the EU has been pushed toward flexibility before.

When Greece became the first eurozone member to default in 2010, threatening the currency’s survival, other EU governments set up the Greek Loan Facility and lent money bilaterally because the bloc did not yet have a common fund for such crises.

The same logic is now being applied to Ukraine. If the blocked funds remain frozen, one proposal is for the other 26 EU members to issue a set of bilateral loans and simply bypass Hungary’s veto altogether.

That kind of workaround is messy, but it is also very European: first get blocked, then invent a structure that was probably needed all along.

The larger issue is that the EU missed a structural chance in 2005, when referenda in France and the Netherlands killed a constitution that would have replaced unanimity with qualified majority voting. Orbán’s power has grown in part because unanimity survived that failure.

And yet the bloc has continued to change under pressure. In 2020 it issued its first common bond to support an economy battered by the COVID-19 pandemic. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the EU began pouring money into its defence industry and says it ultimately wants to become a defence union.

“There is a very strong belief that Russia will turn on us after 2030 or so,” Miklossy said. “So we are in a hurry … Ukraine is the buffer zone, and they are fighting for us.”

Why this election matters beyond Hungary

Ukraine’s role in Europe’s security has helped build support for aid, but the limits of the EU’s improvised style are becoming obvious.

Orbán agreed in December to the 90-billion-euro loan package for Ukraine after being promised that Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic would not have to back it. Then he reversed himself last month, saying Ukraine had refused to repair the Druzhba pipeline that carries Russian oil to Hungary after it was accidentally bombed by Russia.

A stormy summit failed to change his mind.

And even a Tisza victory would not instantly solve Ukraine’s funding problem. Victoria Vdovychenko, co-leader of the Future of Ukraine programme at Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics, said Kyiv will not get access to the loan right away even if Magyar wins.

“In December 2025, there was a first European Council decision, when the European Union was promising this money as soon as possible, starting from January 2026,” she said.

“[This] never happened, as we know already, and now it’s not again happening. Plausibly, feasibly, [this] will be happening only in June,” she added.

Still, a Tisza victory would matter far beyond Budapest. Amadae said it would send a strong signal to Europe and the United States alike.

“It would be a big shot of confidence into the EU,” she said. “There is an existential threat to this set of values that the EU is based on. But I think it’s more that stealth creep of illiberalism, the far right populism, the economic disenfranchisement of the people that aren’t part of the economic pie. I don’t think it’s from an invasion of Russia.”

“It’s gonna be this big feeling of, ‘we could do things’. Imagine all those countless protests that have gone on with people marching; there’ll be a sense of ownership over the future of Hungary,” she said.

She also said it could affect politics in the United States, where Trump’s Republican Party faces difficult polling ahead of congressional elections this November.

For now, the question is simple enough: can Péter Magyar actually beat a party that has spent 16 years learning how to survive?

There are reasons to doubt it. There are also reasons Brussels is watching so closely.