Marc Felix Serrao is a correspondent with the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, of which POLITICO is part.
BUDAPEST — Not too long ago, Balázs Orbán was one of the most powerful men in Hungary. The 40-year-old lawyer worked at the center of the former prime minister’s government and helped oversee Hungary’s courtship of the American right. MAGA celebrities like Tucker Carlson and JD Vance made appearances at events sponsored by the institute he chaired, in some cases, more than once.
This morning, however, he arrives alone to meet me. His government power is gone, and the institution he once chaired is fighting for survival.
The former prime minister, Viktor Orbán (no relation) was defeated in a landslide in April elections. In the months since, pressure has built not only on his own Fidesz party but on an extensive web of think tanks, talent programs and conferences that turned Budapest into a hub for the international right, especially MAGA adherents and pro-Trump intellectuals. One of those, arguably the most influential of the bunch, was the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, and Balázs Orbán was its chairman.
MCC and the rest of the network really took off when President Donald Trump was out of office after his first term and Hungary offered American conservatives a political role model and a welcoming base abroad, and it remained one after Trump returned to the White House in 2025.
Now the MAGA-Hungary relationship faces a test of reciprocity: Will MAGA continue to support the Hungarian partners who stood by it in the political wilderness?
Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party were in power for 16 years, and the loss was not a narrow one. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won 141 of parliament’s 199 seats, securing the two-thirds majority needed to amend the constitution. A few days ago, his new government raided Fidesz party offices as part of what appears to be a corruption investigation.
It is 8 a.m. on a July morning in Budapest, already oppressively hot under a steel-blue sky. Balázs Orbán has suggested meeting at the House of Hungarian Music, a striking contemporary building near Heroes’ Square, which commemorates the founding of Hungary. It does not open until 10 a.m., so we sit outside at an empty table.
“Hungary remains important for conservatives everywhere because we have developed a language and a way of governing that offers an alternative to the supranational and hyper-liberal mainstream,” he says.
Fidesz is trying to evolve from being a ruling party to being an ordinary, out-of-power opposition party. For his part, Balázs Orbán is set to take up a seat in the European Parliament and says he will now focus on the struggle over the future direction of the EU.
If Balázs Orbán feels diminished by the setbacks, he does not show it.
“Our fight continues,” he says. “It is no longer just for Hungary, but for Europe.”
Trump first received Viktor Orbán at the White House in 2019. Two years later, Tucker Carlson — then one of the most influential hosts on Fox News and now an independent media entrepreneur whose foreign-policy views have moved sharply against the Republican establishment — took his TV show to Budapest for a week. On the first evening, with the illuminated city behind him, Carlson told his audience: “We’re coming to you this evening from Budapest.”
Then he explained why: “If you care about Western civilization and democracy and families, and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by the leaders of our global institutions, you should know what is happening here right now.”
That same summer, Dennis Prager, the veteran American radio host and co-founder of PragerU, a media organization known for its short videos that present a MAGA-friendly version of American history, spoke at an MCC event. “If Western civilization is saved, it will be saved by Eastern Europe,” he told the audience at “MCC Feszt” in Esztergom, a historic city on the Danube in northwestern Hungary. MCC Feszt was organized annually by the collegium, which had expanded under Orbán into what critics regarded as the most powerful force on Hungary’s intellectual right.
Many other MAGA-aligned notables followed, among them Patrick Deneen, the Notre Dame theorist of postliberalism, former Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro.
In 2022, the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, held the first of five annual gatherings in Budapest. By then, the Hungarian capital had become a regular base for a MAGA movement then out of power in Washington.
The MAGA-Hungary axis was unusual for its asymmetry. Hungary’s population is just under 10 million, and in terms of economic weight and military power, the country is a minor American ally. For America’s right, however, it occupied a unique place in the world. Orbán seemed to be living proof that conservatives could do more than merely slow down progressive change. They could reorder a nation’s institutions and cultural norms in their own image.
How did it begin? Matt Schlapp, the man who chairs both the American Conservative Union and the CPAC Foundation, says the initiative came from Hungary. “The ambassador at the time reached out and invited us to lunch,” he said of a meeting in Washington during Trump’s first term. Until then, he said, American media coverage had portrayed Orbán as “a dictator, a fascist, an antisemite.” After hearing the Hungarian side and speaking with members of Congress, he concluded that much of the reporting was politically skewed to the left.
