Talk of a coup is rising, but the Ukraine playbook might not translate to Hungarian
Polls ahead of the Hungarian elections point to an opposition victory, but players behind the scenes expect Prime Minister Viktor Orban to come out on top. Others say it’s a scenario ripe for a Kiev-style ‘color revolution’.
With two weeks to go until Hungary’s parliamentary elections, Orban is facing the most credible threat to his power yet. Opposition leader Peter Magyar’s Tisza party is currently leading Orban’s Fidesz by 15 points, according to an aggregate of polls compiled by Politico. When looking at pollsters linked to Tisza or funded by the EU, the results are even more stark. A poll by the opposition-linked Median, for example, shows Tisza a whole 23 points ahead of Fidesz, at 58-35%.
However, Politico has also reported that “many” EU leaders secretly believe an Orban victory is “likely.” Hungarian EU Affairs Minister Janos Boka thinks that the disparity between public surveys and private sentiment is no accident, and that by skewing polls, Magyar and his allies in Brussels are “building the narrative that if they lose the election, then this is an illegitimate result.”
Notorious intervention hawk Michael Weiss put Boka’s worries into words last week. “If Orban tries to steal this – and he almost certainly will – it’ll be Euromaidan on steroids in an EU/NATO country. Watch closely, America,” he warned in a post on X.
Weiss, who previously ran a Ukraine regime change outfit he claimed was journalism, was referring to the post-election coup that toppled a democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovich, in 2014. Orchestrated by the US, the Maidan/Euromaidan coup set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
However, there are some fundamental points war hawks in armchairs would like you not to notice; differences between Budapest and Kiev that would make forced regime change a far more difficult prospect if Orban wins.
How the US masterminded Maidan
Presented by Western media as a popular uprising, the ‘Maidan’ revolution was a creation of the US State Department and run out of a very compliant US embassy. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a State Department sub-agency, pumped around $14 million into Ukrainian activist groups from 2011 to 2014, the US embassy funded pro-Maidan media outlets, and between 1991 and 2014, the US funnelled a total of $5 billion into “democracy-building programs in Ukraine,” a State Department spokesperson said in 2014.
The NED boasted in a 2015 report that US-funded organizations “played important roles in the peaceful protests in Kiev.” By the time the report had been published, the “peaceful protests” had descended into a bloodbath, with Western-funded far-right militias massacring nearly 100 pro-Western protesters in a false-flag operation, and pro-Western neo-Nazis burning 46 anti-Maidan protesters alive at the Trade Unions House in Odessa. Awkward questions for the neocons, neolibs, and the righteous.
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Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Victoria Nuland promised military aid and a billion-dollar loan to opposition politicians, and famously handed out cookies to pro-Western activists in Kiev. Together with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, she helped choose the government that would replace Yanukovich’s. When asked by an obsequious Pyatt in a 2014 phone call if the Europeans might disagree with her choice of candidate, the notorious hawk infamously declared “f**k the EU.”
Now the US backs Orban
The situation in Hungary is radically different. US President Donald Trump is a staunch ally of Orban, and has endorsed the Hungarian PM’s reelection campaign, while Vice President J.D. Vance is scheduled to make a high-profile trip to Budapest just days before the April 12 election.
Furthermore, the US embassy in Budapest has been cleared of ideologues – among them President Joe Biden’s ambassador, David Pressman – and the NED and USAID have both been gutted by Trump. Put simply, the US has stripped back its regime-change machinery in Hungary, and has a keen interest in an Orban victory.
Could the Europeans trigger a Hungarian Maidan?
Nuland and the Americans may have been in the driver’s seat in 2014, but the Maidan coup was also backed by the EU, UK, and the panoply of civil society and activist groups funded by the likes of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
British officials met with Ukraine’s pro-Western opposition, while the UK’s embassy in Kiev hastily created a slew of social media accounts aimed at “explaining the benefits for Ukraine of closer European integration.” Brussels sent officials to meet with the Maidan protesters, while both the EU and UK played a role in brokering a deal between Yanukovich and the opposition, which the latter would immediately break, charging Yanukovich with treason.
