Who is Peter Magyar, Hungary’s new leader who trounced Viktor Orban?

Peter Magyar, once a staunch loyalist of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has ended his mentor’s 16-year rule after his Tisza party won Sunday’s parliamentary election by a landslide. With votes in 97.35 percent of precincts counted early on Monday, Magyar’s centre-right party has secured 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament and 53.6 percent of the vote. Orban’s Christian nationalist Fidesz party won 55 seats with 37.8 percent of the votes, according to official results.

In a victory speech to tens of thousands of supporters gathered along the Danube River in the capital, Budapest, on Sunday, 45-year-old Magyar said: “Tonight, truth prevailed over lies.” “Today, we won because Hungarians didn’t ask what their homeland could do for them; they asked what they could do for their homeland. And you followed through.” But who is Magyar? And what does his victory mean for Hungary and the rest of the world?

Peter Magyar, whose last name literally means Hungarian, was born in Budapest in March 1981 into a family of lawyers. He is also the great-nephew of Ferenc Madl, who was president of Hungary from 2000 to 2005, overlapping with part of Orban’s first term as prime minister (1998-2002). After completing his education with a degree in law at the Pazmany Peter Catholic University near Budapest in 2004, he started his career in corporate law.

At university, he joined Orban’s Fidesz, which was then in opposition, after failing to secure a majority in the 2002 election, despite securing most seats. In an interview with Hungarian podcast Fokuszcsoport last October, Magyar said, as a young boy, he was inspired by Orban and his politics because of the way he led Hungary’s pro-democracy protests in 1989 against the Soviet Union and the Moscow-backed communist leadership in Budapest. In September 2006, Magyar legally assisted Fidesz on a no-fee basis.

As the main opposition party, Fidesz was then taking part in a series of antigovernment protests against Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany. He had admitted lying about the country’s economic condition. That same year, Magyar married Judit Varga, who would later serve as Orban’s justice minister between 2019 and 2023.

They have three children. In 2010, when Fidesz returned to power and Orban became prime minister again, Magyar was appointed as an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2011, he joined the Permanent Representation of Hungary to the European Union in Brussels.