Make America Hungary Again
13 min read
At last week’s NATO summit, one allied leader distinguished himself from the pack of those anxious about the possibility that Joe Biden might lose the November presidential election to Donald Trump: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the leader of the European Union’s only authoritarian member state, accused his European peers of being “the people on the Titanic playing violins as the ship went down.” Orbán left the conference early on Thursday to meet with Trump in Florida—his second visit to Mar-a-Lago this year, after he went there in March to endorse Trump’s presidential bid.
This is no unrequited love affair. In the past several years, Orbán has become perhaps the most popular foreign leader in the Republican Party. Trump released a video in April calling Orbán a “great man,” and vowing to work closely with him “once again when I take the oath of office.” Senator J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, has cited Orbán as a policy inspiration, saying that “he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.”
Trump’s admiration for autocrats is no secret, but Orbán represents something particularly insidious. Hungary has become an authoritarian beachhead in the heart of Europe by custom-building its quasi-dictatorship to survive and even thrive in a place where most people believe in democracy. Orbán has created a system that can pull the wool over his citizens’ eyes, making them feel as though they have power over the state even as the state exerts power over them.
In theory, Hungary should have been rocky soil for authoritarianism to flourish, given its decades-long, bitter experience with communism. But the reactionary spirit—the impulse to turn to authoritarianism as a means of staving off social change—remained a powerful lure for sectors of its society. Orbán skillfully manipulated this sentiment to build support for his political project and hid his assault on democracy behind subtle, legalistic maneuvering. He devised a playbook for paying lip service to democracy while hollowing out its institutions until an incumbent basically can’t lose. The Republican Party’s chorus of praise for this project is revealing, to say the least.
Hungary’s transition to democracy in the early 1990s was so swift and smooth as to be the envy of many of its neighbors, particularly the ones to its south and east. In those years, Hungary was widely seen as a model of post-communist economic, political, and social stability. Orbán and his Fidesz party were an important part of that success story. They emerged from an anti-communist student movement on the center right, and Orbán served as prime minister from 1998 to 2002.
In 2002, Fidesz lost an election to Hungary’s center-left Socialists. Orbán spent the next eight years nursing a political grudge that would curdle into an ever more hard-line political agenda. He was fortunate in his enemies: The country’s economy was devastated by the 2008 recession, and the Socialist government was mired in scandal. Its leader, Ferenc Gyurcsány, had been caught on tape admitting that he had lied about Hungary’s economic situation. In 2010, Fidesz campaigned as a clean and competent alternative to an unpopular incumbent.
The party returned to power with a two-thirds majority—and as the avatar of a new, hard-right authoritarianism that was not quite what it had promised voters. So instead of announcing their intention to construct an autocratic state, Orbán and his allies approached the project like lawyers—altering the Hungarian legal code in ways both bold and devious. Many of their tactics passed below the radar of all but the most attentive experts and activists. Over time, the combined weight of them made Fidesz extremely difficult to dislodge through electoral means.
First, the party rewrote the entire Hungarian constitution in secret. Parliament passed the new constitution after only nine days of debate. Changes included a restructuring of Hungarian elections, such that more than half of parliamentary representatives would be chosen through single-member, American-style districts (the remainder are determined by a national proportional-vote share). In drawing the new districts, Fidesz abused a rule that allowed the government to vary them in size from roughly 60,000 to 90,000 people.
The new map packed opposition voters into a handful of larger districts, diluting their votes, while pro-Fidesz voters were distributed among smaller districts. This gerrymandered system would allow Fidesz to fall short of a popular-vote majority but still win a two-thirds majority in Parliament—something that happened not once but twice, in 2014 and 2018.
A blizzard of other electoral changes accompanied the redistricting. Each was incremental, and potentially even defensible in isolation. But in combination, the laws erected extraordinary barriers that would keep opposition parties from winning elections. For example, the old system had allowed for a runoff in any district where the victorious candidate got less than 50 percent of the vote. The new system abolished the runoff, allowing a party to win a district with a mere plurality. At the same time, Fidesz created a rule that required national parties to compete in at least 27 single-member districts—even as the party passed laws that made it trickier for small parties to unite on a joint list. The result was that the various opposition parties were basically forced to split the anti-Fidesz vote in many districts, allowing Orbán’s candidates to win with relatively small pluralities.
Such election-law minutiae can be confusing, even boring. Fidesz leaders knew this and counted on the public to tune out the legal arcana as the party adopted rafts of technical new policies that together served to entrench it in power. Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton who studies Hungarian law, told me that the relevant changes were sometimes hidden across different statutes in unrelated areas. A significant change to election law might end up in, for example, counterterrorism legislation.
