BUDAPEST — As Hungarians awoke to a sunny national day on March 15, a question overshadowed the celebrations: Who would draw the larger crowd to the streets of Budapest? Would it be incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, still a formidable force after 16 years of uninterrupted rule? Or Péter Magyar, a less prickly opposition wild card who is bidding to bring down Orbán’s government? With less than a month to go until the April 12 election — and with Magyar’s opposition Tisza party polling about 10 points ahead of Orbán’s Fidesz — the national day festivities offered both parties a final chance to show off their strength and sway public opinion as the campaign enters its final stretch. “Everything is ready for the biggest event ever,” Magyar had said the evening before. “This will be the day when size truly matters,” he added Sunday morning. Meanwhile, as followers started gathering after 9 a.m. to march for Orbán, the Fidesz-aligned Magyar Nemzet newspaper said that “the crowd is huge.” Small wonder, then, that the two sides disputed who had attracted the bigger crowd. The Fidesz “peace march” rally at Kossuth Square, next to the Hungarian Parliament building. | Max Griera/POLITICO Fidesz shared data from the Hungarian Tourism Agency, which reported that Orbán’s “peace march” had drawn 180,000 people to the opposition’s 150,000; the agency, which is controlled by the government, based its estimate on how many cell phones had been connected to antennas near the respective rallies. But people close to Tisza estimated for POLITICO that their party had mobilized 350,000 attendees. DEFENDING HUNGARY AGAINST BRUSSELS, KYIV Hungary’s March 15 national day commemorates its revolution and war of independence to escape the rule of Austria’s Habsburg monarchy from 1848-1849. Both parties used the occasion to drive home their campaign slogans and espouse patriotism and national identity. Orbán’s Fidesz has focused on the war in Ukraine and Iran, portraying itself as the party of security but avoiding domestic issues. Tisza has campaigned on a platform of complete regime change. The competing events both featured national anthems and folk songs, most prominently “Nemzeti Dal” by Sándor Petőfi — an iconic poem and a cornerstone of Hungarian literature that is widely credited with helping spark the Hungarian Revolution in 1848. And both Orbán and Magyar called on Hungarians to rise and defend the country just like they did in 1956 against the Soviet occupation — the former invoking Ukraine as the threat, the latter another Orbán government after 16 years of uninterrupted rule. Orbán addressed his supporters beside the parliament in Kossuth Square, where they had marched from the Buda quarter of the capital across the Danube River. “We will not be a Ukrainian colony,” was the motto on the placards protesters carried, a slogan that Orbán had echoed on social media the day before. Budapest is embroiled in a furious dispute with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the cessation of Russian oil flows across Ukraine and a stalled €90 billion EU loan to fund Kyiv’s war effort. Orbán has framed his rival Magyar as a Brussels proxy who will do as the EU and Ukraine say. “I said no to the Soviets,” Orbán told the rally. “I said no to Brussels, to the war, and I’m standing before the vote now, together with you, saying no to the Ukrainians.” Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó took the stage to claim that Brussels, Kyiv and Berlin “want to bring Europe to war” and “want the money of Europeans to be given to the Ukrainians.” Near Kossuth Square, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Boulevard was at a standstill with dozens of buses still disgorging supporters from the countryside, who had been brought in to offset Budapest’s predominantly opposition voters. High school student Mikolt, 16, and her stay-at-home mother Daniela, 42, were arriving from the village of Eger in the northeast of the country. They said they supported Orbán because he is keeping Hungary out of the war in Ukraine and because he supports Christianity, the family and Hungarians. Tisza volunteers Balázs and Zsigmund on Andrássy Avenue before the march starts. | Max Griera/POLITICO Magyar is a “narcissist,” Daniela said, who “behaves like a wounded little child who no longer has any power” since leaving Fidesz in February 2024. “RUSSIANS GO HOME” A 20-minute walk away, the Tisza marchers were beginning to assemble. Volunteers Zsigmund and Balázs, both 18, agreed to talk with POLITICO, despite having received a caution from their team leader not to speak with media, as Orbán’s “propagandists” could use what they said against the party. Describing themselves as “patriots,” the two students are counting on Magyar to improve the country’s health care and education systems, which they said have been battered by years of misrule. “Orbán replaced skilled people with loyalists. Tisza has many professionals and they have a program, Fidesz hasn’t had a program for years,” Zsigmund said. For Balazs, who plans to study economics at a foreign university, the election is existential — he says he may not come back if Orbán wins. “I would prefer to come back, definitely, but let’s see what happens.” Once it gets going, the Tisza march fills the 2.5 kilometer-long Andrassy Avenue, heading for Heroes Square, where Magyar is due to speak at 17:00. On stage, the opposition leader promises to fix Hungary’s health care system, restore billions of euros in EU funding that has been frozen due to rule-of-law concerns regarding Orbán’s government, improve pensions and child support, boost the economy and fight corruption. Evoking Hungary’s “other” revolution — the 1956 uprising that killed 3,000 civilians — Magyar said Hungarians need to rise up again to regain their “freedom” and protect their rights. Framing the current government as an occupier that represses its “subjects,” he accused Orbán of allowing Russian agents in the country to meddle in the election. “Russians go home!” the crowd chanted, repeating: “It’s over!”

