Trump’s Best Friend in Europe May Lose His Election

BUDAPEST — An Arctic wave swept across Hungary in early January, dumping more snow than the country had seen in more than a decade. The temperature lingered below freezing, and people struggled to keep warm in rural villages, where many homes still rely on wood-burning stoves.

Help arrived at one remote location in the middle of the storm. But it didn’t come from the government, which since 2010 has been led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump’s top ally in Europe.

It came from Péter Magyar, Orbán’s chief political rival. Magyar showed up in Nógrád County, Hungary’s poorest region, with free firewood, snow shovels, and volunteers from the party he leads, known by its Hungarian initials, Tisza. The name—derived from the Hungarian for “Respect and Freedom”—is an unsubtle riposte to Orbán’s signature concept, “illiberal democracy,” and the corruption that has allegedly crept into his government.

“Action comes first, words come second,” Magyar wrote on his Facebook page, which has more than 750,000 followers. “Thousands of Tisza volunteers are already helping in hundreds of locations with snow removal, transportation, shopping, and distributing firewood.”

Magyar said he would “pause” campaigning during the blizzard so his party could focus on aid delivery. This wasn’t 100-percent true: Magyar’s firewood distribution, carefully staged and packaged for social media, was itself a smart campaign move—and an indication of why Orbán might be at risk of losing power in elections scheduled for April 12.

An Orbán defeat would be a political earthquake in Europe and a setback for Trump’s national security strategy, a key element of which is support for right-wing populists in the European Union—of whom Orbán is his closest partner. Trump’s demands for Greenland alienated some on the European right, but not Orbán, who helped Trump during that now-abated crisis by vetoing a proposed EU statement that would have taken Denmark’s side.

The contest is just beginning in earnest and Orbán has been counted out many times before. But with Tisza leading the prime minister’s Fidesz party, 51 percent to 39 percent, in the most recent poll, “The chance of an opposition victory is the highest in the past 15 years,” Zselyke Csaky, who monitors Hungarian politics for the Centre for European Reform, a Brussels-based think tank, told me.

To be sure, Orbán’s vulnerability was not the impression I was supposed to get from my visit to Hungary during the first full ...