Bringing CPAC to Budapest in 2022, and then for the next four years, Schlapp said, “was the right thing to do.”
The Heritage Foundation also cultivated very close ties to Orbán’s Hungary; they did not respond to written requests for interviews for this article. Nor did the Danube Institute in Budapest, another key node in the network. But one American formerly attached to the Danube Institute sent me a written assessment of where the American-Hungarian conservative alliance goes next.
Rod Dreher, a 59-year-old conservative writer, used to be director of the Danube Institute’s Network Project, which tried to bring American and European conservatives into closer contact. Dreher lived in Hungary until this spring. After Orban’s loss, fearing the institute could be eliminated, and with his elderly mother ill, he moved back to what he calls his “cultural homeland,” the American South. He now lives in Birmingham, Alabama.
Dreher praises Viktor Orbán as “a statesman of true civilizational vision,” but acknowledges that his regime had weaknesses. Vision, he argues, did not help Hungarian voters struggling with a stagnant economy. Orbán had tolerated “far too much corruption and mismanagement,” Dreher wrote me, and this helped bring him down even “with all the good things that he and his party accomplished.”
Dreher nevertheless credits Hungary’s former prime minister with building something real. “Orbán was the keystone in the bridge connecting Trumpist American conservatives with European nationalists and sovereigntist parties and leaders,” he wrote. “Nobody did more than Orbán’s government to make that connection real.” Most politically engaged American conservatives, he adds, saw Europe as “a swamp of godless liberalism.”
Orbán had shown them another Europe.
For the future, Dreher locates the larger danger on his side of the Atlantic. “I think these alliances could carry on without Orbán, but they cannot carry on with Trump, whose big mouth and recklessness forces those parties and their leaders to side against the United States,” he writes. “The loss of Orbán is a problem, but not an insurmountable one; the presence of Trump, with his ignorance and arrogance, is probably a deal-killer.”
Across Europe, closeness to Trump is no longer an obvious asset. Since he returned for a second term, the U.S. president has unsettled allies again and again, and even conservative governments have found that ideological sympathy does not spare them from public humiliation. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, once eager to cultivate Trump, has moved visibly away from him. Jordan Bardella, a leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, emphasizes European strategic independence rather than alignment with Washington. And in Germany’s Alternative for Germany, or AfD, early enthusiasm for MAGA’s culture-war energy has given way to a noticeable chill.
In fact, Trump’s unpredictability and his perceived lack of respect for other sovereign nations have revived an older anti-Americanism that never fully disappeared on Europe’s right. In that sense, Orbán was not a trendsetter, but rather an exception.
MAGA figures did their best to help Orbán remain in power. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Budapest in mid-February and strongly endorsed the bilateral relationship. Vice President JD Vance followed in April, five days before the election, in what looked unmistakably like a last-minute show of support.
But while MAGA could bless a foreign ally, it seems it could not persuade foreign voters.
In Budapest, I found the new Hungarian government of Péter Magyar uninterested in discussing the future of the MAGA-Hungarian alliance; they declined an interview request. So did the State Department in Washington. Asked whether Hungary still occupied the special place it had enjoyed under Orbán, and whether the Trump administration still regarded Orbán and Fidesz as preferred partners, the State Department did not answer the question directly: “The United States is working with Hungary’s new government to advance regional and global security, economic prosperity, sovereign rights, and our common civilizational values.”
But Fidesz politicians were willing to engage. János Bóka, a 47-year-old Hungarian lawyer and former minister for European Union affairs under Orbán, met me in one of the parliament’s meeting rooms and expressed optimism about the future of his party’s alliance with MAGA. He has since been elected Fidesz’s parliamentary group leader.
MAGA is not synonymous with Trump but part of a broader strategic turn in American politics, Bóka said, reflecting a lasting American retreat from the post-Cold War international order. Asked whom he would like to see in the White House next, Bóka answered without hesitation: JD Vance. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Vance had delivered a widely criticized and unusually blunt attack on Europe’s liberal elites. For Bóka, the speech “could have been the manifesto of Patriots for Europe,” the far-right faction Fidesz belongs to in the European Parliament.
