What America can learn from Viktor Orbán’s defeat
"The key was linking Orbán’s corruption to Hungarians’ daily lives."
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Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was finally defeated in an election that took place on April 12.
Orbán led Hungary for 16 years, during which time citizens endured a crackdown on free speech, the free press, LGBTQ rights, and immigration. He cozied up with Putin and moved Hungary away from Europe. The MAGA movement saw Orbán as a model — the infamous Project 2025 was heavily influenced by his governance style — so his loss is not just important for Hungary or the European Union, but also in terms of the global fight against right-wing authoritarianism.
Orbán’s defeat offers some lessons for how democracy defenders could potentially win the fight against Trumpism here in the United States. One of the key takeaways is that the opposition, led by victorious Tisza Party candidate Péter Magyar, focused on Orbán’s corruption and what it meant for everyday Hungarians. And as we were reminded yesterday, there’s no leader in the world more nakedly corrupt than Trump.
To get some expert insight on the fall of Orbán and the reasons Magyar was able to beat him so resoundingly, we connected with Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international relations at Princeton University, who has worked in Hungary and actually met Orbán.
“It was amazing what they threw at Magyar, and he just kept marching on,” Scheppele told us, alluding to all of Orbán dirty campaign tricks and the structural reforms he enacted to entrench himself in power. “By the end, [Magyar] was having these rallies of half a million people in a country the size of New Jersey. It was about making people feel like he had their backs if they came out and voted for him.”
“In the US right now, especially among the elites that ought to be leaders in all of this, people are hiding because of what Trump can do to them,” she added. “People have gotten off of social media. Universities keep changing their DEI standards. People are complying in advance, keeping their heads down, not standing up because they’re afraid. But once there’s too many of you for the government to do bad stuff to each of you, it’s almost like immunity.”
A full transcript of the conversation between Scheppele and Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Thor Benson
A lot of American commentators are attributing Magyar’s success to the fact his campaign focused on an anti-corruption message, and are drawing conclusions from that for US politics. Is that your analysis too, or is what happened more nuanced?
Kim Lane Scheppele
It’s a little more complicated than that, because “anti-corruption” is still pretty abstract to most people. But what Magyar was able to do was link Orbán’s corruption to people’s lives.
There was amazing investigative reporting exposing visible aspects of Orbán’s corruption. You probably heard the stuff about zebras — a drone discovered that there was this little gathering of them near Orbán’s property. It was this visible sign of how ridiculous and expansive the corruption had become.
Corruption became meme-able, and there were other scandals that were happening. These investigative reporters kept turning up one thing after another. The crucial thing that Magyar did was to say, “Orbán’s government is corrupt. Look at the zebras. That is why the hospitals don’t work. Because they’re underfunded. The transportation system is underfunded. The educational system is underfunded. They’re stealing the money.”
The key was linking Orbán’s corruption to Hungarians’ daily lives. “The National Health Service promised you healthcare, but it couldn’t deliver. It promised you an education, and it couldn’t deliver. All of the trains are falling apart, and they’re always late. How come if you travel in the rest of Europe, the trains are air conditioned, but not here?” The visible signs of a corroding social state were blamed on the corruption.
The next through line was that democracy has broken down. “They’ve created an autocracy in which they don’t have to listen to you anymore.” It was a package of things.
It wasn’t just democracy as an abstract issue or corruption or affordability. The Democratic Party in this country tends to run on checklists. “Here’s corruption, here’s another issue, here’s that issue.” They’re all important, but they’re not linked to an ideological framework. Magyar linked the issues to an ideology. “We need democracy back again.”
Thor Benson
In America, everyone understands that Trump is corrupt, but the challenge is linking it to problems people face. AOC strikes me as somebody who is good at that. She says, “You know why they’re taking away your health insurance? Because they’re using the money for Trump’s war.”
Kim Lane Scheppele
Exactly. That’s what Péter Magyar did. He stayed away from the hot-button issues of both the left and right. He said almost nothing about immigration. He said almost nothing about gay rights. He just stayed away from all those issues on which left and right are polarized, and which the Orbán government had used to divide people.
He said, “Look, we’re all in this together, and here’s what we share.” He said the reason we need democracy is because it prevents corruption and ensures that when the government provides things, it does so effectively and for everyone.
Thor Benson
How was Magyar able to deal with the fact that Orbán had totally captured the media?
Kim Lane Scheppele
Yeah, media rigging is a part of this story too. Orbán controls literally all the television stations and radio stations and newspapers of any serious circulation size. That whole block of Orbán media gave virtually no attention to the opposition candidate, unless it was negative. Magyar had no way to get his message out. He was not interviewed once by the public broadcasters.
