LATIKA M BOURKE: Does JD Vance have the reverse Midas touch? Hungary election flop follows failed Iran talks

It has not been the best of weeks for the US Vice President. JD Vance has tried to do two things, and failed, and both could affect his tilt to be Donald Trump’s successor.

In a sign that perhaps the US President does not regard his Vice President as his heir, Mr Trump ordered Mr Vance to lead the post-ceasefire negotiations with Iran, which unsurprisingly did not end in a deal being struck.

This, in and of itself, is not necessarily a problem for Mr Vance. Attempting to end the US and Iran’s decades-long feud in one first sitting was always going to be ambitious.

But regardless, he is now bound to the fate of his administration’s war in Iran, something Mr Vance has never said publicly that he supported and US media has reported that he opposed.

With the MAGA base openly warring about the US starting the conflict, it is an important ideological battleground and Mr Vance has also attempted to keep a low profile during the war.

By sending him to Pakistan to lead negotiations, which Mr Trump no doubt suspected would fail at the first go, the President has ensured that whatever happens in Iran, Mr Vance owns the outcome too.

Mr Vance’s week got worse when the Hungarian people spectacularly rejected the autocratic, populist Viktor Orban, ending his 16-year rule as prime minister.

It was more than just an historic ousting of an ageing, illiberal ruler but a middle finger to the Trump administration, and its chief villain in Europe — Mr Vance as well as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

The US Vice President last week flew to Budapest to campaign alongside Mr Orban. He began his speech to a giant rally by phoning Donald Trump and putting the US President on speakerphone to laud the Hungarian leader and urge his re-election.

It was cringeworthy. And he lent his weight, and that of the United States, to a losing leader.

“We want you to make a decision about your future with no outside forces pressuring you or telling you what to do. I’m not telling you exactly who to vote for but what I am telling you is that the bureaucrats in Brussels, those people should not be listened to,” Vance told Hungarians.

It was naked interference in another country’s election in support of one of Europe’s most pro-Kremlin leaders. But it is not surprising. Last November, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy said it was “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” — a reference to what MAGA believes is Europe’s civilisational decline because of Muslim immigration.

The United States was not the only foreign country to attempt to influence the Hungarian election. Russia, too, has long been trying, successfully, to peel the country out of the EU and into Russia’s orbit.

Mr Putin was successful. Mr Orban, who cracked down on freedoms, including free media, became a Russian pawn, running interference at key EU meetings and passing on NATO information to the Kremlin, as revealed by leaked recordings of phone calls between Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and his Hungarian counterpart.

Mr Putin and Vance failed to engineer a favourable result for the populist Orban. The results, finalised on Monday, were a political tsunami and as seismic as they were historic.

Turnout was just shy of 80 per cent, the largest ever, and voters gave the six-year-old Tisza party 139 of the Parliament’s 199 seats, sweeping the 45-year-old Peter Magyar to power with a victory large enough to implement constitutional change and demand a new President, giving him free rein to pursue closer relations with Brussels.

What the result was not was a shift in the political landscape or an embrace of progressive left social policies. Tisza is a conservative party, in line with Hungarian social attitudes. It is essentially a copy of Mr Orban’s Fidesz party to which Mr Magyar belonged, but without the corruption and alignment with the Kremlin, China and even Iran.

“We need to change the regime because the country was practically overtaken and managed by an organised crime syndicate where political criminals were in cahoots with the economic criminals and also with the media,” Mr Magyar told reporters in Budapest on Monday.

Mr Magyar is stricter even than Mr Orban on immigration, and campaigned for spending the NATO standard of 5 per cent on defence. He backs the European Union.

His win is a huge psychological victory for Brussels and, in particular, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, whose image was a mainstay of Orban’s anti-Brussels campaign propaganda.

“Hungary will belong to Europe, no matter what the resigning corrupt government was planning to lead Hungary out of the EU, Hungarians yesterday decided, 23 years to the day, after our referendum on accession to the EU, they reinforced Hungary’s place in Europe and in the EU,” Mr Magyar said.

Speaking at the Commission, President Von der Leyen did not even try to conceal her grin at Orban’s loss.

“It was an exceptional evening yesterday,” she said.

“I really want to say to the Hungarian people, you’ve done it again, like you did it in 1956 when you courageously stood up, like you did in 1989, when you were the first to cut the barbed wire.”

It is also a major breakthrough for Ukraine. Mr Orban’s anti-Ukrainian rhetoric turned real when, late last year, he teamed up with populist leaders in neighbouring Slovakia and the Czech Republic to block the already agreed-upon €90 billion ($149b) funding package for Ukraine.

Ukraine is running out of money and desperately needs the funds, which will likely flow very soon. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the Hungarian result a “turning point”.

Or to use Mr Trump and Mr Vance’s Oval Office lexicon, a significant card to add to Ukraine’s deck.

Hungarians have shown the world some important lessons. Populism is beatable. The Trump administration can be defied. And choosing the West over Russia is a decision that can be remade, even amid today’s disinformation ecosystem.

As German centre-right Chancellor Friedrich Merz put it: “Our democratic societies are evidently much more resilient against Russian propaganda and other external interference in such elections.”

“Right-wing populism suffered a serious defeat in Hungary yesterday, and this concerns not just Hungary. A very clear signal is coming from Hungary against right-wing populism worldwide.”

For Merz, Vance’s intervention in Hungary was personal, as Vance has openly supported the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which German intelligence declared a “right-wing extremist force.” And it was at the Munich Security Conference where Vance first displayed MAGA’s open hostility to Europe and support for the AfD.

Mr Vance has sought to model himself to Europeans as an example of what they were voting for, but Hungarian voters evidently did not like what they saw.

Mr Vance will be forever linked to Mr Orban’s toppling – his intervention may even have been a case of reverse Midas touch, something the Vice President will be hoping does not continue back at home.