Who is Peter Magyar, Hungary’s new leader who trounced Viktor Orban?

Peter Magyar, once a staunch loyalist of Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban, has ended his mentor’s 16-year rule after his Tisza party won Sunday’s parliamentary election by a landslide.With votes in 97.35 percent of precincts counted, Magyar’s centre-right party has secured 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament and 53.6 percent of the vote. Orban’s Christian nationalist Fidesz party won 55 seats with 37.8 percent of the votes, according to official results.In a victory speech to tens of thousands of supporters gathered along the Danube River in the capital Budapest on Sunday, 45-year-old Magyar said: “Tonight, truth prevailed over lies”.“Today, we won because Hungarians didn’t ask what their homeland could do for them; they asked what they could do for their homeland. You found the answer. And you followed through”.But who is Magyar? And what does his victory mean for Hungary and the rest of the world?Peter Magyar, whose last name literally means Hungarian, was born in Budapest in March 1981 into a family of lawyers. He is also the great-nephew of Ferenc Madl, who was President of Hungary from 2000 to 2005, overlapping with part of Orban’s first term as prime minister [1998-2002].After completing his education with a degree in law at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University near Budapest in 2004, he started his career in corporate law. At university, he joined Orban’s Fidesz, which by then was in opposition, after failing to secure a majority in the 2002 election, despite securing most seats.In an interview with Hungarian podcast Fokuszcsoport last October, Magyar said that as a young boy, he was inspired by Orban and his politics because of the manner in which he led Hungary’s pro-democracy protests in 1989 against the Soviet Union and the Moscow-backed communist leadership in Budapest.“There was a surge of energy around the regime change that swept me up as a child,” Magyar said.In September 2006, Magyar legally assisted Orban’s Fidesz party on a no-fee basis. The main opposition party at the time, Fidesz, was taking part in a series of anti-government protests against then prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany. He had admitted lying about the country’s economic condition. That same year, Magyar married Judit Varga, who would later serve as Orban’s justice minister between 2019-23. They have three children.In 2010, when Fidesz returned to power and Orban became prime minister again, Magyar was appointed as an official in the ministry of foreign affairs. In 2011, he joined the Permanent Representation of Hungary to the European Union in Brussels.After his tenure in Brussels, he returned to Hungary in 2018 and was appointed to the board of directors of state-owned road operation and maintenance company Magyar Közút ZRT. He also became the head of the Orban government’s student loan provider.Since his entry into politics, Magyar always served as a loyal Fidesz official. But a scandal in 2024 soured his relationship with the party.In February 2024, it became known that almost a year earlier, Hungary’s former president Katalin Novak had pardoned a man convicted for helping cover up a sex abuse case in a children’s home. Also implicated in the pardon was Varga, who had signed the pardon as justice minister.Varga had in 2023 resigned from her role as justice minister to lead Fidesz’s charge in the 2024 European parliamentary elections, and at the time, was widely seen as a potential successor to Orban. Magyar and Varga divorced in 2023.Protests broke out after the revelations surrounding the children’s home scandal. Novak resigned as president, and Varga stepped down from her seat in the Hungarian parliament.Magyar, meanwhile, emerged as a face of the public outrage over the scandal.In March that year, in a Facebook post, he accused Orban’s government of corruption and also published a recording of a January 2023 conversation with his ex-wife in which she detailed an attempt by aides of Orban’s cabinet chief to interfere in the prosecution files of a corruption case.He also told Hungarian media outlet Partizan that Orban and his allies were “hiding behind women’s skirts” in the scandal.The Facebook post and interviews with local media helped increase Magyar’s domestic popularity. Earlier that month, he had told reporters in Hungary that he planned to establish a new, pro-EU political party.But it was only in April 2024 that he decided to join the centre-right Tisza Party as a candidate in the 2024 European parliament elections and Hungary’s national elections in 2026.He won a seat in the European parliament, representing the Tisza Party. On Sunday, his party won the Hungarian elections by a landslide, and he is projected to become the country’s next prime minister.But Magyar’s rise to power has also been marred by scandals, including his former wife, Varga, accusing him of domestic violence.Soon after Magyar posted her recording on Facebook in March 2024, she wrote on her own Facebook account: “I said what he wanted to hear so I could get away as soon as possible. In a situation like this, any person can say things they don’t mean in a state of intimidation”.“Peter Magyar made a secret recording of his former spouse, me, in our home and now used this to achieve his political goals. He is not worthy of anybody’s trust,” she added.In February this year, he was accused of a sex scandal and drug use after photos of an apartment and a bed circulated on social media.While he admitted visiting the apartment, and said he was intimate with his former girlfriend with her consent, he rejected allegations that he consumed drugs and said his former girlfriend had lured him into a  “honey trap”.“That night I didn’t realise that I was facing a secret service operation, so I let myself be seduced,” Magyar said in a video on his social media platform on February 12.“But later I realised that I had walked into a classic Russia-style compromising situation. But since I had not done anything illegal, my conscience is clear,” he said.He also accused Orban’s party for its attempts to target him on personal grounds.“The Fidesz leaders know that I have my sons with me this week as our grassroots campaign starts next week. They wanted to ruin this period and to put me under even greater psychological pressure, so I made a mistake. They will not succeed,” Magyar added.Magyar has vowed to revive Hungary’s economy, which has been stagnant since early 2022.He has also pledged to improve relations with the European Union. Under Orban, ties between Brussels and Budapest were tense due to his close ties with Russia. Magyar said he would reduce Hungary’s dependence on Russian energy by 2035, while striving for “pragmatic relations” with Moscow. He also said he would focus on getting the EU to release funds frozen by the union over Hungary’s alleged failure to meet a series of the bloc’s conditions for financial support.At the same time, Magyar has in the past been critical of Ukraine’s push to join the EU imminently, arguing that this process should not be rushed — placing him at odds with Kyiv.Still, for many young Hungarians, Magyar’s election represents a change that had appeared hard to imagine just a few months earlier.Izabella Nagy, a young professional in Budapest, told Al Jazeera that Magyar had “ignited a sense of hope for millions of Hungarians, both at home and in the diaspora”.“I have been following the recent political shifts closely. Peter Magyar’s background within Fidesz gives him a unique, ‘insider’ understanding of how the current system operates, which is perhaps why he has been able to mobilise so effectively,” she said.But she noted that the hard work he has to do to improve the country is only just beginning.“Rebuilding a democracy and a fractured society is a far more gruelling task than the dismantling of one, which we have witnessed over the last decade,” she said.“While the path ahead is difficult, the enthusiasm of his team suggests they feel the weight of responsibility towards the millions of citizens who are now counting on them for genuine change,” she added.