On 12 April 2026, Hungarian voters gave Péter Magyar’s Tisza party 138 of the 199 seats in parliament, a constitutional majority, on a record turnout of 79.5 percent, according to preliminary figures analyzed by the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw (OSW). Viktor Orbán, prime minister since 2010, congratulated his challenger. The result gives a very old question a concrete form. Was Orbán’s government legitimate during the years in which it kept winning? Political legitimacy is the right to rule, as opposed to the mere power to rule, and the answer depends on what one thinks creates that right.

A Government That Lost on Its Own Rules

In July 2014, Orbán told an audience at Băile Tușnad, in Romania, that his government was building an “illiberal state” inside the European Union. He said it did not reject freedom, but that it would no longer make liberalism the organizing principle of the state (Attila Juhász summarized the speech for the Heinrich Böll Foundation).

Twelve years later, international observers described the 2026 election in two sentences that pull in opposite directions. Voters were engaged and had a genuine choice. Yet the playing field was uneven, because the ruling party enjoyed systemic advantages that blurred the line between state and party (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, PACE).

Both statements describe the same vote. The governed could remove their government, and they did. But the government had spent years shaping the ground on which it could be removed. That is the tension this essay examines. Earlier PRR essays on the rise of illiberalism and on why illiberalism explains changes in today’s social order address related questions, as does a piece on constitutional courts and electoral integrity.

Political legitimacy is shown by the capacity to lose: not at the moment of victory, when every government looks legitimate, but at the moment of defeat, when only some of them leave.

Institutions disagreed about how to describe that regime. On 15 September 2022, the European Parliament adopted a resolution, by 433 votes to 123 with 28 abstentions, that called Hungary a hybrid regime of “electoral autocracy” and found a clear risk of a serious breach of the values on which the Union is founded, under Article 7(1) of the Treaty on European Union (European Parliament Legislative Observatory).

The 123 votes against show that the verdict was contested. The label also sits awkwardly beside the April result, because it stresses the form of elections without their effect, and these elections removed the incumbent.

Two terms need fixing, and political science already has a vocabulary for them. David Easton, who shaped the study of political support, distinguished three objects of support: the political community, the regime, which he treated as the “rules of the game” that let a political system be maintained, and the authorities, the people who hold office (as summarized in the International Encyclopedia of Political Science).

This essay uses his middle term. A regime is the set of rules and institutions through which power is won and held. It differs from the government in office, which changes, and from the state, the permanent apparatus that survives a change of government. In April, Hungary’s state did not shake. Its regime was put to the test.

Political Legitimacy: Belief, Justification, Consent

Philosophers answer the question in three main ways. The first is descriptive. Max Weber held that every system of authority rests on a belief, and he named three sources of that belief: tradition, charisma and legality (the trust placed in rules applied through law). On this account political legitimacy is a fact about what people believe: a government is legitimate when its subjects believe it is, whatever their reasons.

The second answer is normative: political legitimacy depends on a standard the government must meet, whether or not anyone believes in it. John Rawls’s liberal principle holds that political power is legitimate only when it is exercised under a constitution whose essentials all citizens, as reasonable and rational persons, can endorse.

Rawls treats this as a weaker demand than justice, so that just institutions are necessarily legitimate but legitimate ones are not necessarily just (as Fabienne Peter reports in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

A. John Simmons adds a distinction that matters here. Showing that states in general are morally justified is one task. Showing that a particular, historically existing state is legitimate is another, and for Simmons it requires the actual consent of its citizens.

Joseph Raz offers a third normative route, the service conception: an authority is justified when its subjects comply better with the reasons that already apply to them by following its directives than by acting on their own judgment.

The third answer combines these. In The Legitimation of Power (1991), David Beetham argues that Weber’s three categories are types of belief, which are only one component of legitimacy (as summarized by the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre). Legitimacy has three levels: conformity to established rules, justifiability of those rules by beliefs that rulers and ruled share, and consent expressed by the ruled. A breach of the rules produces illegitimacy; a gap between the rules and shared beliefs produces a legitimacy deficit; withdrawn consent produces de-legitimation.

Beetham’s scheme of political legitimacy fits the Hungarian case closely. The first level is the weakest test, because a government that writes the rules can always comply with them. The contest lies in the second and third levels: whether the rules can be justified to the people who live under them, and whether the consent they give is a real signal.

Consent given on a field tilted toward the incumbent is weaker evidence of approval than consent given on a level one. And we must keep apart what Stefan Sciaraffa, in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on authority, calls de facto authority, which a state holds when it maintains order and is generally obeyed, from normative authority, the right to be obeyed. Orbán’s government plainly had the first. The question is about the second.

Three Grounds, Three Verdicts

Recent work sharpens these options. In a 2020 article in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Fabienne Peter argued that debates over political legitimacy, which usually ask how much weight procedure and outcomes deserve, overlook a prior question: what gives legitimacy its normative force? She sorted the answers into will-based, belief-based and fact-based conceptions, objected to each, and defended a hybrid account.

The sorting is useful because each ground gives a different verdict on Hungary. A will-based view asks whether citizens actually consented, and the record turnout shows that they could act on their will. A belief-based view, Weber’s, asks whether they believed in the order, and the years in which Orbán’s party kept winning elections are evidence that many did.

