World

Orbán government takes victory lap, despite party's worst-ever performance in EU parliament race

Published

2 years ago

June 10, 2024

Orbán government takes victory lap, despite party's worst-ever performance in EU parliament race

The day after Hungarians voted in the European Parliament elections, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government declared a big win, but missing from the victory speeches was an acknowledgement that it was his party’s worst performance in an EU election since Hungary joined the bloc 20 years ago.

The lackluster showing can largely be attributed to the emergence of a new political force in Hungary — Péter Magyar, a former insider in Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP coalition, who broke with the party and declared his intention to build a popular movement to defeat Orbán and sweep away his autocratic system.

Eleven of Hungary’s 21 delegates to the EU’s legislature will come from Fidesz — more than any of its domestic competitors. After tallying 44% of Sunday’s vote, the government said the result clearly signals overwhelming support for Orbán’s hard-right nationalism.

GERMANY’S CONSERVATIVES FINISH FIRST IN EU ELECTION, AS FAR-RIGHT MOMENTUM SENDS FRANCE’S LEADER SCRAMBLING

“Never before have so many people, 2.015 million, voted for Fidesz-KDNP in an EP election,” spokesman Zoltán Kovács wrote Monday on the social media platform X. “The message is clear: Hungarians say no to war, migration, and gender ideology.”

Nonetheless, Fidesz has never performed so poorly in a European Union election since it joined in 2004. Votes for the party were down sharply from its 52% support in the 2019 polls, and it lost two of its European Parliament seats.

András Bíró-Nagy, an analyst and director of the Budapest-based think tank Policy Solutions, said the power of Orbán — who returned to office in 2010 — has never been more at risk.

“We are in an unknown territory because previously it was not imaginable that a single political party could mount a serious challenge to Viktor Orbán,” Bíró-Nagy said.

FILE – Viktor Orbán waves after his annual state of the nation speech in Varkert Bazaar conference hall of Budapest, Hungary, Feb. 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Anna Szilagyi, File)

Magyar’s new party, Respect and Freedom (TISZA), won nearly 30% of the vote on Sunday, earning seven delegates in the EU legislature. He has said the election would propel his movement into a stronger position to challenge and defeat Orbán in the next national ballot, scheduled for 2026.

Late Sunday, thousands of Magyar’s supporters gathered next to the Danube River to await the election results. Addressing the jubilant crowd, Magyar said his party’s performance was a “political landslide” that would usher in a new era of “useful, fair and, especially, honest” governance.

“Today marks the end of an era,” Magyar said. “This is the Waterloo of Orbán’s factory of power, the beginning of the end,” he said, referring to the battle that ended the Napoleonic Wars.

Magyar campaigned less on a specific party program than a structural critique of Orbán’s system, which he characterized as rife with corruption, nepotism, intimidation and propaganda.

He derided the condition of Hungary’s education and health care systems, accused Fidesz of creating a class of oligarchs enriched with lucrative public contracts, and vowed to form a more constructive relationship with the EU.

Hungary’s traditional opposition parties, through pressure from Orbán’s government and their own fractiousness and infighting, have been unable to mount a serious challenge to Fidesz in the past 14 years.

“The Péter Magyar phenomenon is the symptom of a deep crisis in Hungarian politics,” said Bíró-Nagy. “This reflects not only some disillusionment with the Orbán regime, but it shows the complete disillusionment with the established opposition.”

“Many people in Hungary are craving for something new, are craving for change, and they are willing to support basically anybody who shows potentially some strength against the Orbán regime,” he said.

Magyar’s rise followed a series of scandals that rocked Orbán’s government and prompted the resignation of the president and justice minister. A deep economic crisis, compounded by the highest inflation in the 27-member EU, also led to a drop in popularity for the bloc’s longest-serving leader.

Meanwhile, the EU has frozen more than 20 billion euros ($21.5 billion) to Hungary over its violations of rule-of-law and democracy standards, and Orbán’s friendly relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin have pushed him further into the margins from his EU and NATO allies.

Ahead of the elections, the five-time prime minister campaigned on an anti-EU platform, and cast the ballot as a contest that would decide whether Russia’s war in Ukraine would engulf Europe.

He relied heavily on culturally divisive issues such as migration, LGBTQ+ rights and fears that the war could escalate to involve Hungary directly if his political opponents were successful.

But Fidesz’s weakened position suggests Orbán’s hopes that the EU election would consolidate euroskeptic parties and deliver him a bigger role on Europe’s far-right have likely been dashed.

“Orbán has already taken the place of the radical right in Hungarian politics,” Bíró-Nagy said. “But the breakthrough that Viktor Orbán was hoping for didn’t materialize at the European level.”

World

Supreme Court rejects Virginia’s bid to restore congressional map favoring Democrats

Published

9 minutes ago

May 16, 2026

Press Room

Supreme Court rejects Virginia’s bid to restore congressional map favoring Democrats

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday rejected Virginia’s bid to restore a congressional map that would have given Democrats a chance to pick up four seats in the closely divided House of Representatives.

The court’s order, issued without any noted dissent, is the latest twist in the nation’s mid-decade redistricting competition. It was kicked off last year by President Donald Trump urging Republican-controlled states to redraw their lines and was supercharged by a recent Supreme Court ruling severely weakening the Voting Rights Act that opened up even more winnable seats for the GOP.

