Vice President JD Vance waded into Hungary’s election to help a friendly candidate, but his attempt to tip the scales appears to have blown up in his face.
Vance suffered a stinging embarrassment Sunday as voters ousted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—an ally of President Donald Trump and an icon of the global right—despite the vice president’s on-the-ground campaigning blitz last week.
Orbán’s Fidesz party is on track to receive just 54 seats with over half of the votes counted, while his challenger Péter Magyar’s Tisza party is set to win 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament, The Guardian reports. Orbán, 62, has conceded defeat.
Hungarians went to the polls in record numbers on Sunday, pushing turnout to 78 percent, the highest in any election in Hungary’s post-Communist history.
The stunning defeat of the European Union’s longest-serving leader comes just days after Vance traveled to Hungary to campaign for Orbán, who has close ties with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Vance, 41, participated in a MAGA-esque rally to hype up Orbán, whom he called “one of the only true statesmen in Europe.”
During the rally, Vance railed against what he referred to as European Union “bureaucrats,” who had “tried to destroy the Hungarian economy” because “they hate this guy.”
“Will you stand for sovereignty and democracy, for truth and for the God of our forefathers?” Vance asked the Hungarian voters. “Then, my friends, go to the polls this weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you, and he stands for all these things.”
Vance also called Trump into the rally, and while the president didn’t pick up the call the first time, he eventually connected to the crowd to say, “I love Hungary, and I love Viktor. I’m telling you he’s a fantastic man.”
After Vance’s visit, prediction markets trimmed the odds of an Orbán win.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Vance’s office for comment.
In a speech on Sunday, Orbán said the election result is “painful for us, but clear,” according to The Guardian. “The responsibility for and the opportunity to govern were not given to us.”
Over the last 16 years, MAGA’s European darling clamped down on press freedoms and consolidated power to the executive branch as he has dismantled many checks and balances within the country’s government.
But it was Orbán’s close ties to Moscow, along with a languishing economy, that emerged as a major campaign issue in the election.
On the morning of Vance’s trip last week, Bloomberg reported that Orbán had called Putin in October 2025 to offer help to Moscow “in any way” to win the war in Ukraine.
Magyar, 45, a former Orbán loyalist who broke from the Fidesz party in 2024, ran on an anti-corruption and pro-EU platform.
If his Tisza party secures the supermajority it is currently projected to win, it would allow Magyar to dismantle key features of Orbán’s “illiberal democracy,” Politico reports. Orbán’s defeat also removes the EU’s chief internal disruptor from its 27-member bloc.
