Lessons For The Underdog

• Irina Khalip
• 17.04.2026, 15:19

Orban wouldn't advise against it.

Viktor Orbán certainly pleased last weekend. He admitted defeat, congratulated the winner at 9:11 p.m., when there was plenty of time left before the official results of the Hungarian election were announced, and, of course, promised to continue working for the good of his native country. He was pleased not only by the fact that he left without "blue fingers", but also by the lesson that he accidentally, unknowingly, taught to the remaining dictators. Our dictator, first of all.

Our dictator in general, since the beginning of the year, has been in the position of a second-year student (sorry, a thirty-two-year-old, to be precise), to whom the teachers, maddened by his eternal presence at the desk, decided to teach the school program in an accelerated and compressed manner. At the beginning of the year he saw how Maduro's friend, surrounded by guards armed to the teeth, one day finds himself in a prison in another country, and the guards don't understand what came over them - they couldn't resist the enemy, couldn't move a hand, as if they were under some kind of obsession. Then it turns out that the Ayatollah hidden in the bunker, which no terminators can reach, suddenly turns dead and speechless in a second. And even if you have been sitting at a desk for a hundred years due to lack of cognitive potential, with such a visual presentation of educational material you should already realize that for complete destruction of all bunkers together with their inhabitants in Belarus, which is eight times smaller than Iran, approximately one sortie will be enough. A harsh but necessary lesson. And now here is Orban, who has demonstrated that the system, which he built exclusively "for himself" for sixteen years, has destroyed him.

Orban has redesigned the electoral system so that most of the 199 members of parliament - 103 - are elected in single-member districts. Those, in turn, are "sliced" in such a way that most of the mandates are distributed in rural districts, which traditionally supported the Fidesz party. That is, if in opposition Budapest one hundred thousand votes are needed for one mandate (the figures are notional, just to explain the principle), then in a rural district much less is needed. And all the results were thus initially a bit rigged. When Orban gained less than half, he still got 52-53 percent in the exit polls. And now that the pendulum has swung the other way, the same system has played against him, handing him defeat. This is the first Hungarian lesson for Lukashenko: the system created by you will hit you one day. If you bet on law enforcers, wait for one of them to declare himself Prigozhin and attack the residence.

But you can do without law enforcers - this is the second Hungarian lesson. One should simply remember who Peter Magyar is. And this, for a moment, is Orbán's flesh and flesh. He joined the Fidesz party back in 2002, but has been unable to build either a party or state career for two decades. But being a loyal Orbanian and the husband of a successful wife - the Minister of Justice - he changed from time to time insignificant, but quite calm positions in different state structures, that is, he was fed and confident in the future. And when the scandal with secret pardons broke out, and Magyar's wife (whom he had prudently managed to divorce shortly before the scandal) resigned, he got his bearings in time and, as the recent husband of a big boss and participant in a corruption scandal, went on the airwaves and YouTube channels exposing the system from the inside - from the marital boudoir. This was enough.

Magyar's rise in just a few months is an illustration of the fact that any small official from conditional Mikashevichi or Kostyukovichi can become a national hero and a national leader if he opens his mouth at the right moment and starts spewing revelations. At least Kochanova's husband, by God. It is not for nothing that in 2020 Belarusians said that even a horse's ass could win this election, because Lukashenko is so annoying. And Orban is simply fed up for 16 years.

And, finally, the last Hungarian lesson. The ally in the form of Russia, which remained Lukashenko's last hope (other allies have fallen like overripe fruit from a tree), is absolutely elusive. Not even a day after the Hungarian elections, and Putin's spokesman Peskov has already rushed to declare that Viktor Orban has never been an ally of Russia, and in general it was a dialog, not friendship. Putin understands the language of force perfectly well and at the slightest risk of losing an ally, he forgets about his oaths of eternal friendship and runs to make an alliance with the winner. This was the case in Venezuela, Iran, Syria, and Hungary. (He can, of course, welcome a house in Rostov to a former friend who has fled. The scheme did not work only with Ukraine, because its new government was not strong and looked almost cartoonish. It seemed to Putin that it could be "swept off the table with the strength of one airborne regiment" and gain territory.

But in Belarus, even in 2020, when Lukashenko was hanging on by a thread, the Kremlin's help amounted only to sending a few third-rate propagandists to Minsk who didn't have enough for a hangover. And they came up with nothing but the word "yabatka". Thanks for your help, it was funny. So in the future one should not count on Moscow either: as soon as Lukashenko falls off his chair, the Kremlin will throw up its hands and go to negotiate with the new authorities, while he, who has fallen, will be declared a collective farmer who can't even drive a tractor.

And he really can't even drive a tractor.

Irina Khalip, specially for Charter97.org.