Trump wanted a fellow authoritarian to continue ruling Hungary. Hungarians voted differently today. Yay!

Thank you, Hungarian voters.

You brought a big smile to my face when I learned that Viktor Orban, the authoritarian who has ruled Hungary for 16 years, had conceded to Peter Magyar — the leader of a party that is expected to win 138 of the 199 seats in Hungary’s parliament, which gives Magyar’s party a 2/3 supermajority that will allow them to revise the Hungarian constitution that Orban had meddled with to keep himself and his cronies in power.

It was a sweet victory for those of us here in the United States who detest Trump and J.D. Vance. They’ve been big fans of Orban, because Trump and Vance admire his love of Putin and his distaste for the European Union that Hungary is a member of. Orban also was an enemy of Ukraine, blocking aid for the embattled country that had been approved by the E.U.

Vance recently visited Hungary to urge the people there to keep Orban in power. Trump praised Orban in Truth Social posts, saying that if Orban continues in power the United States will reward Hungary. All that didn’t work. If anything, it backfired, causing the opposition to Orban to increase their efforts to remove him from office.

Makes sense.

The results of today’s election showed that Hungarians want democracy, not autocracy; independence, not subservience; prosperity within the European Union, not poverty as a vassal of Russia. The more Trump and Vance tried to convince Hungarians that Orban’s authoritarianism should continue, the more voters there thought, Keep your damn opinions about our country to yourself; we’ll decide what’s best for Hungary.

The happiness of Hungarians shown in this video is infectious.

Anne Applebaum has a great piece in The Atlantic: “Illiberalism Is Not Inevitable: If Viktor Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.” That gift link should be readable by everybody. Here’s excerpts:

In the end, the defeat of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, required not just an ordinary election campaign or new messaging but rather the construction of a broad, diverse, and patriotic grassroots social movement. And by building exactly that, Hungary’s opposition changed politics around the world.

Orbán’s loss brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement, as well as the belief—also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric—that illiberal parties are somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the “real” people. As it turns out, history doesn’t work like that. “Real” people grow tired of their rulers. Old ideas become stale. Younger people question orthodoxy. Illiberalism leads to corruption. And if Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.

…Although results are not final, Tisza appears to have won more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. That would give Magyar a constitutional majority that should allow him to pick apart some of the damage that Orbán has done to the Hungarian constitution and to public life. In his victory speech, he called for the resignation of the president, the prosecutor general, the president of the constitutional court, and other institutions. He said he would rejoin the European legal system. In response, according to one witness, Hungarians at his rally chanted, “Europe, Europe, Europe.”

Nobody is pretending this will be easy. Fidesz still dominates many Hungarian institutions and businesses, and the party’s friends and supporters will do their best to undermine a Tisza government. Orbán also leaves behind a fiscal mess, which the analyst Dalibor Rohac suggests Orbán might be happy to abandon while plotting his comeback. “Letting the opposition deal with the economic fallout of the last 16 years might well facilitate Orbán’s return to power in the future,” Rohac wrote earlier this week. Some in the opposition are still expecting dirty tricks in the next days and weeks, before Orbán formally hands over power.

But whatever happens next, this election represents a real turning point. For most European governments, this result is a relief: We can’t know yet what kind of government Tisza will create, but it won’t be one that functions as Russia’s puppet in Europe, blocking EU funding for Ukraine or European sanctions on Russia. Nor will it be a regime that serves as a model for Americans or Europeans who want to capture their own states, or take apart their own checks and balances, or impose their own illiberal ideologies on people who don’t accept them.