Three Sundays That Cracked the Populist Right
Notes on a fracture nobody planned
Saturday morning, May 9, 2026. In the chamber of the Hungarian National Assembly, a forty-five-year-old former Fidesz insider named Péter Magyar raised his right hand and swore the oath of office. He is Hungary’s first post-Orbán prime minister in sixteen years. The vote tally on his confirmation was 140 in favor, 54 against, with one abstention. His party’s vice president, Ágnes Forsthoffer, was elected speaker and announced, as her first order of business, that the European Union flag would be reinstalled on the parliament building after 12 years in storage. Viktor Orbán, breaking a 36-year post-Communist parliamentary tradition, did not attend.
Two days later, on Monday, May 11, in Brussels, the twenty-seven foreign ministers of the European Union sat down at the Council building and did something Orbán had personally blocked for almost two years. They agreed, unanimously, to sanction Israeli settler organizations and their leaders over violence in the West Bank. The same meeting approved sanctions on Hamas leaders. Hungary’s new foreign minister, on instructions from the Magyar government sworn in forty-eight hours earlier, dropped the veto Orbán had been holding since President Trump scrapped the Biden-era settler sanctions on his first day in office in January 2025.
And on Thursday, May 7, in England, Wales, and Scotland, voters went to the polls in local and devolved elections that broke British politics. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK gained 1,244 council seats and took control of fourteen councils, including the home turf of Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. In Wales, Plaid Cymru ended a century of Labor dominance; Reform came second with 34 seats, and Welsh Labor was reduced to 9. The latest YouGov Westminster poll, fielded May 10–11, put Reform on 28 percent, eleven points ahead of any other party.
Three stories. One week. One continent and one ocean.
Most takes you’ll read on these events treat them as a single mood. Populism is winning. The right is rising. Fasten your seatbelts. I’m here to argue the opposite, or at least something more complicated. These three stories, read together, show that the trans-Atlantic populist alliance Donald Trump and JD Vance have been trying to anchor is actively coming apart. Not collapsing. Fracturing. Splitting along fault lines that were always there and that the people inside it spent the last decade pretending they could paper over.
I’m writing from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which is the wrong place to be a transgender woman in 2026 and the right place to watch the global authoritarian turn happen in real time. South Dakota was the sixth state to ban gender-affirming care for minors when Kristi Noem signed House Bill 1080 in February 2023. I have to leave my own state for routine medical care. I’m not coming to this story from the cheap seats. I’m watching the people who want to delete me from public life try to build an international coalition, and I’m watching that coalition trip over its own contradictions.
The thesis is simple. I want to say it up front so we can argue about it for the next 5,500 words. The Magyar government, the EU settler sanctions, and the Reform surge are not three data points on the same trend line. Three different trend lines are running through the same week. The Vance-aligned populist lost in Hungary. The Vance administration’s most reliable European blocker on Israel policy is gone. The British populist who once campaigned with Trump is now Britain’s most popular politician precisely since he has begun, quietly, to put distance between himself and the White House. Each of these developments would individually complicate the story of a unified right-wing international. Together, they break it.
What they do not break, and this is the part American liberals keep getting wrong, is the underlying social conservatism of the European electorate. Magyar won by avoiding the things Orbán built his career on. He did not promise to repeal the Pride ban. He did not commit to restoring legal gender recognition for trans people. He has a two-thirds supermajority, the same constitutional firepower Orbán used to entrench the regime, and the Hungarian LGBTQ+ rights organization Háttér Society reports he has not contacted them once. The European right-coded governments breaking with Trump on Israel are not breaking with Trump since they have suddenly discovered Palestinian human rights. They are breaking since Trump’s Iran war made him radioactive, since his tariffs are hurting them, and since, in some cases, their own voters got out ahead of them. The fracturing of the trans-Atlantic right is real. It is not a victory. It is a reshuffling.
Let me show you what I mean, one story at a time.
