On April 12, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his small fascist ruling party Fidesz were ousted in an election landslide. The outcome represents a win for the big fascists of the European Union (EU), the big multinational banks, and other finance capital bosses with the trans-Atlantic military alliance of NATO and the EU. These liberal rulers are determined to keep Western imperialism top dog on the world stage—and to push back the upstart European “alternative finance” capitalists, whose wealth is tied to hedge funds and private equity (Irish Times, 4/15).
By dethroning Orban, a loyal ally of both the Russian imperialists and U.S. State-Terrorist-in-Chief Donald Trump, the liberal mass murderers have removed one obstacle to their clash with Russia in the ongoing bloodbath in Ukraine. They’ll also have freer rein to expand the EU’s military buildup and prepare for wider wars. Hungary has now pledged to not block a EU-funded $105 billion loan mainly for military aid to Ukraine (Bloomberg.com, 419). As winning candidate Peter Magyar and his new Tisza party are signaling a renewal of close ties with the EU, the liberal bosses are rejoicing. An editorial in the New York Times gushed, “Hungary now has a golden opportunity… [to] become a lighthouse of democracy” (New York Times, 4/13).
Workers everywhere have good reason to reject the likes of the racist, sexist, incompetent, and corrupt Orban. But electing some other capitalist stooge will never meet the needs and aspirations of the international working class. The growth of fascism goes deeper than an Orban or a Trump or a Giorgia Meloni. It reflects an acute crisis of the worldwide profit system as it lurches toward world war.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) rejects voting and all bosses in favor of armed struggle and workers’ power. When we unite with millions of other working people, we are on the path to transforming society. On this coming May Day, the international workers’ holiday, let’s take to the streets and raise the red flag of communism. Let’s defy the bosses’ racist, sexist attacks, their misleader politicians, and their imperialist wars!
New Hungarian PM a racist enemy to workers
As a longtime agent of the Hungarian ruling class, the opportunist Magyar is no friend of the working class. He went to elite private schools and joined Orban’s Fidesz party in 2002, while still in university (BBC, 4/12). Magyar left Fidesz barely two years ago. His ex-wife, the country’s former justice minister, was at the center of a cover-up of child molestation (Forbes, 4/13).
Magyar has promised to tackle corruption, improve the economy, and defend Romani workers who have long faced racist repression (BBC 4/1).
Yet for over two decades, as Orban’s staunch political ally, he helped lead an administration that scapegoated Romani and immigrant workers and did nothing to address their high poverty rate and low life expectancy (The Guardian, 1/31).
Magyar’s stated resolve to pivot on Ukraine is a complicated story. Like much of the EU, Hungary remains dependent on Russian gas and oil. The incoming prime minister has signaled that his future support for Ukraine could be contingent on that country’s repair of a damaged pipeline to keep Russian fuel flowing (The Independent, 4/18).
Liberal rulers build for world war
For the battered pro-EU and NATO rulers across Europe and North America, Orban’s removal could be very helpful. Over the decades following the carnage of World War II, ascendant U.S. imperialism projected global power through a “rules-based” order through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund on the one hand and U.S. military bases on the other—the carrot and the stick . NATO was conceived as an instrument to contain the Soviet Union and later post-Soviet Russia.
But the rise of go-it-alone small fascist factions in the U.S. and Europe have threatened to hollow NATO out. Trump has repeatedly derided the coalition as dead weight. He most recently took it to task for failing to join his brutal massacre across Iran and the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports and the Strait of Hormuz (Reuters, 4/13).
For the mainstream liberal European bosses, the existential threat is a resurgent Russian imperialism, abetted by loose cannon Trump and open European fascists. The Russian bosses are in fact coming out ahead in Trump’s war on Iran. Relaxed sanctions on Russian oil have netted them $9 billion to keep slaughtering workers across Ukraine (CNN, 3/27). Meanwhile, Magyar’s allies in Brussels are aiming to expand the conflict with their Russian rivals, at the cost of even more workers’ lives.
At the end of 2025, EU nations within NATO pledged to more than double their military spending to 5 percent of their gross domestic product by 2035, to over $4 trillion (SIPRI, 6/27/25). To reach that target, the liberal EU bosses will need to further gut social benefits for millions of workers already suffering under vicious austerity measures (NYT, 3/31).
Don’t vote – fight for communist revolution!
The enthusiasm over Magyar, like all electoral reform movements, reflects the extreme inequality of capitalism and its failure to meet workers’ most basic needs. Class struggle is the antidote to attacks on our class. Our task is to fight in the muck and mire of the reform struggle while at the same time rejecting reformist misleaders and their anti-worker ideology. But unless reform struggles are injected with communist ideas and used to build the revolutionary PLP, they are destined to fail.
Side-by-side with our class sisters and brothers, from the U.S. and Europe to Iran and Sudan, we can transform dead-end election campaigns into fightback against imperialist war and rising fascism. Ultimately, we can destroy the bosses’ rotten system once and for all. March on May Day and join PLP!
