Central European country ruled by Viktor Orban, one of the "Visegrad Four" (V4) along with the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia.
Hungary's population has fallen from 10.7m in 1980 to 9.5m. The pre-first-world-war fear of nemzethalal (national extinction) among more numerous Slavs and Germans has deep historical echoes. Electoral defeats for the opposition have prompted waves of liberal emigration: surveys commissioned for "Democratic Drain", a book by Justin Gest of George Mason University, found that Hungarians who expressed interest in emigrating were consistently more liberal than their average compatriots. The departure of liberal citizens may be helping Viktor Orban's regime survive.
Orban started a big pro-natal push in 2011, giving parents everything from tax breaks and cash handouts to free child care. These policies cost 5.5% of GDP annually—more than almost any government will spend on an ageing population in any year between now and 2050. Mothers of three or more children pay no income tax, and that exemption is being extended to mothers of two. Parents can get interest-free loans and subsidised mortgages.
Hungary's fertility rate was 1.25 when Orban came to power in 2010. It climbed to 1.61 by 2021, but by 2025 had fallen back to 1.31, with just 72,000 babies born—the fewest on record. The rate has followed a similar path to those of nearby Czech Republic and Slovakia, which spend much less on child support, suggesting handouts encouraged some mothers not to have more babies but to have the same number sooner.
Hungary gets about 90% of its oil from Russia and buys lots of Russian natural gas. Many believe its pro-Russian stance is cemented by contracts it awarded to Rosatom, Russia's state-owned nuclear firm, in 2014—without going through tenders—to build two nuclear reactors. Hungary is assessed to have a "high" dependence on Russian-built nuclear power. Along with Slovakia, it lobbied the European Commission to delay plans to introduce taxes or levies on Russian enriched uranium, arguing the measures would lead to higher prices.
Before the second world war, Budapest almost rivalled Berlin, Paris and Vienna in intellectual heft. The city nurtured world-renowned musicians (Bela Bartok, Franz Liszt), writers (Arthur Koestler, Karl Polanyi), film-makers (Michael Curtiz, of "Casablanca" fame, and Alexander Korda) and physicists (John von Neumann, Leo Szilard). Budapest was home to one of the biggest Jewish communities in Europe, with about 200,000 people—roughly a quarter of the city's population. The central synagogue on Dohany Street was, and remains, the largest in Europe.
Hungary's government, led by Admiral Miklos Horthy, joined the Axis powers in late 1940, hoping Nazi Germany would help it recover territory lost after the first world war. Local authorities gradually curtailed the rights of the country's Jews to appease the Nazis, while Horthy quietly kept lines open to the British and Americans.
The Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944. Within months some 400,000 Jews from the countryside had been rounded up and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Budapest's Jews were pushed into ghettos. When Ferenc Szalasi, a Nazi sympathiser, took over from Horthy, the Arrow Cross—Hungary's virulently antisemitic paramilitary organisation—was empowered to terrorise and kill at will. Jews snatched from the ghettos were tied together in threes, the middle one shot so as to weigh down the others as they were thrown into the Danube. Perhaps 20,000 Jews were killed this way. Soviet forces fought their way into Budapest in February 1945, losing around 80,000 men, and showed little mercy in victory. Large parts of the old city were levelled in the final assault. Many in the Arrow Cross carried on their thuggish ways under the auspices of the Soviet regime's secret police. Budapest has never recovered its pre-war lustre.
Orban has dominated Hungarian politics since 2010. Fidesz's tactics—stacking courts, skewing the electoral system, installing cronies, taming critical media and using intimidation to secure business support—are described by political scientists as "competitive authoritarianism". His formula was the model for "Project 2025" in America.
On April 12th 2026 Peter Magyar's Tisza party defeated Fidesz by roughly 52% to 40%, winning a two-thirds supermajority of 137 of 199 seats. Our Homeland, an ultra-nationalist party, took 6%. Rural regions in the east and south deserted Fidesz. Magyar declared a "complete change of regime" and demanded the resignations of Fidesz-installed officials. His first priority is unlocking frozen EU funds worth around €18bn, nearly 10% of GDP. Economists think this could raise the growth rate by a percentage point or more by reducing debt and lowering interest rates. Magyar also promised to lift Orban's veto on a €90bn EU loan for Ukraine. Gergely Karacsony, the mayor of Budapest, says the city, which generates 40% of Hungary's GDP, may go bankrupt owing to a "solidarity tax" levied by the Orban government to divert funds from richer, opposition-run cities.
The European Union suspended billions of euros in aid over rule-of-law violations during the Fidesz years.
Hungary's electoral system is systematically biased towards Fidesz. Under the old system parliament had 386 seats, with 176 elected in single-member constituencies and the rest by proportional representation. In 2011 Fidesz pushed through a law reducing the number of seats to 199, with 106 representing single-member districts. As the biggest party Fidesz has tended to sweep most single-member districts, exaggerating its majorities, and Orban has gerrymandered many districts to increase his advantage. Big liberal cities such as Budapest and Szeged were given their own districts, concentrating opposition votes in fewer seats. Smaller opposition-leaning towns were combined with surrounding rural areas that tend to vote for Fidesz. In 2022 Fidesz won 54% of the popular vote but 68% of the seats. The public broadcaster serves as a megaphone for Fidesz, as do nearly all local newspapers in the countryside. Ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring countries, granted voting rights by Fidesz, tend to back it. Roma, who make up perhaps 7% of the population, generally support Fidesz in exchange for public-works jobs. Tisza needs to beat Fidesz by almost five points to win a majority.