A fact-based view asks whether the regime met a standard that holds independently of anyone’s will or belief, and the observers’ finding of an uneven field suggests that it did not fully meet one. Matthias Brinkmann’s 2024 book defends one such outcome-centered standard, instrumentalism, the claim that political legitimacy rests on promoting justice (Oxford Academic).

Thomas Fossen’s Facing Authority (Oxford University Press, 2023) denies that any of these standards can be applied from outside. In his pragmatist account, to call a regime legitimate or illegitimate is to take a stance toward it: to comply, support, resist or evade (as the reviewer Matthew Noah Smith summarizes in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews). On that reading, Hungarian voters did not discover whether their regime was legitimate.

By voting the incumbent out, they performed a judgment about it. The view has a cost. Fossen, as the review reads him, holds that substantive principles of legitimate authority are neither correct nor incorrect, so his account leaves no room to say that the observers’ standard of a level field was the right one. The argument of this essay needs that claim to be possible.

Heaven’s Mandate and the Limits of Performance

The liberal vocabulary is not the only one available for thinking about political legitimacy. In the Chinese tradition, as Bryan Van Norden recounts in his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Mencius, the founders of the Zhou dynasty justified their rule by claiming that Heaven had mandated it, and that Heaven favors those who possess virtue.

By the same account, the late Zhou rulers had lost Heaven’s favor. Two lessons follow. Legitimacy depends on conduct, not on holding office. And it can be lost.

Scholars disagree about how far Mencius makes the people themselves the source of that authority. Bai (2008) finds in his thought a possible foundation for democracy, while Tiwald (2008) warns against overestimating how far he goes. What the disagreement leaves intact is the conditionality of the mandate.

This tradition is often read as a case for performance legitimacy: rulers deserve to rule if they deliver order and welfare. Hungary shows why that cannot settle our question alone. A government can deliver growth and still fail the standard Rawls and Beetham set.

A government that delivers poorly can keep its political legitimacy if its citizens retain a real power to replace it. What the Mandate of Heaven and the liberal principle share is not a theory of performance or of consent. They share a refusal to treat the possession of office as proof of the right to hold it.

Two Objections: Voters Chose Him, and Nobody Owes Obedience

The best reply comes from the Weberian side. Orbán’s party won elections, citizens turned out, and in 2026 they withdrew their belief at the ballot box. Before that, he had it, and belief is all that legitimacy is. The tilt of the field is a complaint about fairness, not about legitimacy.

The objection fails for two reasons. First, belief is evidence of political legitimacy, not its content. If belief alone made a government legitimate, then whatever produces belief would produce legitimacy, including the advantages the observers described. The concept would measure a government’s success at persuading, and it could no longer criticize any government that persuades well. A concept that cannot criticize is of little use to the citizens who most need it.

A supermajority is exactly the condition under which a government is tempted to make itself harder to remove.

Second, the objection cannot explain the concession. Orbán conceded and congratulated his challenger. He accepted that the people who could remove him had removed him. That act only makes sense if the regime still contained, at the decisive moment, a rule everyone present treated as binding: the loser leaves.

The tilt reduced the competitiveness of the contest, but it did not abolish the principle that gave the result its authority. Political legitimacy here comes in degrees. A regime that tilts the field is less legitimate, not illegitimate, and how much less cannot be read from the vote share alone.

A different objection comes from the opposite direction. Robert Paul Wolff argued that to claim authority is to claim the right to be obeyed, and that rational persons must act on their own moral judgment, so a political authority understood as a duty of obedience is never legitimate. If Wolff is right, Orbán’s regime and Tisza’s are equally illegitimate, and the comparison this essay draws collapses.

The reply does not need to refute Wolff, whose point about autonomy is serious. It needs only to notice what his conclusion leaves standing. That conclusion concerns a duty to obey. It does not by itself rank ways of holding power, and citizens who owe their rulers no obedience still have reasons to prefer rulers they can remove. That preference is what this essay calls the right to lose, and it survives the anarchist’s premise.

A Working Test: Could They Have Lost?

If the capacity to lose measures political legitimacy, it can be turned into three questions that an observer can ask of any regime without first settling the philosophical dispute.

• First, can the opposition compete on terms that its supporters would accept as roughly fair? This is what observers such as the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe examined when they found the Hungarian field uneven.
• Second, are the results counted and accepted by the loser? The concession answers that for 2026.
• Third, does the winner leave the rules under which it won open to the same challenge?

The first two can be judged during and just after an election, and the third only over time. Roughly, they track Beetham’s levels: rules that can be justified, consent that is really expressed, and a government that keeps to rules it did not rewrite for its own protection. The test is a proposal, not an established method, and reasonable observers can weigh the three questions differently.

The Right to Lose

Simmons’s distinction can now be put to work. The Hungarian state was not what the April vote put to the test. What was at stake was the legitimacy of a particular regime, and the test was whether the governed could withdraw their consent and have the withdrawal obeyed.

They could. This is the sense in which political legitimacy is shown by the capacity to lose: not at the moment of victory, when every government looks legitimate, but at the moment of defeat, when only some of them leave.

That test now falls on the winner. Tisza holds a constitutional majority and plans to dismantle parts of the previous system through constitutional amendments (according to OSW). A supermajority is exactly the condition under which a government is tempted to make itself harder to remove.

The political legitimacy of the new regime will not be settled by the size of its victory. It will be settled by whether it leaves the next opposition a field level enough to win.