The spirit of mutirão — communities joining forces to get something done — runs deep in Brazil’s culture. Here at COP30 it is inescapable. The phrase is on the lips of negotiators from nearly 200 countries and it has become the defining ethos of this conference: global climate cooperation built on shared effort and mutual accountability.  National governments and cities, campaigners and businesses must now come together in that same spirit to move from the age of negotiation to the decade of delivery. Here in Belém it is impossible to forget why this matters. Every country has its story of floods, heatwaves, wildfires or supercharged storms that strike hardest in the places least able to cope. At both the Brazilian Ministry of Cities and C40 Cities we see every day that adapting to current challenges and turning the tide on the climate crisis are not separate challenges but part of one mission: to protect the people and places we love now and for generations to come. We are becoming a planet of urbanites, even here in the Amazon rainforest there are nearly 22 million people living in cities like Belém, so it’s crucial to combine preservation with sustainable and inclusive development for those communities. Across Brazil and around the world, cities are already facing up to this challenge. They are greening streets, serving sustainable and nutritious lunches to school children, keeping the most vulnerable safe from heat and floods, designing urban areas that meet the needs of people — not cars — and creating good green jobs for all.  > Every country has its story of floods, heatwaves, wildfires or supercharged > storms that strike hardest in the places least able to cope. Last week we both joined mayors, governors and regional leaders representing more than 14,000 cities, towns, states and provinces at the Bloomberg COP30 Local Leaders Forum in Rio de Janeiro. It was the largest and most diverse gathering of subnational climate leaders in history, and it sent an unmistakable message to national governments: local leadership is already delivering and it is ready to go further.  Via C40/Caroline Teo – GLA Following this historic moment and boosted by the COP30 presidency’s willingness to put urban climate action to the fore, cities came to COP30 with three clear offers: 1. Partner with us to implement national climate plans and turn strategies into results that improve lives. 2. Invest in the local project pipeline. More than 2,500 projects seek support and thousands more can follow if the political will is forthcoming. 3. Make COP a place of action and accountability where progress is measured not in pledges but in cleaner air, reduced health risks and green jobs created.  If countries accept these offers the COP process itself can evolve from negotiation to delivery, from promises to proof that the Paris Agreement goals can be not just agreed but also delivered.  This is not just a theory. It is already happening here. Under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s leadership Brazil has embedded ‘climate federalism’ into national policy, linking the federal government, states and municipalities in coordinated delivery for the good of all Brazilians and the planet.   Research shows that, in countries that are part of the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships for Climate Action (CHAMP), collaboration between national and subnational governments could close 37 percent of the global emissions gap needed to stay on a Paris-aligned pathway. Launched at COP28, CHAMP already includes 77 nations and continues to grow. Brazil is showing what this looks like in practice and is inspiring more countries to take action.  Via 10 Billion Solutions, Mariana Castaño Cano On the city side of the equation the evidence is unequivocal. Per-capita emissions in C40 Cities are falling five times faster than the global average and more than 70 percent of C40 cities have already peaked emissions and are now delivering significant emissions reductions. Many C40 cities are also committing to a Yearly Offer of Action, demonstrating how to translate global ambition into measurable progress by announcing every year what they will do in the next 12 months to accelerate climate action.  To unlock that progress the financial system must evolve too. The world’s development and climate finance architecture was designed for national ministries not city halls. Yet cities control or influence most of the decisions that shape emissions from transport, waste, buildings and land use. This means they can enhance and accelerate the implementation of National Climate Plans. Much more could be achieved if urban climate finance is increased and local governments have direct access to the capital they need. The Baku to Belém Roadmap is calling for $1.3 trillion of annual climate investment to support developing countries. This could help scale-up finance and make it more reliable and accessible while prioritizing a just and resilient transition. Cities have the projects, partners and are the closest level of government to people’s daily needs — enhanced collaboration, preparation and direct access to finance can help bring their ambitious visions to life.     > To unlock that progress the financial system must evolve too. The world’s > development and climate finance architecture was designed for national > ministries not city halls. We have both witnessed here in Brazil how quickly change accelerates when local and national leaders come together. When buses run on clean power, when families in flood-prone neighborhoods move into resilient homes, when air is cleaner and streets are safer, climate policy stops being abstract. It becomes tangible progress that citizens can see and support.  If COP30 becomes the moment the world embraces climate federalism and genuine national and sub-national collaboration, then Brazil will have set a new global standard for collective climate delivery and a real just transition.  The decade of delivery begins here in Belém. Let us build it together, in mutirão. 

When a Donald Trump-appointed judge delivered a stinging rejection of his effort to put National Guard troops on the ground in Portland, the president had some regrets. “I wasn’t served well by the people that pick judges,” Trump vented Saturday. His gripe came four months after he similarly sounded off about the “bad advice” he got from the conservative Federalist Society for his first-term judicial nominations — a reaction to a ruling, backed by a Trump-appointed judge, rejecting his power to impose sweeping tariffs on U.S. trading partners. “This is something that cannot be forgotten!” he said on Truth Social. While Trump and his allies have spent all year leveling pointed attacks at Democratic judicial appointees, labeling them rogue insurrectionists and radicals, the president is increasingly facing stark rejections from people he put on the bench — including at least one from his second term. The brushbacks have come mainly from district judges, who occupy the lowest level of the three-tiered federal judiciary. So far, it’s been a different story among Trump’s three most powerful judicial appointees: Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. That troika, along with the high court’s three other conservatives, has handed Trump numerous short-term victories in emergency rulings this year, often lifting injunctions against Trump policies issued by district judges. The White House leaned into that bottom-line success in a statement to POLITICO that attributed Trump’s defeats to Democratic appointees and sidestepped questions about the defeats dealt by Trump’s own picks. “The Trump Administration’s policies have been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court as lawful despite an unprecedented number of legal challenges and unlawful lower court rulings from far-left liberal activist judges,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson. “The President will continue implementing the policy agenda that the American people voted for in November and will continue to be vindicated by higher courts when liberal activist judges attempt to intervene.” Trump allies also emphasize that district court judges tend to require the approval of home-state senators, leading presidents to nominate more moderate picks than they might otherwise in states dominated by the opposing party. Still, in some cases in which Trump-appointed judges have heard Trump-related cases, they have gone further than simply ruling against his policies. They have delivered sweeping warnings about the expansion of executive power, the erosion of checks and balances and have criticized his attacks on judges writ large. One Trump appointee rebuked the president and his allies for a “smear” campaign against the judiciary. “Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system,” U.S. District Judge Thomas Cullen wrote in a recent ruling, “this concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate.” Rulings against the administration by Trump-appointed judges have come in some of the most high-profile cases of Trump’s second term. Here’s a look at the most notable examples. NATIONAL GUARD CALL-UP U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, a first-term Trump appointee in Oregon, ruled that Trump’s effort to put National Guard troops in Portland was “untethered” from reality and risked plunging the nation into an unconstitutional form of military rule. DEPORTING GUATEMALAN CHILDREN U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly, a first-term appointee in Washington, D.C., rejected the Trump administration’s claim that it was trying to reunite unaccompanied Guatemalan kids with their parents when it abruptly loaded hundreds of children onto buses and planes for a middle-of-the-night deportation effort. That explanation “crumbled like a house of