Authoritarianism Was Defeated in Hungary
Orbán's brand of "illiberalism" is still being emulated in the United States
On Sunday, Hungarian voters ended Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power, handing his Fidesz party a crushing defeat at the hands of Péter Magyar’s Tisza party. With 97 percent of precincts counted, Tisza secured 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament to Fidesz’s 55, a two-thirds supermajority. That majority gives Magyar the power to undo the constitutional changes Orbán used to entrench himself. Turnout was nearly 80 percent, a record in any post-communist Hungarian election. That’s not only a mandate for Magyar and Tisza; it’s a repudiation of authoritarianism and illiberalism.
The far right has spent years holding up Orbán as a model.1 Steve Bannon once called him “Trump before Trump.” That description was always more accurate than flattering. Orbán coined the term “illiberal democracy” himself. This version of authoritarianism is the idea that you can preserve the form of democratic elections while systematically dismantling every institution that makes democracy functional. Independent courts, a free press, competitive public procurement, and an independent central bank, all of it subordinated to the survival and enrichment of one party and its patrons. The European Parliament eventually declared Hungary an “electoral autocracy.” Orbán’s backers scoffed at the label. Sunday made the case for them.
Trump isn’t just some admirer of Orbán’s illiberal democracy. He’s actively been trying to replicate it. Trump’s agenda has striking parallels to how the Hungarian leader used the levers of government to tilt the media, judiciary, and electoral system in favor of his party to keep it in power. This has ranged from the targeting of political opponents by federal law enforcement to pressure on the courts to the effort to delegitimize any institution that produces an inconvenient result. The difference, for now, is that American institutions have proven somewhat more resilient. Somewhat. One scholar noted that in some ways, Trump has been more oppressive than Orbán, citing the use of the Department of Justice to investigate political opponents. That’s a step that, as far as I know, Orbán’s government never took.
Let’s be specific about what Orbán actually did, because the far right—national conservatives, populists, and even Christian nationalists—has been conspicuously vague about it. In 2010, shortly after returning to power, Orbán announced that the state would retain mandatory monthly payments made by individuals to 18 private pension funds,2 ostensibly a temporary budget measure. The thing is, it wasn’t temporary. The government deposited the funds into a so-called “Pension Reform and Debt Reduction Fund,” a name that proved misleading, as much of the money was used to plug spending gaps.
Orbán had promised the roughly three million Hungarians who surrendered their private savings that they would retain individual accounts in the state system. Nobody received any credit within the state pension system for private retirement savings confiscated in 2011. The government seized an estimated $12 billion in compulsory private pension fund assets. That’s theft.
The corruption didn’t stop there. Between 2011 and 2021, just 12 businessmen close to Orbán and his inner circle captured 21 percent of the value of European Union (EU)-funded contracts awarded through closed, noncompetitive procedures. One of the best examples involves Orbán’s son-in-law, István Tiborcz, whose company won numerous public contracts for street-lighting projects. Many of those projects were funded by the European Union. Investigations by the European Anti-Fraud Office revealed irregularities, including collusion, conspiracy, and inflated prices. The Hungarian government chose not to pursue legal action. Transparency International ranked Hungary the most corrupt country in the EU. One former Fidesz member turned anti-corruption investigator explained that the party had built an organization across the country with one primary purpose, which was extracting as much EU money as possible for itself.3
Something that should annoy anyone who takes free markets seriously is that Hungary has received more in EU funds than any other major postcommunist EU country, both as a share of GDP and per capita. Orbán spent 16 years positioning himself as the EU’s most defiant critic—railing against Brussels, vetoing Ukraine aid, blocking sanctions on Russia—while operating what amounted to a kleptocratic system supercharged by EU taxpayer money. Around €18 billion in funds remain blocked over corruption and rule-of-law concerns, representing roughly 10 percent of Hungary’s gross domestic product. The anti-EU posturing was never really about sovereignty. Rather, it was about keeping the spigot open while avoiding accountability for how the money was being spent.
