NEWS BRIEF The vote by Hungarians to reject an EU plan for a bloc-wide migrant quota is being labeled both as an overwhelming victory for Prime Minister Viktor Orban as well as a humiliating defeat for him. So which is it?

The EU plan to redistribute 160,000 asylum-seekers across the bloc would have resulted in 1,294 people being resettled in Hungary. But Orban strongly opposed the plan, challenged it in court, and called for a referendum. With nearly all the ballots counted in Sunday’s vote, 98 percent of voters supported Orban’s call to reject the EU plan. But turnout was 43 percent—well short of the 50 percent needed for the results to become legally binding. Orban was undeterred, however. He said he would amend Hungary’s constitution to make the decision binding. He said that though a “valid [referendum] is always better than an invalid [referendum],” the result would give him enough support to tell the EU Hungary “should not be forced to accept … people we don’t want to live with.”

But that may not be easy. Orban had made the issue the centerpiece of his campaign against the EU. He has presented the newcomers as a threat to his country’s European identity, prompting accusations he was xenoophobic. Last year, he said not only would he like “Europe preserved for the Europeans ...[but] we want to preserve a Hungarian Hungary.” The government spent millions on a campaign urging citizens to vote no to the question “Do you want the European Union to be able to mandate the obligatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens into Hungary even without the approval of the National Assembly?” In the end, it wasn’t enough. Despite his public optimism after the vote, the shortfall means Orban can’t force the EU to rethink its plan.

#HungaryReferendum: In domestic politics, #Orbán will try to spin that he won this – but it doesn’t send a strong message to Brussels. — András Bíró-Nagy (@bironagyandras) October 3, 2016

Ferenc Gyurcsany, the leader of the opposition Democratic Coalition, said the low turnout showed “the people do not support the government. And this is good.”