The centre right is not dead. It just forgot how to fight.

What Hungary’s seismic election result can teach Australia about the difference between conviction and theatre

Last Saturday, 79 per cent of Hungarians turned out to do something most of Europe thought impossible. They voted Viktor Orbán out of office. Not with a progressive revolution or a left-wing surge, but with a centre-right lawyer who looked voters in the eye and offered them something Orbán had long stopped providing: credibility.

Péter Magyar’s TISZA party secured a two-thirds supermajority, 138 seats in a 199-seat parliament, on 53.6 per cent of the vote. Orbán’s Fidesz was reduced to 55 seats. The turnout was the highest in Hungary’s post-Communist democratic history. Nearly 293,000 young people voted for the first time. Sixteen years of nationalist strongman politics dismantled in a single day. The weapon of choice was competence.

What Magyar actually ran on

The platform deserves close attention, because it dismantles the lazy assumption that centre-right politics has to choose between progressive capitulation and populist mimicry.

Magyar ran on anti-corruption and judicial independence, restored EU and NATO relationships, and an energy transition away from Russian dependence by 2035. He proposed joining the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. He called for term limits on elected officials, including a two-term cap on the Prime Minister, and promised to declassify Communist-era agent files to shed light on wealth accumulated during the 1990s privatisation period. He pledged to rebuild checks and balances and make the judiciary independent of political interference.

He also kept Orbán’s border fence and rejected EU migrant quotas.

Magyar won a supermajority while holding a firm position on borders and sovereignty. He didn’t chase progressive approval. He took conservative instincts, stripped them of theatre, and dressed them in substance. The European People’s Party, the traditional centre-right bloc in Brussels, has a new standard-bearer. And he won by pulling the conversation back to the centre of gravity where most voters actually live.

Orbán’s quality control failure

Orbán’s defeat was structural. After sixteen years, his governance had calcified into something closer to a patronage network than a functioning administration.

Transparency International ranked Hungary dead last in the EU for corruption in 2025, sharing the basement with Bulgaria, at 84th globally with a score of 40 points. That was the worst score Hungary had ever recorded. The European Commission projected GDP growth of just 0.4 per cent for 2025. Hungary permanently lost EUR 1.1 billion in EU cohesion funding due to rule-of-law deficiencies, and a further EUR 18 billion in EU funds remained blocked, representing roughly 10 per cent of GDP. CNN reported on a $1.5 million government-funded roundabout built from nowhere to nowhere as a symbol of the Orbánist economy.

Voters noticed. When Magyar offered transparency, institutional accountability, and actual governance, the response was decisive. The margin was a rout.

Voters eventually tire of performance masquerading as governance. They tire of the strongman who mistakes volume for conviction and grievance for policy. Orbán’s fall was a quality control failure, pure and simple. The product stopped delivering, and the customers found a better supplier.

Meanwhile, in Australia

This should be studied in Canberra with the intensity of a post-mortem. Because what just happened in Budapest is the inverse of what is happening here.

The Coalition’s primary vote has fallen to 18 per cent. One Nation sits at 27 per cent nationally, one point behind Labor and four points clear of the party that once defined the centre right in this country. In Queensland, One Nation leads the primary vote outright at 30 per cent. In the South Australian state election last month, One Nation outpolled the Liberals in 31 of 47 seats. Thirty-five per cent of voters who backed the Coalition at the 2025 federal election have since swung behind Pauline Hanson’s outfit.

The Farrer by-election, scheduled for 9 May, is shaping up as a live demonstration. Polling has One Nation’s David Farley leading the primary vote at 28.7 per cent. The Liberal candidate, Raissa Butkowski, sits at 19.1 per cent. The Nationals are at 5.2 per cent. Labor opted not to field a candidate at all. In a seat that was held by the Liberals for its entire existence, the party is now third.

The instinct to chase

The instinct from some quarters has been predictable. Senator Alex Antic argued the Liberals should stop offering “teal-like policies” and shift further right. Alexander Downer suggested the party learn from One Nation’s stance on immigration and race. Angus Taylor rolled Sussan Ley in a leadership spill on 13 February, positioning himself as the hard-right corrective.