In recent years a slew of websites, magazines, institutes and think-tanks, funded by Hungarian quasi-state entities disbursing tens of millions of dollars a year, have sprung up to influence conservative discourse across the European Union. Brussels Signal, a website that carries neither advertising nor subscriptions, was created by a former Fidesz political adviser. Related ventures include Remix News (stories about crimes committed by migrants) and the European Conservative (policy). MCC Brussels, one of the best-funded think-tanks in Brussels despite being only four years old, receives a generous stipend from the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest, which was endowed with over $1bn in assets in 2020, including lucrative stakes in Hungary's national oil company, and is chaired by a close aide of Orban. "Hungary House", a palatial venue in Brussels, opened in 2024. The Trump-adoring CPAC conference has come to Budapest five times. Frank Furedi, the Hungarian-born boss of MCC Brussels, speaks of the need for an "alternative intelligentsia" to counter prevailing liberal groupthink. The opposition Tisza party says it would throttle the Orbanite ideological network should it win, but America's State Department is said to want to shower money on similar mouthpieces.
Transparency International's corruption-perceptions index ranks Hungary as the most crooked country in the EU. Over 4m people watched "The Dynasty", a documentary by Direkt36, detailing the luxurious lifestyle of Orban's family, including his father, a former agricultural engineer, who owns an 18th-century palace in the countryside. The former head of the central bank, once a close Orban ally, left office after the state auditor accused him of involvement in the theft of up to €1.2bn ($1.4bn). An independent MP claimed lavish renovations at the bank involved 72 gold-coloured toilet brushes at €130 each.
Under Fidesz, billions of dollars in infrastructure contracts have gone to companies owned by Istvan Tiborcz, Orban's son-in-law, and Lorinc Meszaros, a childhood friend. In 2025 some 71% of single-bid government contracts went to companies associated with Orban's allies, up from 39% in 2022, according to the Corruption Research Centre of Budapest. Hungarian firms invest relatively little in research and development, presumably because political loyalty is a cheaper way to win business.
Since 2022 the European Commission has frozen more than €16bn that Hungary was to receive from the EU's post-covid recovery fund and its development scheme for poorer regions. The sums are huge for a country of Hungary's size: their loss has knocked a percentage point or more off the growth rate for the past couple of years, according to ING Bank.
Hungary spends just 6.5% of GDP on health care; the other Visegrad countries all spend 8% or more. Its health-care system ranks last in the EU or close to it by nearly all measures of quality, including the highest rate of mortality from cancer. The system needs about 6,000 general practitioners but has only 5,000, and their average age is 61. At the Szent Janos Hospital in Budapest, the walls of the intensive-care unit are crumbling.
Hungary has always done less for Ukraine than the other Visegrad countries. Orban repeatedly blocked EU aid to Ukraine, often as a bargaining chip to get the bloc to release funding for Hungary frozen over rule-of-law violations, and vetoed a €90bn EU loan. He tried to recruit the Czech Republic and Slovakia as allies in an anti-Ukrainian stance, though both remained broadly aligned with the EU's pro-Ukrainian consensus. Orban's ejection by voters in mid-April 2026 made other leaders' doubts about Ukraine's EU accession more visible, now they could no longer hide behind Hungary's veto. Magyar promised to lift the veto on the €90bn EU loan.
Despite Viktor Orban's past claim that Hungary did not require "a single migrant" for its economy to function, he has quietly embraced guest-worker schemes. In 2024 around 78,000 non-EU migrants worked in Hungary, some 92% more than in 2019.
After a good run in the past decade, Hungary's economy has run out of steam. GDP shrank by 0.8% in 2023 and expanded by just 0.4% in 2024, while Poland's grew by 3.6%. Inflation peaked at 17% in 2023, the highest in the EU. The forint slid from 360 to the euro at the start of 2022 to 415 in early 2025. To tame inflation the central bank has kept its policy rate at 6.25%, more than four percentage points above the ECB's rate, crimping investment. Wages have risen rapidly owing to labour shortages: decades of emigration and low fertility are causing the workforce to shrink. The government limits food stores' profit margins on staples such as potatoes—a relatively sophisticated price control. The pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which hugely inflated energy prices, depressed growth. Rising tariffs imposed by Donald Trump weigh on the country's open economy. Germany is the biggest investor in the region and trades more with the V4 collectively than with America or China.
Hungary received 44% of all Chinese investment in the EU in 2023, according to Rhodium. In that year Viktor Orban and Xi Jinping signed an "All-Weather Comprehensive Strategic Partnership for the New Era", the highest form of co-operation China offers. Hungary took a 20-year loan of about $1.9bn from China to finance its section of the Budapest-Belgrade railway, the first Chinese-built railway in the EU, which opened in full on February 27th 2026. It classified details of the loan and contracts as secret. The Hungarian stretch has dozens of level crossings, limiting speeds to 160kph.
The automotive industry generates 9% of GDP in both Hungary and the Czech Republic. Audi (part of Volkswagen) employs more than 11,000 workers at a factory in Gyor; a Mercedes plant in Kecskemet has over 5,000 employees. BYD announced in May 2025 that it will establish its European headquarters in Hungary, where it is building an enormous factory. CATL is building a huge battery plant in Debrecen. Hungary spends only 1-2% of GDP on research and development.
A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.