In Europe, most countries have a public broadcaster, like the BBC or Deutsche Welle. And there was such a thing in Hungary, but it got taken over by Orbán, so they never gave Magyar a minute of time to explain himself.
How do you overcome that? That’s where the opposition basically turned to social media, a couple of independent journalism platforms funded by readers and viewers, and a YouTube channel. That was it.
One great thing about the zebras is that it worked really well on social media. Post a little zebra icon and then everybody knows what you mean. A YouTube channel actually started running news broadcasts, and because it’s YouTube, it was hard for the Hungarian government to take it down. Ditto with social media. We all think social media is the thing that destroyed democracy, but it could end up saving it.
Maybe social media platforms are all that’s left. That’s what the Hungarian opposition moved on to — YouTube and Facebook. The young people got mobilized in this campaign, and they were really good at memes. The Orbán government tried everything. They had a negative press campaign, but they also bugged Magyar’s phone and released snippets of conversations where he was saying negative things about people in his own party.
They sent a girlfriend to him. He had a divorce. He was looking for girlfriends. They sent this woman to him, and then she taped his phone conversations to create scandals around him. There was one point when the Orbán-dominated media got this photograph taken from above of a bed that was all messed up. And then it was like, “coming soon.” Everybody assumed there was going to be a Magyar sex tape. He said, “Look, I’m a healthy 45-year-old man. I have a sex life with consenting women.” He addressed it, then dropped it. The young followers of Magyar started creating these fake AI videos of stuff happening in that room.
The opposition spread pictures of Orbán in bed with Putin and Trump. By the time the Magyar sex tape was expected to drop, there were so many ridiculous things out there taking place in that room that it would have just joined them as yet another fake video. It was pretty brilliant.
There was this other problem, which was that the election system was rigged. Magyar faced the difficulty that votes from the countryside are worth up to three times as much as a vote in the cities. He knew he had the cities in his corner because they would vote for anybody who would take down Orbán, frankly.
But Magyar had to persuade Orbán’s voters. In the absence of the kind of media that they watch, namely television and radio, he would go around to all these villages. He spent two years doing six, seven, sometimes eight villages a day and meeting people and talking to them and asking about their problems and connecting it back to the state stealing their money.
Thor Benson
Wow. There were more dirty tricks in the campaign than I realized.
Kim Lane Scheppele
There were tons. Magyar, at the beginning of his campaign and before he developed extraordinarily steely discipline, got into a bar brawl with somebody. He could have been provoked by Orbán’s people. That’s kind of what I think, but we never could prove it. Somebody punched him, and then he got into this fight and threw somebody’s phone into the Danube River. The public prosecutor, who’s in Orbán’s pocket, came after him with criminal charges.
By this time, Magyar had been elected to the European Parliament, and no state can put a member of the European Parliament under criminal charges unless the European Parliament waives his immunity. The European Parliament refused to do so.
It was amazing what they threw at Magyar, and he just kept marching on. Orbán had intimidated everybody. You knew that if you stood up to Orbán, he would be able to come after you with whatever it was you needed from the government. Maybe your kid needs to get into college, and almost all the colleges are public colleges. Maybe your spouse is on the chopping block at their job. Orbán had such a reach that they could ensure that you lost your job, couldn’t get your social benefits paid, and couldn’t get unemployment insurance. They were using the power of the state to deny people every material thing that the state can provide.
People kept their heads down. They just said it’s not worth it. Magyar’s campaign was a campaign against fear. He said, “Look, of course they’re after me, but here I am. If I can do it, you can do it.” He brought out lots of people who would then realize, “Oh, my neighbor’s here. I’m not alone. Other people are standing up.” By the end, he was having these rallies of half a million people in a country the size of New Jersey. It was about making people feel like he had their backs if they came out and voted for him.
In the US right now, especially among the elites that ought to be leaders in all of this, people are hiding because of what Trump can do to them. People have gotten off of social media. Universities keep changing their DEI standards. People are complying in advance, keeping their heads down, not standing up because they’re afraid. But once there are too many of you for the government to do bad stuff to each of you, it’s almost like immunity.
That’s it for now
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In October and March I attended the No Kings rallies. I can assure you there were a great many people there who were NOT keeping their heads down and trying to ignore Trump's corruption.
My main, nagging misgiving about how quickly that 'learning' happens is stubbornly rooted in just how apparently hard the ~40% of folks that are currently 'ok enough' with things need to be punched in the face by their own kind before 'light dawns over Marblehead', so to speak.
I do, however, remain quite optimistic that our current predicament will (ultimately)not be allowed to stand.