Hungary has become an unusually revealing case study for America in 2026. In April, Viktor Orbán—one of the European figures most admired by the MAGA movement—lost power after sixteen years as Hungary’s prime minister. Orbán cultivated a close relationship with Donald Trump, while influential figures on the American right treated Hungary as a political laboratory—a place to study how conservative power could be won, consolidated and translated into lasting institutional change.
That makes a different question worth asking after Orbán’s defeat: If Americans paid so much attention to how the Orbán system was built, shouldn’t they pay at least as much attention to what comes after it?
When Hungarian voters ended Orbán’s sixteen-year rule this spring, many in Europe and the United States saw the result as a democratic reset. Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s government has now passed its first hundred days in office. That is, of course, too little time to judge the long-term consequences of its policies. But it is enough to begin assessing the governing model taking shape: how the new leadership relates to institutions, how power is distributed inside the government, and how closely Magyar is adhering to the principles he championed in opposition.
Orbán is gone, the rhetoric has changed and new officials run the ministries. Yet senior state officials appear to enjoy limited real autonomy, while decision-making is increasingly concentrated around the prime minister. Hungary has changed its leader. It is less clear that it has changed its model of leadership.
One particularly striking example involved two senior appointments at Hungary’s public media. After reports emerged that two new executives were about to be appointed, journalists raised concerns about aspects of their previous records. Under one article discussing the controversy, Magyar posted a terse response: “I don’t think so”—apparently signaling that the appointments would not go ahead. The next day, they were withdrawn.
The episode was especially revealing because it involved an institution whose political independence the new government had explicitly promised to restore.
The removal of President Tamás Sulyok raised similar questions. The process itself triggered rule-of-law concerns, and the Venice Commission began examining the case. After Sulyok’s departure, Magyar called for public input on the choice of a new president. Yet the very next day, he unexpectedly put forward his own preferred candidate: Judit Polgár, the internationally renowned chess grandmaster. She ultimately declined.
By the hundred-day mark, these episodes were becoming harder to dismiss as isolated cases. The resemblance goes beyond political tactics. Power remains highly centralized, with major decisions concentrated around the prime minister.
The pattern is not limited to governing style. The new administration has already faced the kind of corruption concerns that dogged Orbán’s governments.
Leaked correspondence suggested that the company later chosen to organize Hungary’s August 20 celebrations had received detailed information about the event weeks before it was formally invited to bid. The affair reached Magyar’s inner circle when government commissioner Márk Radnai’s name surfaced, and the government eventually ordered an investigation amid mounting scrutiny.
The broader lesson from Hungary lies precisely in these continuities. Political leaders can be voted out of office. The political culture and institutional habits they normalize are much harder to dismantle.
The United States will eventually face its own version of this problem. Trump will leave the White House no later than January 2029. Trumpism, however, may not leave with him.
The American political system is different from Hungary’s, but some of the same habits of political power are visible in both. Even after Trump, both parties may continue to treat elections as existential struggles, presidents may push executive authority to its limits, and personal loyalty may increasingly displace institutional loyalty. Congress, meanwhile, may remain trapped in a political culture where compromise is easily recast as betrayal.
Nor is a Democratic victory in 2028 inevitable. A post-Trump Republican could be more disciplined, less scandal-prone and more competent than Trump without making the exercise of power any less personalized.
Trump’s departure may solve one of America’s political problems. But it may do little to address the deeper conditions that made Trump possible in the first place.
The most enduring legacy of a political era, after all, is not necessarily its leader’s ideology, rhetoric or even specific policy agenda. More difficult to reverse are the habits surrounding how power is acquired and exercised.
The most important question, then, is not simply what comes after a leader-centered political era. It is a far more uncomfortable one: What if the problem outlives the politician?