Gergely Gulyás is a different kind of Fidesz figure. In early July, he received me in a large corner office on Fidesz’s parliamentary floor overlooking the Danube. The 44-year-old constitutional lawyer, a former minister in the prime minister’s office and then the party’s parliamentary group leader, sounded less like a MAGA admirer than a Central European conservative carefully calculating what remains after defeat.
His political world has long reached into Germany’s center-right parties, the CDU and CSU, and into their affiliated party foundations. Many conservatives regard the once reliably right-of-center German alliance as an ideologically diluted force that moved steadily leftward during Angela Merkel’s long chancellorship. His contacts in Germany, Gulyás stressed, have not been with the far-right AfD.
American support matters, Gulyás said, but only up to a point. “For Hungary, it cannot replace European partnerships.”
For Gulyás, Fidesz’s defeat also has a personal edge. He and Péter Magyar were once friends, before Magyar broke with his former political camp and led Tisza against his old party. And in recent weeks, Magyar’s government has rewritten the rules for politicians like him, imposing term limits to force him from office. He has since resigned as parliamentary group leader, saying the largest opposition faction should be led by someone eligible to run in the next election.
The Gulyás case is part of a broader effort by Magyar’s new supermajority to dismantle Orbán-era power structures, most dramatically by forcing out President Tamás Sulyok. Supporters describe the process as democratic renewal; Fidesz calls it a purge, while some rights groups warn that the rushed overhaul risks undermining the rule of law.
For years, Orbán’s critics had described Hungary as something well short of a proper democracy. The European Parliament called it a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.” And yet, in April, when Fidesz lost, the result stood, and power changed hands. Whatever else Orbán’s system had become, it still contained one core democratic feature: It could lose.
Another question is what happens to the infrastructure Orbán’s defeat leaves behind, the infrastructure that once propped MAGA up. It leads, above all, to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium.
Bence Bauer, the 46-year-old head of MCC’s German-Hungarian Institute, is a fast talker who is practiced at explaining Hungary to foreigners. We meet in the college cafeteria one evening in early July. In a city full of imperial facades and grand old buildings, MCC’s Budapest home is a strikingly plain modern block. Inside, a few students are still sitting nearby with laptops and books. European newspapers in several languages lie on the tables, ranging from left-liberal to conservative.
On this day, nothing suggests that the lights could soon go out.
Three months earlier, during his pre-election visit to Hungary, Vance had also stopped at the college, where Balázs Orbán received him in his capacity as chairman. The vice president charmed his hosts by hailing MCC as a rare academic institution devoted to preserving and strengthening the values of Western civilization.
MCC is not a government creation. It was started in 1996 by a wealthy conservative family as a private talent-development institution and named after Matthias Corvinus, the 15th-century Renaissance king who remains one of Hungary’s most celebrated national heroes. Under Viktor Orbán, however, it grew into something much larger and more powerful, helped by Hungary’s so-called KEKVA system: public-interest asset management foundations created under Orbán and endowed with public assets.
In 2020, previously state-held shares were transferred to the foundation behind MCC: 10 percent stakes in two listed Hungarian blue-chip companies, MOL, an oil and gas group, and Gedeon Richter, a pharmaceutical company. The shareholdings alone were worth more than €1 billion at the time of the transfer. MCC’s funding model relied heavily on the dividends from those shares.
Supporters saw the KEKVA foundations as a way to protect universities and cultural institutions from day-to-day politics. Critics saw them as a way to move public wealth into Fidesz-friendly structures beyond the reach of future governments.
MCC says its programs reach roughly 8,000 students and participants, including schoolchildren in weekend and talent programs beginning at age 10. It offers dormitory places, stipends, seminars, research trips and language training.
Still, Bauer acknowledges a “slight challenge”: Balázs Orbán, until very recently MCC’s chairman, had also served as Viktor Orbán’s political director and later as his campaign chief. That overlap, Bauer concedes, gave critics an opening. But he says it represented only a small part of the institution: “99 percent of MCC’s activities are really not political.” Many MCC students, he adds, probably voted for Tisza, the party now threatening the institution’s financial basis.
