MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
There's a new political reality in Hungary today. After 16 years, citizens have ousted Prime Minister Viktor Orban in an election that saw the highest voter turnout there since the end of the Cold War. Peter Magyar is the 45-year-old conservative politician who led his party to a massive victory. Today, he promised to renew relations with Europe.
PETER MAGYAR: Millions of Hungarians proved yesterday that Hungarian people write their history, not in Moscow. Our history is not written in Brussels or in Washington but in Hungarian streets, Hungarian squares. I am grateful that they managed to prove this.
KELLY: Esme Nicholson reports from Budapest.
(SOUNDBITE OF RHYTHMIC CLAPPING)
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in non-English language).
ESME NICHOLSON, BYLINE: Thousands of Hungarian voters lined the banks of the Danube and cheered as the man set to be their next prime minister, Peter Magyar, took to the stage to claim victory in front of the flood-lit Parliament where his party, Tisza, will occupy the most seats.
MAGYAR: (Non-English language spoken).
NICHOLSON: "My friends," he says, "the time is here to mend the mistakes of our predecessors," adding that Tisza will heal historical wounds.
(SOUNDBITE OF ABBA SONG, "GIMME! GIMME! GIMME! (A MAN AFTER MIDNIGHT)")
NICHOLSON: Among the crowd was 29-year-old Laura Lasner (ph), who said she's trying to get her head around what real freedom might feel like.
LAURA LASNER: I feel like that people are less afraid now, and they can believe everybody's vote means something for the world, and they can make a change if they really want it.
NICHOLSON: Marc Loustau, a fellow at the Central European University's Institute for Advanced Study, says the world can learn from Hungary's electorate about how to deal with what became widely known as Viktor Orban's illiberal democracy.
MARC LOUSTAU: The most important message is that illiberalism is not inevitable, but it takes courage on the part of political opposition leaders. It takes courage on the part of everyday people who can stand up and say, enough is enough.
NICHOLSON: Orban accepted that voters had had enough in a short concession speech early in the evening as it became clear that his challenger was on course to win a landslide. But some of Magyar's voters, like 32-year-old Yusuf Gosart (ph), are circumspect about whether he really will re-democratize their country.
YUSUF GOSART: Magyar is a beacon of hope, but I'm kind of skeptical of the fact that, yeah, it will be more of the same. If he even does half of what he promised, I'll be extremely happy.
NICHOLSON: Magyar's ballot box success is not only a marker of his political pluck but also of his tenacity on a campaign trail that saw him in some instances walk miles from rural constituency to another to talk to Orban's Fidesz Party voter base in person.
ZSUZSANNA VEGH: He beat Orban at his own game by defying all odds and building a movement that in the very electoral system that Fidesz built can become the strongest force.
NICHOLSON: Zsuzsanna Vegh is an analyst with the German Marshall Fund.
VEGH: Peter Magyar did not try to outflank Orban. What we have seen where far-right parties were rising is that the Democratic forces started to adopt their rhetoric, they've started to adopt their programmatic position, thinking that that is where the appeal lies.
NICHOLSON: Instead, Peter Magyar appears to have torn up Orban's so-called Budapest playbook, a series of strategies to dismantle a democracy admired by illiberal populists the world over. Vegh says this will come as a blow to Orban's backers, from the Kremlin to the White House. But as the wind changes here in Hungary, Democratic onlookers throughout Europe and beyond may well be asking where they can order a copy of Peter Magyar's playbook. For NPR News, Esme Nicholson in Budapest. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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