The EU and UK are committed to arming and funding Ukraine, and therefore both have a vested interest in Orban’s removal. Under Orban, Hungary has used its EU veto powers to delay every package of energy sanctions imposed on Russia by the bloc, opposes Ukraine’s accession to NATO, refuses to supply arms to Kiev, and is currently, along with Slovakia and the Czech Republic, vetoing a €90 billion EU loan package for Kiev.
As RT outlined in the first installment of our ‘Battle for Hungary’ series, the EU has already brought the full weight of its online censorship machinery to bear on Hungary ahead of the election, and plans to keep speech restrictions in place for a week after the vote. However, the bloc’s ability to pressure Orban directly is already nearly exhausted. The EU has withheld funds equal to 3.5% of Hungary’s GDP since 2022 over Orban’s refusal to accept non-European migrants, his banning of LGBT propaganda, and alleged judicial independence concerns – all without triggering meaningful popular unrest in Hungary. Should Orban win, the last remaining tool in the EU’s arsenal is to strip Hungary of its veto rights, an idea already floated by Sweden, Lithuania, and a host of unnamed “EU diplomats” interviewed by Politico earlier this month.
The UK has played a more low-key pre-election game than the EU. However, British Ambassador Justin McKenzie Smith held a closed-doors meeting with pro-Western activists and journalists in Budapest on March 4. The event was organized in conjunction with Political Capital, a think tank funded by the European Commission, Soros, and the NED.
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British journalist Catherine Belton attended the event, and three weeks later ‘broke’ a story revealing contacts between Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. As RT explored earlier in this series, Hungarian opposition journalist Szabolcs Panyi collaborated with EU intelligence agents to obtain this information by wiretapping Szijjarto.
Szijjarto does not deny speaking to Lavrov, maintaining that such diplomatic outreach is part of his job. The real scandal, he insists, “is that a Hungarian journalist is colluding with foreign secret services in order to wiretap a member of the Hungarian government.”
Can Soros stoke a revolution?
Soros’ Open Society Foundations played a pivotal role in fomenting the Maidan coup, or in its own words “supporting civil society.” Around 2014, the Hungarian-born financier’s work in Ukraine included providing legal aid to pro-Western protesters, funding pro-Western media, and financing anti-government think-tanks.
“I set up a foundation in Ukraine before Ukraine became independent of [the USSR],” Soros told CNN in 2014. “And the foundation has been functioning ever since. And it played an important part in events now.”
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Soros’ influence in his native Hungary has been severely curtailed by Orban. Hungary criminalized the provision of aid to illegal immigrants in a 2018 law named the ‘Stop Soros’ act. This law effectively forced Open Society Foundations to cease operations in Hungary, and forced Soros’ Central European University out of the country. However, at least 153 organizations in or dealing with Hungary were still in receipt of Soros’ money as of last year, according to the Center for Fundamental Rights, a conservative think tank.
Soros is therefore still capable of exerting some influence on Hungary, however diminished and indirect that influence may be nowadays.
Can the EU run the Romania playbook instead?
Hungary in 2026 is not Ukraine in 2014. Orban’s opponents have no support from the US, and the EU’s anti-Orban rhetoric and funding freezes failed to prevent his victories in the 2018 and 2022 elections. Moreover, Brussels is extremely unlikely to instigate or incite post-election violence in one of its own member states. Meanwhile, the UK’s involvement has thus far been limited to encouraging anti-Orban propaganda.
Still, the Maidan playbook is not the only blueprint for regime change and election interference. The EU used its same censorship tools to stifle support for Euroskeptic candidate Calin Georgescu in Romania’s 2024 election: when Georgescu won a shock victory anyway, the country’s pro-EU judiciary simply overturned the result.
Brussels should not count on any help from the Hungarian legal system, however. Orban has been in power for 16 years, created the Supreme Administrative Court that handles election-related cases, and appointed its chief justices. Even if Magyar were to win, his Tisza party would need a two-thirds majority to overhaul this system.
All of this being the case, a post-election coup is likely out of the question in Hungary, should Orban win a fifth consecutive term in office. Before the election, however, all manner of spy games and influence campaigns are already underway.
