Turning the Tide on Autocracy

Hungarians are showing us the way

Hungarians (and a puppy) line up to vote in Sunday’s election. [Photo credit: Dénes Erdős/AP]

As of 3:00 local time, 66% of the Hungarian electorate had cast a vote. That number will likely go up dramatically in the last four hours the polls remain open. Polls have been showing that incumbent prime minister Viktor Orban and his party, Fidesz, are well behind his challenger Peter Magyar and the Tisza party.

Orban refers to his system as “illiberal democracy”—a Christian nationalist counter to Western liberal democracy. Its goal has nothing to do with improving the lives of the Hungarian people. In his disastrous sixteen years in charge, Orban has bequeathed his country high unemployment, the social safety net has been brought to its knees, and it is one of the poorest countries in the EU. He’s taken control of universities and the media and restructured the judiciary by installing loyalists with little or no experience in violation of the country’s constitution. His administration is rife with corruption—during his time in office oligarchs have benefited enormously—and the population is shrinking.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because Orban, who Steve Bannon claimed was “Trump before Trump,” provided the roadmap for Donald and the Republican Party, just as Vladimir Putin provided the roadmap for him.

With nothing to run on, Orban has campaigned on stoking fear by claiming that Magyar will drag Hungary into a war with Ukraine. Considering it’s Orban that has relied on his friend Vladimir Putin to spread AI-generated propaganda on his behalf and his pro-Russia American allies (specifically Donald Trump and JD Vance) to campaign for him, the Hungarian people should be much more concerned about an Orban victory. In fact, protesters at his rallies have been shouting, “Russians go home.” The people understand what side their corrupt, compromised prime minister is on.

They also understand what’s at stake, hence the massive turnout. As David Pressman, Joe Biden’s ambassador to Hungary, put it:

The only policy [Magyar is] talking about is that there needs to be a systemic challenge to what has become a kleptocracy that is undermining Hungary and Hungarianness.

Massive turnout aside, we should not be overly confident about the results of today’s election. Polls may show Magyar’s margin to be large, and a landslide for him and his party is a possibility, but unsurprisingly Orban and Fidesz have, during their 16 years in power, done much to rig the electoral system in their favor including extreme gerrymandering. Fidesz has iron-clad control of the media landscape--Reporters without Borders estimates that the party and its allies “now control around 80 percent of the media landscape.”

As the Hungarian people are demonstrating, all the systemic disadvantages they’re up against should not lead to complacency or despair. Instead, they are why turnout matters, showing up matters, and voting matters—even if, or perhaps especially if, the system is rigged against us.