Viktor Orbán has once again achieved what he does best: making Hungary – a small country in terms of GDP and population – function as great symbolic scene of the global right. Weeks before the April 12 elections, his party released a campaign video with support from figures who, together, draw a map of the era: Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini (Italy), Marine Le Pen (France), Alice Weidel (AfD, Germany), Herbert Kickl (Austria), Andrej Babiš (Czech Republic), Aleksandar Vučić (Serbia), Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel) and Javier Milei (Argentina), among others.
It is not a decorative gesture. It is a political message: If Orbán falls, the story suffers. An analyst in Budapest crudely summarized it: for this “ideological field,” the collapse of the “Orbán regime” would be significant above all in symbolic terms, because Hungary operates as a “prototype and early model” of the “illiberal-populist” wave and a point of reference for its perceived “stability.” That is to say: Orbán is not just another leader; is a initiation piece. An origin, a manual, a laboratory.
That is why the spot matters when polls show Orban’s space behind an unexpected rival: Péter Magyar, former man of the system itself, now at the head of an opposition that promises anti-corruption and unlocking frozen European funds. The ruling party, in response, decides to get out of the domestic mud and raise the discussion: it exhibits international connections as an “asset” in a “volatile and turbulent” world, something that the opponent “as a newcomer” does not have.
But the true subtext is another: Orbán is the founding link of a narrative that became transnational. Before “sovereignty”, “traditional values”, “cultural war”, “enemy media”, “suspicious NGOs” and “Brussels” were commonplace, he was already there. Not as theory, but as practice. That is why Le Pen, in the video, not only congratulates him: she places him as the driving force of an expanding political family, the “camp” of “patriots” and “defenders of sovereign nations and peoples.” Weidel presents it as a necessity for Europe: “Europe needs Viktor Orbán.” Meloni, with an institutional tone, marks the identity core: “a Europe that respects national sovereignty” and is proud of its “cultural and religious roots.”
And why does this global choreography include Trump or Milei, even though Washington does not formally appear in the video? Because Orbán was for years, the european bridge between the American extreme right and the continental ecosystem. There is a discourse that, with local variations, is repeated from Rome to Buenos Aires. Orbán functions as validation: “if he did it before and it lasted, it can be done.”
That is the least confessed part of the phenomenon: the global right does not limit itself to sharing slogans; share method. What in Europe was described as the era of “chaos engineers”—digital strategists, algorithmic polarization, emotional segmentation, performative anti-elite—found in Hungary an early case of consolidation: a leadership that combines nationalism, narrative control, construction of internal enemies and an idea of democracy reduced to permanent electoral victory. The subsequent export to other countries was not a carbon copy, but rather a DNA transmission.
In this framework, Milei’s presence is not anecdotal: it is confirmation that “Orbánism” stopped being a European product and became a political language. And the scene is completed with Netanyahu providing the security argument (“security is not taken for granted, it must be earned”) that usually operates as moral armor for agendas of institutional hardening.
The message also touches another nerve of the moment: Ukraine. Orbán – the EU leader closest to Putin – is shown as “fighting for peace”, and Salvini finishes: “if you want peace, vote for Fidesz”. In times where “peace” can mean “give in” or “freeze” and where ambiguity is profitable, Orbán once again offers what the global right demands: a leader who challenges liberal consensus and converts geopolitical friction into electoral capital.
That is why international support is not just a caress: it is a symbolic rescue operation. If Orbán loses, not only a prime minister falls; a “success story” that justified many is questioned. And if he wins, even if it is narrow, the message is reaffirmed that the cycle continues: that democracy can coexist with the slow erosion of counterweights, and that right-wing populism can present itself—again—as stability.
On April 12, then, Hungary does not vote just one government. Vote, in a concentrated version, if the laboratory that inspired half the world continues to be a reference or becomes a warning for replacement. A process in which Latin America has not yet entered (the shifts to the right are seen in the 2025 elections), although the pendulum swings in increasingly shorter cycles.
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