Badenoch: Orbán’s defeat gives me hope for the center-right

LONDON — Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Sunday’s Hungarian election indicates that right-wing populism will be short-lived, the leader of Britain’s center-right Conservatives claimed.

Péter Magyar’s decisive victory over Orbán — a close ally of both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin — is “very positive,” Kemi Badenoch told Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner in an interview for his podcast series MD Meets. (Axel Springer is the owner of POLITICO.)

“Conservatism is being challenged more by the right now, the economic nationalists, the populists, but I don’t think that it’s going to be long lasting,” said the Tory leader, whose party suffered a hefty national defeat in 2024.

“You only need to look at Hungary, look at what’s happened to Orbán, to Fidesz. I think that if you’re unable to deliver growth, whatever your ideology is, it will lose,” she added.

Badenoch’s Conservative Party slumped to its worst-ever result in the 2024 U.K. general election after 14 years in power, and is struggling to regain ground as Nigel Farage’s populist right-wing Reform UK surges in the polls.

But Badenoch said the rise of Magyar, who she described as “very much of the right, in some places even tougher,” shows traditional center-right economics and ideology is “reasserting itself.”

Complacency has been “eating at the heart of all of Western Europe,” Badenoch said, describing it as “Europe’s biggest disease.”

She singled out former German Chancellor Angela Merkel for particular criticism.

“I think there was a lot of complacency. That invitation to a million Syrian migrants to Germany was one of the reasons why people became more skeptical about the European Union project. It was one the triggers for Brexit,” she added.