Steven Koltai is a former State Department official, a former fellow at the Brookings Institution and the MIT Center for International Studies and a longtime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was born in Budapest and came to the United States at age 2 during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He lives in Lincolnville.

“Joe Hungarian’s” victory in this past weekend’s election — Peter Magyar is essentially the Hungarian equivalent of an everyman name — shines a bright and interesting light on the factors that may drive the sunset of populist authoritarianism.

While it is obviously far too soon to know how he will govern, some data from the election itself are revealing and will certainly be scrutinized by other autocrats in similar positions (no names needed, here — just the generic crowd of populist, corrupt, authoritarian leaders).

In no particular order, here are some possible revelations:

1. Democratic institutions were not as fragile as feared. The victory was so overwhelming that it was impossible to argue the results were rigged, that illegal aliens had voted or that ballot-counting machines had been tampered with. Even after 16 years of systematically tilting the electoral system in his favor, when a tsunami of popular revolt arrived, Viktor Orbán’s levees were breached.
2. Economics, as usual, was central. Since most elections are fundamentally about the economy, it is noteworthy that Hungary under Orbán has visibly fallen from being among the leaders of the newly admitted EU members after the fall of Communism in 1989 to the bottom half of that same group. Its economy has lagged traditional underperformers such as Romania and Bulgaria, and fallen far behind its former cohort of Poland, Czechia and Slovakia. Wage stagnation has been a key driver of emigration among young, well-educated Hungarians to other EU countries.
3. Blatant, visible corruption ultimately enraged the public. While it attracted little attention from legislators or courts, ordinary citizens noticed. The Hungarian equivalent of a leader increasing his net worth by an estimated $3 billion-$4 billion in a single year — while drawing a modest government salary — was replicated in Hungarian terms by Orbán. For an economy the size of Kansas, it is hard to ignore when your leader lives in a castle.
4. Young people refused to let the old guard continue ruining their futures. Orbán has governed for 16 consecutive years (plus an earlier four-year term from 1998 to 2002). During his tenure, Hungary has become smaller (having lost population primarily through emigration), poorer (the worst-performing economy in the 27-nation EU), sicker (serious health care failures contributed to his defeat) and meaner — as evidenced by growing intolerance toward minorities, those on fixed incomes and the small number of immigrants who entered the country.

Record-setting voter turnout — the highest since the fall of Communism in 1989 — and mass public demonstrations across the country, not just in the notoriously liberal capital, Budapest, amplified the wave and drove voters decisively toward the opposition. For those who doubt the impact of public protest, Hungary has demonstrated that it truly matters, especially in the period leading up to an election.

Readers may decide for themselves whether any of these revelations resonate closer to home.

For entrenched leaders, however, there can be little doubt that they are likely to produce some anxiety. As some of our own leaders may come to see, the results from Budapest could prove deeply unsettling to an embedded, corrupt old guard.