Viktor Orbán inspired rightwingers across the EU and in Britain. His defeat could represent a turning of the tide | Polly Toynbee

We must hope this vote will be the start of a wider backlash – and send hard-right populism back to the fringes where it belongs

T

he forces of darkness rolled back on Sunday. The mighty combined power of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Donald Trump’s America were defeated in Hungary, as European liberal democratic values triumphed.

The populist-nativist right put their all into keeping Viktor Orbán in power. The US vice-president, JD Vance, mid-war in Iran, took time out to parade his patronage in Budapest, one month after the hard-right US Conservative Political Action Conference took place there. In January, Benjamin Netanyahu appeared in a video endorsing Orbán, with salvoes of support from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen. Herbert Kickl of Austria’s Freedom party declared that “a patriotic wind is blowing across Europe”. Maybe, but not in their direction. Patriotism does not belong to them.

Orbán’s defeat at the hands of the conservative Péter Magyar’s Tisza party weakens them all. Orbán lost despite years of the party-state’s gerrymandering, the constitutional changes, the corruption and the suborning of the media, judiciary and other public offices. Hungarians finally broke free, sending a chill through Europe’s authoritarian right.