I. Hungary: The Defeat That Doesn’t Quite Deliver
On April 7, 2026, five days before the Hungarian parliamentary election, US Vice President JD Vance stood on a stage in Budapest next to Viktor Orbán and decided to talk about my body.
“Across the left, there is a band of radicals,” Vance told the rally crowd. “They reject mothers and motherhood, fathers and fatherhood in the name of liberation. They condemn children to mutilization and sterilization in the name of gender care, and they practice institutional murder in the name of quote end of life planning.”
The trans journalist Erin Reed, who has tracked anti-trans legislation in the United States since 2021, called the Budapest rally the most direct intervention by a sitting American vice president in a European election since the Cold War, and the speech itself the most aggressive anti-trans rhetoric ever delivered by a sitting US official on foreign soil. Trump endorsed Orbán on Truth Social the next day, writing “I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY” and promising “the full Economic Might of the United States” to strengthen Hungary’s economy if Orbán won.
Orbán lost anyway. He lost by enough that there is no asterisk, no procedural complaint, no contested district. Tisza won 141 seats out of 199. The party took 53.2 percent of the list vote to Fidesz’s 35 percent. Turnout was nearly 80 percent, the highest in any post-Communist Hungarian election. The OSCE election observation mission noted that there was “no level playing field” because the ruling party benefited from systemic advantages, meaning Orbán cheated in every legal way available to him and still lost by 20 points.
The American press wrote this up as a Trump humiliation, and it was that. Trump’s response in the days after the loss was something close to grief masked as indifference. “He was a friend of mine,” he said. “It wasn’t my election.” Vance was more pugnacious, telling reporters that he and Trump had gone to Budapest since “it was the right thing to do to stand behind a person who had stood by us for a very long time.” But the political damage was already done. The Christian Science Monitor reported within days that European far-right politicians who had once celebrated Trump’s 2024 return to the White House were now treating association with him as a liability. Marine Le Pen, per a Politico Europe report relayed by The Mirror, told National Rally lawmakers in a closed meeting that the party needed to “keep our distance” from the Trump administration.
Erin Reed’s framing of the Hungarian outcome is worth quoting in full since it captures the stakes for trans people directly:
The anti-LGBTQ+ panic that fueled Orbán’s autocratic regime, and that was exported to state legislatures across the United States, has been repudiated by the Hungarian people themselves in this historic election. LGBTQ+ people will rest slightly easier knowing that the regime is gone.
She is not wrong, and the relief is real. Hungary spent five years building one of the harshest anti-LGBTQ+ legal regimes in Europe. In 2020, Orbán’s government banned legal gender recognition for trans people entirely. In 2021, parliament passed the so-called child protection law banning “promotion” of homosexuality or gender change to minors. In 2023, the Constitutional Court ruled that anyone who had not applied for gender recognition before the 2020 ban was permanently barred from doing so. In March 2025, parliament criminalized Pride marches, with up to a year in prison for organizers. In April 2025, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Fundamental Law constitutionally enshrined the Pride ban and declared that Hungarian law recognizes only two sexes.
That entire architecture was built by people who treated American conservatives as students, not peers. Since 2022, CPAC has held annual satellite events in Budapest, where Orbán delivered keynotes describing “the woke movement and gender ideology” as “exactly what Communism and Marxism used to be.” The Orbán-linked Danube Institute hosted American conservative researchers. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s press secretary, when asked about the inspiration for Florida’s 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” law, said the quiet part out loud: “We were watching the Hungarians.” Hungary’s 2021 anti-LGBTQ+ law preceded Florida’s by nine months. Hungary’s 2020 trans recognition ban preceded the wave of similar US state efforts.
So when the Hungarian electorate threw Orbán out by twenty points, the people losing were not just Orbán’s domestic coalition. The people losing were the people who built South Dakota’s HB 1080, who watched the Hungarian playbook and copied its sections.