Scheppele termed Orbán’s overall strategy “autocratic legalism,” which she defined as the use of legally aboveboard, procedurally sound, incremental measures to replace democratic practices with authoritarian ones. Fidesz tends to pass laws that somewhat resemble those in peer democracies, so that the party can maintain a democratic veneer—and plausibly say that it’s standing up for freedom while actually restricting it.
Many of Orbán’s early policies follow this pattern. One law lowered the maximum retirement age for judges from 70 to 62, which created hundreds of vacancies that Fidesz promptly filled with its allies. Orbán then expanded the jurisdiction of the constitutional court, which is tasked with reviewing legislation, to ensure that his newly appointed friends would be the ones deciding key cases for his government. In 2018, Orbán went on to form a whole new court system to oversee “administrative” concerns, such as election law and corruption. Its judges were—unsurprisingly—Fidesz cronies.
The combination of a two-thirds majority in Parliament and control over the courts has allowed the Fidesz government to assert its will across Hungarian society, systematically taking control of institutions that could potentially threaten its lock on political power.
The press is perhaps the most striking example. After the 2010 election, the government passed a law that brought Hungary’s public media outlets—the equivalents of, say, the BBC in Britain—under the aegis of a new Fidesz-controlled institution that fired independent reporters and replaced them with government mouthpieces. The law also created a body called the Media Council, which Fidesz dominated, and gave it the power to fine private media organizations for vague offenses (such as failing to be balanced). Marius Dragomir, a professor at Central European University, told me that Orbán sold this move as a corrective to left-wing bias in Hungarian media, although in reality, left-wing simply meant independent of Orbán.
But Fidesz’s most effective tool in bringing the press to heel may have been simple market pressure. During the 2010s, the news media globally experienced a revenue crisis as advertising dollars flowed instead to online giants such as Google. In Hungary, the government had traditionally purchased advertising space from media outlets for public-service announcements and the like, and the outlets depended inordinately on this revenue. Fidesz politicized the funding stream, shoveling government ad dollars toward friendly outlets while letting critical outlets starve until they had little choice but to be sold off to the state or one of its allies. Whenever market pressure wasn’t enough, the party would use the tools provided by the 2010 media law.
Dragomir’s research found that, by 2017, roughly 90 percent of all media in Hungary was directly or indirectly controlled by the government, and the proportion has only grown since. On a single day in 2018, Fidesz cronies consolidated about 500 outlets under the management of a new Fidesz-run “nonprofit” called the Central European Press and Media Foundation, which overnight became the largest media conglomerate in Europe. In 2020, Index—the largest remaining independent outlet in the country—was sold to Fidesz interests. In 2021, the radio station Klubrádió, which had somehow survived losing 90 percent of its ad revenue during Fidesz’s first year back in power, was forced off the airwaves by the Media Council. Klubrádió now broadcasts exclusively online; the government gave its former frequency to a pro-Fidesz outlet.
Today Hungary is in the grips of a near-perfect system of subtle authoritarianism. Elections do not need to be nakedly rigged, in the sense of falsifying vote counts, because the deck is so stacked against the opposition that winning is functionally impossible. The greatest proof of the system’s resilience came in 2022, when Hungary’s main opposition parties overcame numerous hurdles to unite on a single ticket. In each district, these parties carefully selected the candidates—more conservative ones in rural areas, more left-leaning ones in Budapest—who would best compete with Fidesz. The idea was to circumvent the system that had forced vote splitting between opposition candidates and give the Hungarian people a binary choice: Fidesz or literally anyone else.
Perhaps this gambit could have worked in 2014, before Orbán fully consolidated control. But in the intervening years, the electoral rules and the press had become so tilted that even a united opposition faced nearly insurmountable challenges. Financially hobbled, fighting on a gerrymandered map, and unable to get its message out because of government control of the press, the opposition was crushed. Fidesz won another two-thirds majority in Parliament, fueled in large part by victories in single-member districts outside Budapest—where it won an astonishing 98 percent of seats.
When I first visited Hungary in 2018, the idea that Viktor Orbán might become a major figure in Republican Party politics would have been laughable. But over the course of the next few years, the radicalizing American right fell in love with Orbán’s Hungary. Today it is to the American right what the Nordic countries have long been to the American left: a utopian blueprint for what their country could and should be.
The relationship is a triumph for Orbán, who has spent millions on lobbyists and organizations such as the Danube Institute to make Fidesz’s case to a global audience. But many countries spend lavishly on public relations and foreign lobbying without capturing the heart of one of the two major parties in the world’s only superpower. Hungary’s rise in America is not just about money; it is a reflection of a deep ideological affinity.