cards,” he wrote, after the Guatemalan government contradicted the claim. Kelly blocked the immediate deportations, saying they appeared to violate the law. RESTRICTING THE AP’S WHITE HOUSE ACCESS U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden said the White House had unconstitutionally evicted the Associated Press from Oval Office events over its refusal to adopt Trump’s “Gulf of America” label. McFadden’s ruling was later put on hold by an appeals court. Notably, Trump has mischaracterized this ruling twice in recent days during public remarks, claiming that McFadden, a first-term appointee, not only sided with his restrictions on the AP but endorsed his relabeling of the Gulf of Mexico. Neither McFadden nor the appeals court reached such a conclusion. TRUMP’S TARIFF POWER Few issues are as central to Trump’s economic agenda as his power to levy tariffs at will against U.S. trading partners he claims are ripping off the country. But Timothy Reif, a judge he put on the U.S. Court of International Trade, joined two other judges in ruling that Trump lacked the legal power to impose such sweeping tariffs, a traditionally congressional authority. A federal appeals court later agreed with the panel, and the matter is now pending before the Supreme Court. SUMMARY DEPORTATIONS UNDER THE ALIEN ENEMIES ACT Several Trump-appointed judges joined a nationwide legal rebuke of the president and his administration over efforts to abruptly deport Venezuelan nationals using Trump’s wartime authority under the Alien Enemies Act. U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. was the first to label the effort “unlawful.” Two other first-term Trump appointees, U.S. District Judges John Holcomb and Stephanie Haines, ruled that Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was legitimate but that the administration’s effort to speedily deport its targets violated their due process rights. RETURNING DANIEL LOZANO CAMARGO Among the targets of Trump’s Alien Enemies Act order was Daniel Lozano Camargo, a Venezuelan man who had been residing in Texas. Unlike others whom the administration abruptly sent to El Salvador under that order, Lozano Camargo was protected by a 2024 settlement requiring the government to resolve his pending asylum claim before deportation could occur. U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a first-term Trump appointee in Maryland, ordered the administration to facilitate the man’s return to the United States — following the lead of her colleague on the Maryland bench, Obama appointee Paula Xinis, in the similar case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. MANDATORY DETENTION OF POTENTIAL DEPORTEES The Trump administration has sought to vastly expand the use of detention for immigrants facing deportation — seeking to deprive bond hearings for all potential deportees, even if they’ve spent decades living in the United States. Dozens of judges have found the abrupt shift illegal, saying the move is potentially subjecting millions of people to being locked up while they fight to remain in the United States. In recent days, several Trump appointees have joined their ranks. They include first-term appointees: Dominic Lanza of Arizona, Rebecca Jennings of the Western District of Kentucky and Eric Tostrud of Minnesota. Kyle Dudek of the Middle District of Florida, whom Trump appointed this term, was confirmed to the bench just two weeks before ruling against the administration. TARGETING THE MARYLAND BENCH Cullen’s stinging assessment of Trump and his allies’ attacks on judges came in a remarkable legal attack by the Trump administration against the entire federal district court bench in Maryland. The administration sued the judges there over a blanket policy to delay all urgent deportation cases for 48 hours to give the court a chance to act before litigants were deported. The administration said the rule infringed on executive power to execute immigration laws. But Cullen rejected the administration’s lawsuit as defective and the improper way to seek relief from an administrative process it disagreed with. OTHER REJECTIONS U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, another Washington, D.C.-based first-term Trump appointee, has turned down the administration on multiple fronts — including an effort by the Justice Department to use Trump’s pardon of Jan. 6 defendants to cover unrelated crimes. She also granted an injunction requiring the administration to disburse funds it had withheld from the National Endowment for Democracy. Another first-term Trump appointed judge, Mary McElroy of Rhode Island, repeatedly rebuked the administration in recent weeks for abrupt funding cuts to homelessness programs and public health grants. Last week, she blocked the administration from repurposing $233 million in FEMA grants from blue states over what those states said was punishment for refusing to assist with immigration enforcement.