Here is where the story gets harder. Magyar’s Tisza party did not campaign on rolling back that architecture. The Hungarian LGBTQ rights organization Háttér Society, in its pre-election guide, stated flatly that “the party’s election program does not address LGBTQ+ issues.” Magyar refused to attend the 2025 Budapest Pride demonstration. He declined to denounce the Pride ban by name. His sole public statement on assembly rights was a generic defense of “the freedom of assembly” that did not mention LGBTQ+ people. On election night, in front of tens of thousands of supporters along the Danube, he came closer to a commitment than he ever had during the campaign, promising a country “where no one is stigmatized since they think differently than the majority. No one is stigmatized if they love someone else, and love differently than the majority.” It was the most a Hungarian prime minister had said about LGBTQ+ Hungarians without contempt in sixteen years. It was an absence of hatred rather than a promise of action.
The day after Magyar was sworn in, the European Council on Foreign Relations published the post-election poll, which LGBTQ Nation and the Irish outlet GCN both covered. Seventy-one percent of Tisza voters supported or somewhat supported the new government protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ people, compared with 23 percent of Fidesz voters. Seventy-five percent of Tisza voters wanted more action on the climate crisis. Pawel Zerka, the ECFR analyst who commissioned the poll, told GCN: “There is a very clear mandate for the new government to have a more progressive stance. But it depends on whether Magyar looks at his own voters or the overall electorate, as the Hungarian public is much more divided on this.” LGBTQ Nation’s headline said it cleanly. The body of the story said something more careful. Magyar’s voters want LGBTQ+ rights protected. Magyar himself has not promised to protect them.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the most celebrated Vance-aligned defeat of 2026. The Hungarian electorate punished Orbán for corruption, for economic stagnation, for the daily grind of state capture. They did not necessarily punish him for the trans recognition ban. Many of them probably do not think about the trans recognition ban at all. Magyar inherits all of that. He has a two-thirds supermajority, the same constitutional weapon Orbán used to entrench his regime. He has the legal capacity to repeal the trans recognition ban, restore Pride rights, and reverse the Fifteenth Amendment. He has not, as of the day his government was sworn in, committed to any of those things.
The Court of Justice of the European Union helped, partially. On April 21, 2026, nine days after the election, the Full Court of the CJEU delivered its judgment in Commission v Hungary (C-769/22). The court found that Hungary’s 2021 anti-LGBT law violated Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union and Article 1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, marking the first time either article had been applied in a CJEU ruling. The court wrote that the Hungarian law “stigmatizes and marginalizes non-cisgender people, including transgender people” and was “contrary to the very identity of the Union as a common legal order in a society in which pluralism prevails.” Human Rights Watch called the ruling “a landmark judgment that firmly rejects attempts to stigmatize lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people under the justification of ‘child protection’” and called on Magyar’s incoming government to repeal the law.
The ruling is binding. Orbán, in one of his last acts as prime minister, said Hungary would not implement it. The decision now sits on Magyar’s desk. He could comply. He could comply partially. He could let Háttér Society’s eighty-seven pending cases at the European Court of Human Rights work their way through the system as he does nothing himself. He could decide that his political capital is better spent on the EU funds he wants to unfreeze, the eurozone accession he wants to pursue, and the corruption prosecutions he has promised, rather than on a fight that energizes the Fidesz base he is trying not to mobilize.
The next year will tell us which Magyar we got. I want to believe the better one. I have watched too many center-right European parties decide that LGBTQ+ rights are a luxury they can defer until the macroeconomic situation improves, by which point the next election is on top of them, and the rights stay deferred. The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union’s Dánel Döbrentey described the purpose of the 2025 amendment as the exclusion of trans and intersex people “not just from the national community, but even from the community of human beings.” That is constitutional language. It sits in the Hungarian Fundamental Law as I type. Magyar has the votes to take it out. We will see whether he uses them.
What the Hungarian election did, unambiguously, was break the Vance-Orbán axis. The CPAC Budapest events, the Danube Institute fellowships, the photo ops with American conservatives, the entire institutional infrastructure that made Hungary the European laboratory for American Christian nationalist policy: that infrastructure now runs through a government that has no interest in hosting it. The American right has lost its European model. They will find another, since the demand is real and the supply of authoritarians is constant. They have lost this one, and the loss is in part Vance’s personal fault. The Hungarian electorate watched the vice president of the United States stand on their soil and tell them how to vote, and they did the opposite.
