U.S. Democrats celebrated the defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Sunday, while Donald Trump’s allies and Republican peers offered a more mixed response to the loss of the leader that Trump had endorsed.
Trump had backed Orban leading up to the vote, even speaking briefly last week at a campaign rally in Hungary, when U.S. Vice President JD Vance telephoned his boss upon taking the stage.
But Orban lost power after 16 years as Hungarians voted in record numbers for a pro-EU course spearheaded by center-right rival Peter Magyar.
The key point for me is that their socialist and green parties stepped out to endorse the new (non-progressive) party so it could have supermajority instead of Orban’s party. In other words, they took the strategic/pragmatic path, unlike the result in the US.