BUDAPEST: When Peter Magyar was a child, he taped a photo of Viktor Orban, then an anti-Communist firebrand, on his bedroom wall, thrilled by Hungary's first democratic elections in 1990.
Decades later, he ended Orban's 16-year rule as prime minister in an election that brought a record-high turnout and was expected to rattle Russia and send shockwaves through right-wing circles across the West, including US President Donald Trump's White House.
Magyar's centre-right, pro-European Union Tisza party beat Orban's nationalist Fidesz party in Sunday's parliamentary election. Partial results showed Tisza would win 137 seats, or a two-thirds majority, in the 199-seat parliament.
Only nine years old when communism collapsed, Magyar said he had decorated his walls with photos of leading political figures in his Budapest family home.
Orban, then a young lawyer, had become a hero of Hungary's pro-democracy movement when he publicly demanded in 1989 that Soviet troops leave the country.
"There was a surge of energy around the regime change that swept me up as a child," Magyar told the Fokuszcsoport podcast last year.
Magyar, whose family name literally means "Hungarian", burst into the limelight two years ago after his ex-wife, Orban's former justice minister Judit Varga, resigned from all political roles after a sex-abuse case pardon that caused public uproar.
Magyar quickly distanced himself from the governing party and accused it of corruption and spreading propaganda, saying he had become disillusioned with Fidesz.
Just four months after emerging from near-total obscurity with an interview at YouTube channel Partizan, Magyar’s new party won 30% in the June 2024 European elections, finishing second to Fidesz and crushing the rest of the opposition.
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