It would have taken a miracle for Viktor Orbán to lose the election. Hungary is a fortified kleptocracy where the ruling party has captured the state and controls 80% of the media. It certainly didn’t help that the opposition’s campaign failed to deliver a post-illiberal vision. With the world reeling from news of massacres on Kyiv’s outskirts, Viktor Orbán named the Ukrainian president among his enemies on 3 April when celebrating his fourth election victory in a row. The Hungarian leadership may have been pressured into pro forma siding with the EU and NATO mainstream in the early days of Russian aggression, but, in their own universe, they have never stopped blasting hardcore pro-Putin propaganda. Many election irregularities were reported,