Hungary

The Third Hungarian Republic grew out of the collapse of the Hungarian People's Republic, the Soviet satellite state set up in 1949. After the Second World War Hungary came under Mátyás Rákosi's Stalinist rule and the ÁVH secret police. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was crushed by more than 150,000 Soviet troops; nearly 20,000 Hungarians died and Imre Nagy was hanged in 1958. Under János Kádár the regime softened, a general amnesty came in 1963 and the New Economic Mechanism of 1968 let market elements into the planned economy, so that Hungary was called the happiest barrack of the Eastern bloc.

In the 1980s living standards fell again in a worldwide recession to which communism could not respond. When Kádár died in 1989 the Soviet Union was in steep decline and younger reformists sought liberalisation. The Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party opened Round Table Talks with opposition groups in March 1989; the reburial of Imre Nagy as a revolutionary martyr that June is widely taken as the symbolic end of communism. Free elections in May 1990 brought the conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum to the head of a coalition, and József Antall became the first democratically elected prime minister since the war. The republic inherited a landlocked country in the Carpathian Basin, on the Danube and the Tisza, with some ten million people, mostly Magyars with a large Romani minority.

The new republic began with a severe recession: state subsidies were removed and privatisation was rapid in 1991, while the Yugoslav Wars on the southern border brought social and security instability. The Antall government's austerity was unpopular, and the Socialist Party, the legal heir of the Communist Party, won the 1994 election. Hungary nevertheless became an OECD high-income mixed economy, more than 80% privately owned, with a skilled workforce and one of the lowest levels of income inequality in the world. It is export-oriented, with more than $100 billion of exports in 2015, 79% of them to the European Union. Its industries include food processing, pharmaceuticals, motor vehicles, information technology, chemicals, metallurgy and electronics, of which it is the largest producer in the region; Budapest produces 39% of the national income.

Hungary kept the forint rather than adopting the euro, and its corporate tax rate is 9%. Tourism drew 24.5 million international visitors in 2019. The population, which peaked at 10.8 million in 1980, has fallen to just over 9.5 million through sub-replacement fertility (1.43 children per woman) and the emigration of young adults; the average age is 42.7. A programme begun in 2011 to raise the birth rate restored three-year maternity leave, and fertility rose from 1.27 in 2011 to as high as 1.5. About 70% of Hungarians live in towns, a quarter of them around Budapest.

The republic has fought no war of its own. Its armed forces, the Hungarian Defence Forces, comprise the Ground Force and the Air Force under the Ministry of Defence and a chief of staff, with the president as commander-in-chief; since 2007 they have stood under a unified command and a Joint Forces Command. In 2016 they had 31,080 personnel on active duty and some fifty thousand with the operative reserve. Military service is voluntary, though conscription may return in wartime. Spending has stayed low: $1.21 billion was planned for 2017, about 0.94% of GDP, well below NATO's 2% target, after a 2012 pledge to reach 1.4% by 2022. The main modernisation was the decision in 2001 to buy 14 JAS 39 Gripen fighter aircraft for about 800 million euros.

Hungary's soldiers have served abroad within the alliances it joined. It entered the Partnership for Peace in 1994 and supported the IFOR and SFOR missions in Bosnia; as a NATO member from 1999 it was involved in the Yugoslav Wars. In 2016 about 700 troops were stationed abroad: 100 with the NATO-led ISAF force in Afghanistan, 210 in Kosovo under KFOR and 160 in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A 300-strong logistics unit went to Iraq to help the United States occupation with armed convoys, against public opinion. At home, accession to the Schengen Treaty led in January 2008 to the merger of the police and the border guards into a single national corps; the militarised Stand-by Police deals with riots.

Hungary is a unitary parliamentary republic. Its Fundamental Law, most recently heavily reformed in 2012, needs a two-thirds supermajority to amend and contains eternity clauses on human dignity, the separation of powers, the state structure and the rule of law. The unicameral National Assembly has 199 members elected every four years, 106 in single-member constituencies and 93 from a national list, with thresholds of 5%, 10% and 15% for single parties and coalitions of two or more. The president, elected by the Assembly every five years, has mainly representative powers but may veto laws and send them to the fifteen-member Constitutional Court; the prime minister, by convention the leader of the largest party, is elected by the Assembly, chooses the ministers and holds executive power.

The multiparty system at first threw out each government: the Socialists won in 1994, the opposition again in 1998 and 2002. In 2006 protests followed Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány's leaked admission that his party had lied to win the election, and in 2010 Orbán's national-conservative Fidesz took a supermajority, repeated in 2014, 2018 and 2022. His government, which Orbán himself called an illiberal Christian democracy, was variously described as a hybrid regime or dominant-party system, and the European Union moved to penalise Hungary over the rule of law. On 12 April 2026 Tisza defeated Fidesz-KDNP and Magyar became prime minister.

Since 1989 Hungary's chief foreign aim has been integration into Western institutions: it joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, and belongs to the OECD, the WTO, the Visegrád Group and the Central European Defence Cooperation. It held the presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2011 and 2024. Basic treaties with Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine renounced territorial claims, though the rights of the roughly five million Hungarians living abroad, mostly in Romania, Slovakia and Serbia, still cause tensions; relations with Serbia grew close, while those with Ukraine deteriorated from 2017 over the Hungarian minority there. The parliaments of Hungary and Poland declared 23 March the Day of Polish-Hungarian Friendship in 2007.

Under Orbán, Hungary's relationship with the United States and the European Union entered a period of strain over LGBT rights, migration, the lex CEU, the authorisation of Russian and Chinese vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic and sanctions on Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Hungary's intellectual weight outlasts its size: thirteen Hungarian scientists had received Nobel Prizes by 2018, the country spent 1.61% of GDP on research in 2020 and ranks fourth in the all-time medal count of the International Mathematical Olympiad. It was the 14th most peaceful country in the 2024 Global Peace Index.

The republic's recent decades were dominated by the Orbán era of 2010 to 2026. Fidesz's supermajorities rewrote the constitution and the electoral law, and the country was described as an illiberal democracy, a hybrid regime, a kleptocracy or a mafia state; EU bodies and member states moved to penalise Hungary or curtail its voting rights, and the government disputed the rule-of-law charges. In the election of 12 April 2026 Péter Magyar's Tisza Party won a decisive supermajority, sending Fidesz into opposition for the first time in sixteen years, and Magyar was sworn in as prime minister on 9 May 2026. The national landscape now consists of the centre-right Tisza, the national-conservative Fidesz and the ultranationalist Mi Hazánk, with left-of-centre parties strongest in the cities.

Hungary faces a shrinking and ageing population, high emigration among the young and an energy supply dominated by natural gas, oil and coal. A law of June 2020 binds it to net-zero emissions by 2050, with two new nuclear units planned, though growth in renewables has stagnated and policies limiting wind power are expected to hurt the sector. The economy remains high-income and export-led, with unemployment at 4.1% in 2017 against 11% in the 2008 crisis, and the forint is still the currency, since public debt alone keeps Hungary from the Maastricht criteria. Its institutions, from the Fundamental Law to the counties, remain those of the state built after 1989.