That is the part of the Hungarian story that travels.
II. Brussels: The Sanctions That Reveal the Real Argument
The fastest way to test whether the European right-coded electorates have actually broken with Trump on foreign policy is to look at what their governments do once the procedural blocker is removed. Hungary, under Orbán, had spent two years as the EU’s sole holdout on sanctions against violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The bloc operates by unanimity on foreign policy, which means one government, even one government governing nine and a half million people, can stop twenty-six others. Orbán used that veto for Benjamin Netanyahu, his closest non-American ally and a fellow traveler in the project of redefining democracy to mean whatever a majoritarian government decides it means.
Two days after Magyar was sworn in, that veto was gone. Twenty-seven foreign ministers met in Brussels and adopted, unanimously, sanctions targeting “extremist and violent” Israeli settler organizations and their leaders. The package included sanctions on Hamas leaders, a condition some member states had required for their support. The speed of the vote, per the European Middle East Project’s Martin Konečný, “validates the notion that Orban was blocking them single-handedly.” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas posted on X: “It was high time we moved from deadlock to delivery. Extremism and violence carry consequences.”
The list of sanctioned entities, per Israel’s Haaretz newspaper and NPR, includes the settler organizations Amana, Nachala, Hashomer Yosh, and Regavim, along with some of their leaders: Daniella Weiss, Meir Deutsch, and Avichai Suissa. An EU official told The Times of Israel that a total of seven settlers and settler organizations would be blacklisted, with asset freezes and EU travel bans. Weiss, often described as the godmother of the Israeli settler movement, told the AP she had received no formal notification and described the sanctions as “ridiculous.” Regavim said it considered being sanctioned “a badge of honor.” Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called the decision “arbitrary and political” and vowed that Israel would “continue to stand for the right of Jews to settle in the heart of our homeland.” Prime Minister Netanyahu, posting from his official account, said that as Israel and the United States were “doing Europe’s dirty work by fighting for civilization against jihadist lunatics in Iran and elsewhere, the European Union exposed its moral bankruptcy.”
The most important sentence in any of the news coverage came from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Ron Kampeas: “Under the Biden administration, the United States sanctioned multiple settler leaders, settler groups, and West Bank outposts in 2024. Trump canceled the sanctions a day after reentering office in January 2025.” The European Union is now sanctioning the same individuals and organizations that the previous American administration sanctioned and that the current American administration unsanctioned. The EU is not breaking new diplomatic ground. It is filling a vacuum left by the United States. The trans-Atlantic alliance that for two generations meant Washington led and Brussels followed is now running in reverse on at least one consequential question of international law.
To grasp why this matters for the populist coalition, you have to look at who voted yes. The unanimous vote includes Italy under Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party has historically been one of Israel’s most reliable European partners and has been a vocal Orbán ally. It includes Germany under Friedrich Merz, whose CDU/CSU government has historically treated criticism of Israel as politically untouchable for reasons of Holocaust memory. It includes France under Emmanuel Macron, whose foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said: “It’s done. The European Union is sanctioning today the main Israeli organizations guilty of supporting the extremist and violent colonization of the West Bank, as well as their leaders.” Italian, German, and French governments, who would have been very happy to leave the sanctions question parked indefinitely so long as Orbán was the one parking it, lost that excuse on May 9 and could not find a new one by May 11.
That speed is the tell. The sanctions had been ready for months. They were waiting for Hungary. Sweden’s foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard, said immediately after the vote: “We also need to move forward with sanctioning of Israeli ministers that are driving these settlements.” Ireland’s Helen McEntee called what was happening in the West Bank “just unacceptable behavior by Israel” and noted that “for the first time, I believe in quite some time, there was a desire by many member states to do more to respond to what is an increasing level of violence.” Spain, Slovenia, Belgium, Ireland, and the Netherlands are pursuing separate national bans on goods from illegal settlements. The Spanish government has called for suspending the EU’s trade agreement with Israel entirely.
