With its reputation tainted by association with a regime embroiled in scandal and corruption, the Hungarian Church faces a reckoning after Péter Magyar’s election victory.

The landslide defeat of Viktor Orbán’s far-right Fidesz party in Hungary’s parliamentary elections on Low Sunday opens a new chapter in the country’s national story. The centre right Tisza party, led by former Fidesz insider Péter Magyar, won 54 per cent of the vote to Fidesz’s 38 per cent, securing a whopping two-thirds (141 out of 199 seats) supermajority in Hungary’s unicameral legislature.

The result has prompted speculation about the future of the populist right in Europe – of whose rise Fidesz was both a harbinger and an enabler. It also raises difficult questions for Hungary’s mainstream Churches, and their role in the “illiberal democracy” in place since Orbán’s return as prime minister in 2010.

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