Viktor Orbán is gone. Sixteen years as Hungary's prime minister, ended Sunday on the banks of the Danube, where tens of thousands of people who had never known an adult life without him celebrated into the night. Peter Magyar's Tisza party took 53.6% of the vote and 138 seats in a 199-seat parliament: a supermajority that allows him to unpick the constitutional changes Orbán spent a decade embedding. JD Vance had flown to Budapest days before polling to stand alongside Orbán, calling his leadership a model for the continent. The model finished on 37%.
The Western press has a word for leaders like Orbán: strongman. It carries a specific charge. Authoritarian tendencies. Eroded judiciary. Captured media. The label is not wrong in his case. But the word gets used with a looseness that should trouble anyone who cares about precision in political language.
Narendra Modi sits at 68% approval in the latest Morning Consult global tracker, the highest of any major world leader, ahead of every G7 counterpart by a distance that cannot be explained away. Macron sits at 15% approval with 77% disapproval. Keir Starmer is at 24%. Trump, the man whose movement treated Orbán as a prophet, manages 39%. Modi leads three consecutive democratic mandates and commands approval that Western leaders would consider a hallucination.
He too gets called a strongman. The same word, applied to the same category of leader, with the same disapproving tone.
The difference is not subtle. Orbán systematically dismantled Hungary's independent courts, bought or bullied its press, and engineered electoral rules to make opposition nearly impossible. It took a near-80% turnout and a tsunami of a result to dislodge him, precisely because the system he built was designed not to be dislodgeable.
Modi won three general elections under the same rules his opponents compete under, in a country of 1.4 billion people with a free press that criticises him daily and an opposition that campaigns freely, with a Supreme Court held with the same respect as the UK Supreme Court.
The word "strongman" has done quiet damage to political discourse by collapsing this distinction. A leader who wins because voters prefer him is not the same creature as a leader who wins because he has rigged the room. Conflating the two is not analysis. It is an editorial preference.
Orbán's exit is genuinely good news for European democracy, for Ukraine, and for the rule of law in a country that had been hollowing it out for years. Celebrate that clearly. But while celebrating, it is worth asking why the Western commentariat applies the same label to the man who just fell and to the man whose own voters, by a margin that makes Vance's heroes look like also-rans, have returned him again and again.
Net-net: not every popular leader is a strongman. Sometimes a leader is simply popular.
Alpesh B Patel OBE has advised governments and worked in the US Congress on foreign policy. He writes at politicalanimal.me