The new government has moved to dismantle non-university KEKVA foundations. Under the timetable published by the government, the foundation behind MCC is to be dissolved at the end of July. If implemented as announced, its assets would then return to state control.
That does not mean that the college will disappear altogether. In some form, it could continue operating. But without the dividends from MOL and Gedeon Richter, its political and international weight would be radically reduced.
Bauer tries not to sound despairing. If MCC cannot continue in its current form, other structures and other funding will have to be found, he says. “There is always a life after.”
The consequences reach beyond Budapest. MCC Brussels, the institution’s EU-capital outpost, has been one of the most visible conservative think tanks in the city in recent years. But it depends almost entirely on money from MCC Hungary. If the parent institution loses its asset base, the Brussels office has to find new money, too.
To Fidesz, the dismantling of MCC and other Orbán-era institutions looks less like reform than a campaign prepared in advance. During our conversation next to the House of Hungarian Music, Balázs Orbán points to a policy brief by the Wilfried Martens Centre, the official think tank of the center-right European People’s Party. The paper, published in May, describes MCC and similar institutions as part of a transnational illiberal infrastructure and argues that Hungary’s change of government offers the “first opportunity to dismantle parts of this infrastructure.”
It is not a legal blueprint for closing MCC. But for Orbán’s circle, it reads like an intellectual justification for doing exactly that.
“We will fight back,” Balázs Orbán tells me, “with every legal and political tool available.”
Boris Kálnoky also considers the new government’s move against institutions such as MCC a severe blow. He does not, however, sound optimistic about legal resistance. The 65-year-old journalist comes from the Kálnoky family, an old Transylvanian-Hungarian noble house. A former correspondent for the German news organization WELT (which like POLITICO is owned by Axel Springer), he runs MCC’s media school.
“A crucial ingredient in building the international network was Hungarian intellectual initiative, and money to support it,” Kálnoky says. Yet he does not think the larger movement is dead. “Hungary helped initiate something,” he says. “But the forces behind national conservatism in the West do not depend on Budapest: migration, distrust of elites, public insecurity, cultural change, and the feeling among voters that their societies were transformed without their consent.” Then he adds: “You do not need Hungary for that.”
But who do you need in Washington? In Fidesz circles, when people talk about the future of the transatlantic nationalist alliance, one name comes up again and again: JD Vance.
Balázs Orbán, for example, hopes Vance will be the next Republican presidential candidate, win the election and enter the White House. That, he says, would be good for Europe and good for the United States. Rubio is also respected by Hungarian conservatives. But those in Washington who best understand Europe and its national-conservative movement, Orbán argues, tend to be closer to the vice president. (Vance’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
An international right is an awkward thing to build and sustain. Nationalists think in borders and sovereignty. This particular alliance worked not only because of the power dynamic at its center: Trump set the tone, and Orbán was willing to accept the hierarchy. But the Hungarian prime minister had also stood by Trump during the Biden years, when he was out of office and politically vulnerable. That loyalty may have earned Fidesz extra credit with its American partners. But in politics, loyalty rarely outweighs defeat.
There is another complication: What holds nationalists together is less a shared doctrine than common enemies — mass migration, progressive culture, supranational courts, liberal universities and the “legacy media.” On big strategic questions, they often disagree sharply — today, for example, over Russia, Ukraine, Israel or trade policy, and inevitably over the limits of American influence whenever their own national interests are at stake.
For his part, Schlapp thinks the alliance will persist. “We developed real friendships within the Orbán government. Winning and losing doesn’t affect our friendships.” CPAC, he added, had never been about “just associating with power” but about ideas. He sees no reason for its work in Budapest to end “unless it turns into a dangerous legal situation to exercise our political views.”
Asked about the new government’s open hostility toward Fidesz, Schlapp said: “Every opposition has rights. We will monitor the situation in Hungary and decide about the appropriate course of action.”
American conservatives can continue inviting former Fidesz officials and appearing at their events. What they cannot replace is the Hungarian state power and wealth that helped build the network in the first place.
Still, at the end of our conversation outside the House of Hungarian Music, Balázs Orbán does not sound ready to concede defeat. If institutions like MCC can be saved in some form, he says, the work will continue under old names. Then he looks at his watch; he has to go. “If not, we will do new things.”
