BUDAPEST — Péter Magyar stepped to the microphone on the banks of the Danube shortly before midnight on Sunday, looked out at tens of thousands of Hungarians flooding the riverside promenade, and delivered the sentence they had waited sixteen years to hear. "We have done it," he said. "Together, we have replaced Orbán's system and together we liberated Hungary." [1]

Then the speakers started playing Frank Sinatra's "My Way," and the crowd sang along.

The numbers told the story before the speech did. Magyar's Tisza party won 138 seats in parliament — a constitutional supermajority — against 55 for Fidesz, Viktor Orbán's party that had governed Hungary since 2010. [1] The margin was so large that even Orbán's allies could not contest it. The prime minister conceded at 9:14 pm, calling the result "painful, but clear." [2] By the time Magyar took the stage, the question was no longer whether Hungary had changed governments. It was whether Hungary had changed eras.

Magyar, 44, a former Fidesz insider turned whistleblower who built a mass movement in barely two years, spoke for seventeen minutes in a register that alternated between the personal and the historic. He evoked John F. Kennedy — "Today we won because the Hungarian people didn't ask what their country could do for them" — and then pivoted to specifics that made clear the celebration was also a manifesto. [3]

He pledged to rebuild Hungary's independent judiciary within his first hundred days. He promised to end the "systemic corruption" that Transparency International had ranked among the worst in the European Union. He announced Hungary would join the European Public Prosecutor's Office, the anti-fraud body that Orbán had blocked since its creation. And he committed to reorienting Hungary's energy infrastructure away from Russian dependence — a direct repudiation of the Budapest-Moscow relationship that had defined Orbán's foreign policy. [3]

The crowd was overwhelmingly young. Estimates from Hungarian polling firm Median, published in Kursiv, showed roughly two-thirds of voters under 30 cast ballots for Tisza. [3] They had grown up under Orbán's rule and knew no other political reality. For them, the victory was not nostalgia for a pre-Orbán Hungary they never experienced. It was something more primal — the discovery that the system they had been told was permanent was, in fact, reversible.

European leaders responded with a velocity that underscored how isolated Orbán had become. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen congratulated Magyar within the hour. [1] French President Emmanuel Macron called the result "a great day for Europe." Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk — whose own victory over a populist government in 2023 established the template Magyar followed — offered an invitation to Warsaw. [1]

Magyar accepted. He announced that his first three trips as prime minister-designate would be to Poland, Austria, and Brussels — a deliberate signal that Hungary's years of antagonizing its neighbors and blocking EU consensus were finished. [3] The contrast with Orbán, whose first international trips typically led to Moscow or Beijing, was not subtle. It was not meant to be.

The substance beneath the celebration is formidable. Magyar inherits a state that Orbán spent sixteen years reshaping in his own image. The judiciary, the media, the electoral commission, the public procurement system — all were bent toward Fidesz control. [2] A supermajority gives Magyar the constitutional authority to reverse those changes. Whether he has the institutional capacity to do so while governing a country addicted to Russian gas and facing a European energy crisis driven by the Iran-Hormuz blockade is a different question.

The EU's immediate reward was material. With Orbán gone, the €90 billion Ukraine support loan that Hungary had vetoed for months was unblocked within hours of the result. [1] Brussels was not just celebrating Hungarian democracy. It was celebrating the removal of its most persistent institutional obstacle.

On the Danube banks, none of that complexity was visible. What was visible was a generation that had been told the system could not change, watching it change. They sang Sinatra because the song fit — a man who did it his way, against a system that told him there was only one way.

Magyar finished his speech with a sentence that will either become his legacy or his albatross. "The old Hungary is over," he said. "The new one starts tomorrow." [3]

Tomorrow is already here. It arrives with 138 seats, a continent's expectations, and a country that needs rebuilding from the judiciary up. The Sinatra has stopped. The work begins.

-- HENDRIK VAN DER BERG, Brussels