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

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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.

Who is Magyar, once a staunch Orban loyalist?

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.

“There was a surge of energy around the regime change that swept me up as a child,” Magyar said.

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.

After his tenure in Brussels, he returned to Hungary in 2018 and was appointed to the board of directors of the state-owned road operation and maintenance company Magyar Kozut ZRT. He also became the head of the Orban government’s student loan provider.

Why did Magyar become Orban’s opponent?

Since his entry into politics, Magyar served as a loyal Fidesz official. But a scandal in 2024 soured his relationship with the party.

In February 2024, it became known that almost a year earlier, Hungary’s former President Katalin Novak had pardoned a man convicted of helping cover up a sex abuse case in a children’s home. Also implicated in the pardon was Varga, who had signed the pardon as justice minister.

Varga resigned in 2023 as justice minister to lead Fidesz’s charge in the 2024 European Parliament elections, and at the time, was widely seen as a potential successor to Orban. Magyar and Varga divorced in 2023.

Protests broke out after the revelations surrounding the children’s home scandal. Novak resigned as president, and Varga stepped down from her seat in the Hungarian parliament.

Magyar, meanwhile, emerged as a face of the public outrage over the scandal.

In March that year, in a Facebook post, he accused Orban’s government of corruption and also published a recording of a January 2023 conversation with his ex-wife in which she detailed an attempt by aides of Orban’s cabinet chief to interfere in the prosecution files of a corruption case.

He also told Hungarian media outlet Partizan that Orban and his allies were “hiding behind women’s skirts” in the scandal.

Gabor Gyori, a senior analyst at Policy Solutions, a Budapest-based policy research institute, told Al Jazeera that Magyar’s resignation from the party was more of a gradual estrangement.

“Peter had told local media that he had become disillusioned for some time and increasingly frustrated with all the problems, the corruption, within Fidesz,” Gyori said.

“But he did not want to leave the party as long as his former wife was in power, and after she resigned in the wake of the sex scandal, he used it as an opportunity to break from the party,” Gyori added.

The Facebook post and interviews with local media helped increase Magyar’s domestic popularity. Earlier that month, he had told reporters in Hungary that he planned to establish a new, pro-European Union political party.

“The main reason Magyar became popular with people in Hungary in 2024 was because, till then, there was this kind of hopelessness in the opposition. People felt that no opposition party would be capable of challenging Fidesz successfully. But when Peter came along amid the scandal, there was sudden hope,” Gyori said.

But it was only in April 2024 that Magyar decided to join the centre-right Tisza as a candidate in the 2024 European Parliament elections and Hungary’s national elections in 2026.

He won a seat in the European Parliament, representing Tisza. On Sunday, his party won the Hungarian elections by a landslide, and he is projected to become the country’s next prime minister.

Zsuzsanna Vegh, a political analyst at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told Al Jazeera that Magyar’s victory in the national elections has dispelled the belief that Orban could not be defeated.

“Magyar built something new from the bottom up and, through his own commitment, gave voters not only a reason to hope but also to believe. He managed to unite an ideologically diverse coalition – not of parties, but of voters,” she said.

“He did not outflank Fidesz by challenging him from the right and being more radical, but by focusing on policy responses, hitting a moderate tone and giving back agency to voters to decide about their and their country’s future,” she added.

Scandals involving Magyar

But Magyar’s rise to power has also been marred by scandals, including charges of domestic violence by his former wife, Varga.

Soon after Magyar posted her recording on Facebook in March 2024, she wrote on the social media platform: “I said what he wanted to hear so I could get away as soon as possible. In a situation like this, any person can say things they don’t mean in a state of intimidation.”

“Peter Magyar made a secret recording of his former spouse, me, in our home and now used this to achieve his political goals. He is not worthy of anybody’s trust,” she added.

In February this year, he was accused of a sex scandal and drug use after photos of an apartment and a bed circulated on social media.

While he admitted visiting the apartment, and said he was intimate with his former girlfriend with her consent, he rejected allegations that he consumed drugs. He also accused his former girlfriend of luring him into a “honey trap”.

“That night I didn’t realise that I was facing a secret service operation, so I let myself be seduced,” Magyar said in a video on his social media platform on February 12.

“But later, I realised that I had walked into a classic Russia-style compromising situation. But since I had not done anything illegal, my conscience is clear,” he said.

He also accused Orban’s party of targeting him on personal grounds.

“The Fidesz leaders know that I have my sons with me this week as our grassroots campaign starts next week. They wanted to ruin this period and put me under even greater psychological pressure, so I made a mistake. They will not succeed,” Magyar added.

What will Magyar’s policy positions be?

Magyar has promised to revive Hungary’s economy, which has been stagnant since early 2022.

He has also pledged to improve relations with the EU. Under Orban, ties between Brussels and Budapest were tense due to his close ties with Russia. Magyar said he would reduce Hungary’s dependence on Russian energy by 2035, while striving for “pragmatic relations” with Moscow. He also said he would focus on getting the EU to release funds frozen by it over Hungary’s alleged failure to meet a series of the bloc’s conditions for financial support.

At the same time, Magyar has in the past been critical of Ukraine’s push to join the EU imminently, arguing that this process should not be rushed – placing him at odds with Kyiv.

Vegh said it is not clear what sort of leader Magyar will be, but observed that he is seeking to distinguish himself by underlining his role as being of service to the public and the nation.

“In doing so, he draws a clear line between Fidesz’s self-enrichment and abuse of power, and his intended government of service,” she said.

For many young Hungarians, Magyar’s election represents a change that had appeared hard to imagine just a few months earlier.

Zalan Varga, a Hungarian student based in France, told Al Jazeera that he believes Magyar has real potential to become a good leader of the country.

“Hungarians have every reason to feel hopeful, especially after living their lives under the same regime for 16 years that was fuelled purely by hate and setting people against each other,” he said.

But he noted that making the transition from an opposition leader to Hungary’s governing politician will be where the real test begins for Magyar.

“To lead a country as divided as Hungary, he will need to be genuinely open to criticism, especially from civil society and will have to treat them as valuable partners,” Varga said.

Izabella Nagy, a young professional in Budapest, told Al Jazeera that Magyar had “ignited a sense of hope for millions of Hungarians, both at home and in the diaspora”.

“I have been following the recent political shifts closely. Peter Magyar’s background within Fidesz gives him a unique, ‘insider’ understanding of how the current system operates, which is perhaps why he has been able to mobilise so effectively,” she said.

But she noted that the hard work he has to do to improve the country is only just beginning.

“Rebuilding a democracy and a fractured society is a far more gruelling task than the dismantling of one, which we have witnessed over the last decade,” she said.

“While the path ahead is difficult, the enthusiasm of his team suggests they feel the weight of responsibility towards the millions of citizens who are now counting on them for genuine change,” she added.

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