In recent days, the justices have sided with Republicans in Alabama and Louisiana who hope to redo their congressional maps to produce more GOP-leaning seats following the court’s voting rights decision.

But the Virginia situation was different, stemming from a 4-3 ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court that struck down a constitutional amendment that voters narrowly passed just last month.

The state court found that the Democratic-controlled legislature improperly began the process of placing the amendment on the ballot after early voting had begun in Virginia’s general election last fall.

The Supreme Court typically doesn’t intervene in state court proceedings unless they present an issue of federal law. Virginia Democrats had hoped to persuade the justices that the Virginia court misread federal law and Supreme Court precedent that hold that, even if early voting is underway, an election does not happen until Election Day itself.

Virginia’s amendment had been intended as a response to Republican gains in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, and to blunt a new map in Florida that just became law. Once the Virginia amendment passed, it briefly turned the nationwide redistricting scramble into a draw between the two parties.

That was unraveled by the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision.

The state’s attorney general, Democrat Jay Jones, slammed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, saying it was another example of what he described as a national attack on voting rights and the rule of law.

“Let’s be clear about what is happening. Donald Trump, Republican state legislatures, and conservative courts are systematically and unabashedly tilting power away from the people for Trump’s political gain,” Jones said in a statement issued late Friday night.

The state’s top Democrats had disagreed about whether it was even too late for help from the Supreme Court. “Time grows short, but it is not yet too late,” lawyers for the Democratic leaders of the legislature as well as the state told the justices in a brief filed Friday.

A day earlier, the office of Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger already had confirmed that the state will hold this year’s elections under the current districts established in 2021. Last month, Virginia Commissioner of Elections Steve Koski said a court order was needed by this past Tuesday to set the district lines for primary elections on Aug. 4.

Spanberger reacted to Friday’s decision by saying both courts had nullified the votes of the more than 3 million Virginians who cast ballots in the April 21 special election.

“These Virginians made their voices heard — casting their ballots in good faith to push back against a President who said he’s ‘entitled’ to more seats in Congress before voters go to the polls,” she posted on her X account.

The leader of the state Republican Party said the justices made the right call.

“Wisely, the Supreme Court of the United States has confirmed the judgment of the Supreme Court of Virginia,” state party chairman Jeff Ryer said. “This should once and for all put to rest the Democrats’ effort to disenfranchise half of Virginia.

___

Associated Press writer Safiyah Riddle in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed to this report.

World

Trump says Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, second in command of ISIS globally, killed in US-Nigerian operation

Published

1 hour ago

May 16, 2026

Press Room

Trump says Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, second in command of ISIS globally, killed in US-Nigerian operation

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President Donald Trump announced late Friday that U.S. and Nigerian forces carried out an operation that killed a global ISIS leader.

Trump identified the terrorist as Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, whom he described as ISIS’s second-in-command globally.

“Tonight, at my direction, brave American forces and the Armed Forces of Nigeria flawlessly executed a meticulously planned and very complex mission to eliminate the most active terrorist in the world from the battlefield,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

“Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, second in command of ISIS globally, thought he could hide in Africa, but little did he know we had sources who kept us informed on what he was doing,” Trump continued. “He will no longer terrorize the people of Africa, or help plan operations to target Americans.”

100 US TROOPS LAND IN NIGERIA AS ISLAMIC MILITANTS THREATEN WEST AFRICA REGIONAL SECURITY

President Donald Trump sits at a table monitoring military operations during Operation Epic Fury against Iran at the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 2. (The White House via X Account/Anadolu/Getty Images)

Trump also thanked the Nigerian government for its cooperation in the mission.

“With his removal, ISIS’s global operation is greatly diminished,” he added.

Additional details surrounding the mission were not immediately available.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House for comment.

US MILITARY IN SYRIA CARRIES OUT 10 STRIKES ON MORE THAN 30 ISIS TARGETS: PHOTOS

The announcement comes after U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said it carried out multiple strikes against more than 30 ISIS targets in Syria in February as part of a joint military effort to “sustain relentless military pressure on remnants from the terrorist network.”

CENTCOM said U.S. forces struck ISIS infrastructure and weapons-storage targets using fixed-wing, rotary-wing and unmanned aircraft.

DEADLY STRIKE ON US TROOPS TESTS TRUMP’S COUNTER-ISIS PLAN — AND HIS TRUST IN SYRIA’S NEW LEADER

The U.S. military carried out ten strikes against more than 30 ISIS targets in Syria following a December ambush that killed U.S. troops. (CENTCOM)

Trump told reporters on Jan. 27 that he had a “great conversation” with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa.

“All of the things having to do with Syria in that area are working out very, very well,” he said at the time. “So, we are very happy about it.”

CENTCOM announced in February that more than 50 ISIS terrorists had been killed or captured and more than 100 ISIS infrastructure targets struck during two months of targeted operations in Syria.

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The U.S. launched Operation Hawkeye Strike in response to an ISIS ambush that killed two U.S. service members and an American interpreter Dec. 13, 2025, in Palmyra, Syria.

Fox News Digital’s Ashley J. DiMella contributed to this report.