What Magyar's election win means for Hungary's economy and Europe

Hungary is preparing for a new era, after the centre-right Tisza party of Peter Magyar won a landslide victory over longtime nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Magyar says he'll seek to repair Hungary's confrontational relationship with the European Union, something that could unlock much-needed EU funding for Ukraine and for Hungary itself. Many voters said the stagnating economy was a major factor in their decision to turn against 16 years of Orban's rule. Speaking to FRANCE 24, Balazs Szent-Ivanyi, reader in politics at Aston University's Centre for Europe , says the incoming Hungarian government can't usher in change overnight. "The Tisza party has a very long manifesto, which is fairly rare in Hungarian politics – Fidesz, for example, had no manifesto at all. We see quite a lot of promises, many of them actually relate to increasing spending, which seems difficult to enact at the moment. The budget deficit for this year is forecast around 5-5.5 percent, and that doesn't necessarily take into account the extra spending that the war in Iran is creating." Szent-Ivanyi says that in the medium-term, Magyar could launch an effort to join the eurozone . Integrating into the shared currency bloc "would bring a lot of certainty and increased credibility for the government's economic policies (...) The problem is that Hungary currently doesn't fulfil any of the Maastricht criteria required for introducing the euro . So there's quite a lot of work to do there."

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What Magyar's election win means for Hungary's economy and Europe is an episode from People & Profit by France Médias Monde.

This episode is 00:11:36 long.

This episode was published on Apr 17, 2026.

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