Many of Hungary’s admirers on the American right see Hungary as an exemplar of effective Christian conservative governance and a bulwark against the depredations of the cultural left. Indeed, Orbán has won a string of cultural victories. He has banned gay couples from adopting, built a barrier on the Serbian border to block migration, and prohibited government IDs from recognizing a person’s gender as anything other than the one assigned at birth. Hungary’s education system is dominated by the right; so, too, is its mainstream media. Hungarian conservatives have won their country’s culture war in a way that their peers haven’t anywhere else in the Western world. Some on the global right find much to admire, even envy, in those accomplishments.
But Orbán is not a normal conservative. He is an authoritarian who has self-consciously instrumentalized a central component of conservatism, its commitment to seeing value in tradition and existing social norms, in the service of securing his hold on power. In his addresses to American audiences. Orbán has deliberately pushed his hard-line assault on traditional democratic institutions as a necessary response to an insurgent, even revolutionary, left. In a speech to CPAC Dallas in 2022, he argued that conservatives “cannot fight successfully by liberal means” because “our opponents use liberal institutions, concepts, and language to disguise their Marxist and hegemonist plans.”
Orbán has sold the GOP a package deal that more and more Republicans are willing to buy—one that does not separate the authoritarianism out from the cultural conservatism but that accepts the former as a necessary means of accomplishing the latter.
Of course, nothing about idealizing foreign autocrats is uniquely conservative. Prominent thinkers on the Western left routinely exaggerated the Soviet Union’s accomplishments and downplayed its crimes, even at the height of Stalinist depravity. One of history’s most influential libertarian thinkers, the economist Friedrich Hayek, proudly defended Augusto Pinochet’s murderous dictatorship in Chile on anti-socialist grounds. But there was never much risk that a Soviet apologist would win a national election in Cold War America; no libertarian politician won power on a platform of instituting a Pinochet-style dictatorship in Western Europe. Outright rejection of democracy doesn’t work in a context where democracy represents the consensus position.
By contrast, Orbán’s autocratic legalism is designed to create the appearance of democracy, supplying plausible deniability to the project of democratic dismantlement. This is the playbook to watch for when Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and many other prominent Republicans cite Hungary as a “model.” And they do cite it. In a 2022 interview, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, said that “modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.” Roberts met with Orbán privately in March and issued a public statement afterward announcing that he was “especially proud of our relationship with Prime Minister Orbán, whose leadership in Hungary on immigration, family policy, and the importance of the nation-state is a model for conservative governance.”
Roberts is one of the driving forces behind Project 2025, the now-famous blueprint for a second Trump term. That document proposes Fidesz-style policies for the United States, such as replacing 50,000 federal bureaucrats with Trump-aligned ideologues. In his foreword to the document, Roberts makes the case for these policies in distinctly Orbánist terms, arguing that seizing control of the bureaucracy is necessary to win the culture war.
“Federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening. Nearly every power center held by the Left is funded or supported, one way or another, through the bureaucracy,” he writes. “A conservative President must move swiftly,” he adds, to “remove the career and political bureaucrats” behind these developments.
Project 2025 also promotes a strikingly Hungarian solution to what the Trump administration lawyer Gene Hamilton believes is a problem with the Justice Department—namely that it has become “a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda.” The project’s reform proposal, which Hamilton wrote, suggests bringing on large numbers of new political appointees to supervise “every office and component across the department—especially in the Civil Rights Division, the FBI, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review.” Hamilton suggests transferring authority over elections from the Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division, and assigning criminal attorneys to investigate election officials involved in what he describes as “fraud” in the 2020 presidential election.
The chapter on the media is even more nakedly Orbánist. In it, Heritage fellow Mike Gonzalez proposes stripping the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding to NPR and PBS, of its public funding and status—a move specifically billed as punishment for covering stories in a way that Gonzalez doesn’t approve. He describes the CPB’s budget as “half a billion dollars squandered on leftist opinion each year.”
All of these proposals might have been generated independently, without any reference to Hungary. But the Republican Party of Donald Trump has made no secret of its admiration of Hungary’s government, and it has arrived at policy proposals that bear more than a surface-level similarity to Orbán’s authoritarian efforts at power consolidation. This, together with the explicit imitation coming from people such as Vance and DeSantis, show that the affinities are shaping the agenda at the highest level.
Americans tend to imagine that the end of democracy will come with a bang—something like January 6, signaling a fundamental break with the existing constitutional order. But the ever strengthening connections between Fidesz and the GOP suggest a different and more insidious possibility: a second Trump administration quietly and bureaucratically reshuffling the American legal apparatus to put Washington on the road to Budapest.
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