Many Hungarians see Péter Magyar’s landslide election victory last month as a moment as seismic as 1989, when Hungary’s communist regime collapsed.

In April, Viktor Orbán was shown the door after 16 years of near-total power in which he morphed from an anti-communist liberal, into a Russia-friendly illiberal nationalist.

Few are better placed to draw parallels than Gábor Roszík, a Lutheran pastor who became the first anti-communist MP elected to Hungary’s parliament in 1989. He secured a surprise by-election victory in Gödöllő, near Budapest, in July 1989, helping pave the way for the communists’ collapse in the 1990 elections and Hungary’s transition to democracy.

“In 1989 I was threatened, I was followed in the streets. I didn’t know whether I would go to prison or be killed,” Roszík recalled over the phone.

His election was a global news story, and he received congratulatory letters from all over the world.

My mother, then a journalist for Reuters, interviewed Roszík at his home in Gödöllő in August 1989. “People were angry nervous and unsatisfied,” he told her in that interview, expressing his admiration for Margaret Thatcher. “They know communism doesn’t work. They want something new,” he said of his voters.

Roszík was elected on a liberal conservative ticket for the now-defunct Hungarian Democratic Forum, supported at the time by Fidesz, another anti-communist movement founded, and later led, by Viktor Orbán. Roszík won a seat again in 1990 and remained an MP until 1994, focusing on foreign affairs.

“Fidel Castro held a thirty-minute speech about my victory, attacking the communists in Hungary, asking ‘how could they let a person like me get into the parliament’?”

Winning in 1990 was “much easier” than today, he said, in a Hungary where Fidesz controls much of the system. In 1989, the communists saw the writing on the wall and accepted democracy was coming. This time, he credited Péter Magyar’s “genius” for driving change, and suggested the scale of change needed was vast.

“There was never such a dirty, nasty campaign made,” Roszík, now 71, said about Hungary’s 2026 election. But he said the scale of economic change required in Hungary will be less daunting than the change from communism to capitalism he helped to drive through.

How Orbán changed

Thirty-eight years on, Gábor Roszík reflected on how Viktor Orbán has changed.

“We were very optimistic about Orbán Viktor,” he said, remembering voting for Fidesz in 1998. “But then you know what happened. Fidesz left the liberal association, left everything behind, became Christian Democrat, then illiberal.”

“He brutally misused his two-thirds majority in the parliament, unfortunately. He could have become a great statesman. But instead he started to steal money for himself, for his family, for his friends.”

He traced Orbán’s downfall to corruption, media capture and revelations about luxurious lives led by Fidesz and people in its orbit. The EU froze billions in funding over corruption and rule-of-law concerns, and allies of Orbán bought up much of the media landscape.

His 97-year-old mother, a devoted viewer of state TV, told him Viktor Orbán wanted peace, while Péter Magyar wanted war – a narrative reinforced by Magyar’s near total absence from public broadcasters during the campaign.

Roszík has long since returned to his pastoral duties. He now runs care homes, oversees a prison chaplaincy, and commutes from the border with Slovakia, where he now lives.

After last month’s elections, there is now a “very big feeling of euphoria” in the country, he said, predicting Magyar will keep his promise to transform the country. According to the former lawmaker, political change could come quickly, but economic reform would take longer, predicting billions would be reclaimed from oligarchs and redirected to education and healthcare.

(cs)