The logic is seductive in its simplicity: voters are going right, so follow them.

Yesterday, Taylor put that logic into practice. The Coalition’s Australian Values Migration Plan proposes making adherence to “Australian values” a legally binding visa condition, introducing mandatory social media screening for applicants, creating an ICE-style multi-agency taskforce to track and deport an estimated 65,000 visa overstayers, reassessing some visas already granted, and to and bringing back temporary protection visas. The existing Australian Values Statement, which the Coalition called a “tick-box exercise,” would become an enforceable legal instrument.

The response was instructive. Labor’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke called it “a diatribe” designed to win back voters drifting toward One Nation. The Greens labelled it a “2026 version of the White Australia policy.” Amnesty International called it “divisive, discriminatory, and lacking in humanity.” But the response that should concern the Liberal Party most came from the voters it was designed to court. One Nation supporters dismissed it as “weak,” “too little too late,” and reaffirmed their intention to vote for Hanson. Pauline Hanson herself claimed credit, telling radio she had “no doubt whatsoever” that One Nation’s rise had prompted the announcement.

This is the trap. Chase the populist vote with populist policy, and you inherit the criticism without the credibility. The announcement landed in no-man’s-land, too confrontational for the centre, too tentative for the flank it was courting.

Hungary proves this logic wrong.

Orbán was the archetype of the strategy that some in the Liberal Party are advocating. He moved right. He stayed right. He built an entire political identity around nationalist grievance, anti-EU posturing, and culture war theatrics. For sixteen years it worked, until it didn’t. When a credible alternative appeared, one that shared conservative instincts on borders and sovereignty but coupled them with transparency and institutional respect, voters didn’t hesitate.

The instinct to chase One Nation further right assumes those voters left because the Liberal Party was too moderate. The evidence suggests otherwise. They left because the Liberal Party seemed too incoherent. Too factionally consumed. Too busy with internal leadership dramas to articulate what it actually stood for. Voters drifted because conviction was scarce, and One Nation, whatever its policy limitations, projected certainty.

What One Nation actually offers

One Nation’s platform is worth examining with clinical precision, because it reveals both the appeal and the ceiling.

The party proposes cutting immigration to 130,000 visas per year, deporting 75,000 illegal migrants, introducing an eight-year waiting period for citizenship and welfare, and refusing entry to migrants from nations it deems to have “extremist ideologies incompatible with Australian values.” Immigration frames One Nation’s response to nearly every major challenge facing Australia: housing, cost of living, national security, social cohesion.

This is a one-tool toolkit. And for voters who feel unheard on immigration, that single tool resonates powerfully. But a political party that explains housing policy, economic growth, energy security, and social cohesion all through the prism of immigration is, by definition, a protest vehicle.

Magyar won because he validated voter frustration and matched it with a credible, detailed governing programme. The Liberal Party has the institutional infrastructure, the policy capability, and the electoral history to do the same. It simply hasn’t.

The opportunity

Mimicking One Nation concedes the argument before it begins. The real play is what Magyar pulled off in Hungary: a credible, competent centre-right alternative that takes conservative voters seriously without indulging the worst instincts of populist theatre.

That means a Liberal Party that can talk about border security without reading from One Nation's autocue. A party that takes energy policy seriously enough to have a position beyond opposing whatever Labor proposes. A party that can hold a leader for longer than a news cycle and present a coherent case for why opportunity, not grievance, is the conservative tradition worth defending.

The voters drifting to One Nation are disenchanted centre-right Australians who feel abandoned, and they are right to feel that way. They have looked at the Liberal Party and struggled to find a reason to stay. That failure belongs to the party, not the voters.

The result in Hungary just demonstrated that this drift is reversible. Magyar proved that when a centre-right party shows up with clarity and competence, willing to fight for institutional legitimacy rather than against it, voters come back. They come back in record numbers. They come back with a mandate so decisive it rewrites the constitution.

Seventy-nine per cent of Hungarians turned out to elect a centre-right government last Saturday.

Conservative government can succeed.

The blueprint is right there.

All it requires is a party with the discipline to use it

---

Julianna Burgess is a political adviser, communications professional, former federal Coalition staffer, and regular contributor to The Australian.