This is what a fracture looks like from the inside. The European populist right is not unified on Israel. Meloni and the German CDU support Israel. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s center-left government wants to suspend the association agreement. Robert Fico’s left-nationalist Slovak government is in the Orbán column. Reform UK, the party leading British polls, is unambiguously pro-Israel: Farage has rejected suspending UK arms supplies to Israel, opposes the ICC arrest warrant against Netanyahu, and condemned Keir Starmer’s recognition of Palestinian statehood. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has spent years trying to convince French Jewish voters that the party has moved on from its antisemitic founding generation. The AfD in Germany is openly hostile to Israeli policy and to Trump’s Iran war, with AfD MP Stefan Möller saying in a Bundestag meeting in March 2026 that the party has “two hearts in its chest” about Trump.
The settler sanctions reveal an axis the trans-Atlantic right keeps trying to pretend doesn’t exist: the question of whether European populism is fundamentally about being on the same team as the American populist right, or about pursuing European national interests that sometimes diverge from American ones. For sixteen years, Orbán resolved that question one way. He used Hungary’s EU veto to deliver outcomes Washington wanted, in exchange for ideological partnership and, in the Trump years, the promise of US economic backing. Magyar is in the process of resolving it the other way. His party platform commits Hungary to joining the eurozone by 2030. His first major foreign policy action as prime minister was to drop the veto that Orbán had been holding for Netanyahu, which is to say the veto that Orbán had been holding for Trump. He did it on May 11, two days into the job.
Magyar is not a liberal. His Tisza MEPs in the European Parliament participate in only 53.5 percent of votes compared to an 88 percent average, and Magyar himself participated in only 25 percent. Tisza voted with Fidesz against EU amendments strengthening support for Ukraine and against the EU migration and asylum pact. Magyar opposes Ukraine’s accelerated EU accession and wants Hungarian membership in the EU to be put to a binding referendum. His proposed timeline to end Russian fossil fuel imports is 2035, well behind the EU’s 2027 target. On the day before his oath, he announced that Hungary would not contribute to the proposed €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine, though it would not block it. He is a center-right pro-European who is willing to maintain real continuity with Orbán’s foreign policy on Russia and Ukraine, while breaking with it on Israel and the EU institutions.
That selective alignment is the future of European populism after Trump. Not a uniform Atlanticist bloc and not a uniform anti-American bloc, but twenty-seven governments deciding, case by case, whether the cost of breaking with Washington is higher than the cost of breaking with Brussels. Orbán resolved every such question by siding with Washington and Moscow against Brussels. Most of his successors, even right-wing ones, will not be that consistent. They will defect on Israel since their voters are watching Gaza on their phones every night. They will hold the line on migration since their voters want it held. They will play both sides on Ukraine since their voters are split. The Vance vision of a unified national-conservative trans-Atlantic project requires governments to follow the American lead on every one of these questions. The Brussels vote on May 11 says they won’t.
One more piece of context that does not fit cleanly into the European story, but that I cannot leave out. The settler sanctions package was finalized at a meeting that took place six weeks after Israeli human rights group Yesh Din reported that eight Palestinians had been shot and killed and two hundred injured by extremist settlers during the period of the US-Israeli war with Iran from late February to early April 2026. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that at least 40 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank since the start of 2026, including a record 11 by settlers, two more than in all of 2025. The numbers are not the reason for the policy. They are the reason the policy was politically survivable. European governments could vote yes on May 11 since their own electorates were further to the political left on Gaza and the West Bank than the governments themselves. Spain’s Sánchez, Ireland’s coalition, Belgium’s coalition, the Dutch caretaker government: all of them were responding to street pressure, to youth voters, to a sense that something had to be done.
That public pressure is the unspoken context for the third story in this week’s chain.