Then there’s the foreign policy, which ought to have been disqualifying for any self-described conservative or nationalist. Orbán was a close ally of both Trump and Vladimir Putin, maintaining warm ties with Moscow even after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He routinely blocked, delayed, or watered down EU efforts to assist Ukraine and impose sanctions on Russia.
Orbán’s relationship with China was equally cozy and equally transactional. Hungary joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2015, and Orbán’s administration is generally seen as China’s closest ally in the EU. Hungary has become a bridgehead for Chinese presence and influence in Europe, hosting Chinese electric vehicle battery factories, permitting Chinese police officers to patrol its streets, and allowing thousands of Chinese citizens to obtain residence permits without proper security checks. When Xi Jinping visited Budapest, China upgraded its ties with Hungary to an “all-weather, comprehensive strategic partnership,” a designation it otherwise reserves for Belarus, Pakistan, and Venezuela. That’s some great company.
The media suppression was what made the whole system self-sustaining. Orbán understood early that you don’t need to imprison journalists if you can bankrupt or buy the outlets they work for. Prime Minister Orbán and his ruling party spent years turning Hungary’s media environment into their playground, not through outright repression, but through market distortion and regulatory capture.
In 2018, the Orbán government decreed the formation of the KESMA conglomerate a matter of “strategic national importance,” enabling it to evade an investigation by the competition authority over antitrust rules. KESMA controls nearly 500 outlets, all of which echo the government’s every utterance, be it state propaganda or smear campaigns against Orbán’s enemies. Independent outlets were starved of state advertising revenue and handed off to friendly buyers. Public broadcasting was overhauled, with more than 1,600 journalists and media workers dismissed and replaced by staff who followed the government’s narrative. Reporters Without Borders described Orbán as a predator of press freedom who managed to nearly wipe out independent journalism without imprisoning or killing a single journalist. That’s the model. That’s the thing people were holding up as an example.
Trump personally intervened in the final days of the Hungarian campaign, sending J.D. Vance to Budapest and vowing to use the full economic might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s economy if Orbán won. Well, it didn’t work. There’s something contradictory about imagining that people will vote for a nationalist politician because a foreign power told them to. Vance showed up to help a man whose country was bleeding population, drowning in corruption, and falling further behind its European neighbors economically, and had the audacity to present it as a success story.4 The voters who actually lived under it disagreed.
Orbán’s loss doesn’t mean the authoritarian impulse is spent in Hungary or anywhere else.5 Magyar is a former Fidesz insider, and the system Orbán built doesn’t disappear the morning after an election. Brussels and the new Magyar government shouldn’t underestimate the resistance of the Orbán system and its entrenched members across government institutions. The Kremlin loses an important ally inside the EU. Ukraine may finally see Hungary’s veto on EU support lifted. These are real consequences worth acknowledging.
All this said, the lesson here isn’t really about Hungary. It’s about what happens when a population finally gets tired of being told the looting is governance and the propaganda is journalism. Hungarian voters rejected the authoritarian policies Orbán embodied in favor of a pro-European challenger—in numbers not seen since the fall of communism. The crowds along the Danube chanted “Russians, go home”—the same phrase Hungarians used during the 1956 uprising against Soviet occupation. They knew what they were voting against.
Americans watching their own government work through a similar playbook should pay attention. The people who told you Orbán was a model were never really interested in democracy. They were interested in winning and staying in power. Sunday was a reminder that those aren’t the same thing and that eventually, voters figure that out.
The American Conservative Union (ACU) began hosting a version of its annual conference, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), in Hungary in 2022. CPAC also brought Orbán to the United States to speak at the annual gathering. Magyar has revealed that Orbán’s government paid CPAC and accused the Orbán government of a crime. The specifics of those payments are unclear.
I’m not going to mince words. This is government-sanctioned theft.
This is why I’ve called Orbán a “welfare queen.”
Let’s not forget that Vance, who is wildly and historically unpopular, is the poster boy for far-right populists.
Case in point, Magyar is threatening to shut down a TV channel that shilled for Orbán. As a believer in free speech and the freedom of the press, that really bothers me. That said, I do sympathize with Magyar’s grievances with the channel.