Orbán is out and “the Pope is weak.” Happy Monday!
Let’s bump a few dynamics of the Hungarian election, given their implications for American politics.
First, authoritarians lose when they become unpopular AND the opposition is more popular (as we wrote in Relative Popularity). That means neutralizing attacks, not mobilizing the base. The leader of the opposition, Péter Magyar, vowed to take a hard line on immigration and did not adopt progressive positions on culture issues. You won’t be shocked to learn that “some liberal voters remain wary of his … conservative views.”
Second, it seems like Orbán may have done what we warned MAGA about: changing the rules for short-term gain that backfired into a Dummymander. Here’s Yascha Mounk:
There is a delicious irony to how lop-sided Magyar’s victory is. During his 16 years in power, Orbán repeatedly changed the electoral system to tip the balance in his party’s favor. Because the opposition was divided and he counted on always retaining the most votes of any single party, he adopted an electoral system which strongly boosts parliamentary representation for the numerical victor. Now that Hungarian voters have finally turned on Orbán, he is a victim of his own machinations. Despite winning about 40 percent of the vote, his party will hold less than a third of seats in parliament.
Third, how’s this for a medium-term take on populism? Via CNN:
One reason that Orbán’s campaign focused so heavily on foreign policy is that his domestic record was so poor. This is another lesson of his defeat: Populism is about winning the day, the week, the news cycle. To function, this one-battle-after-another mode of governance needs a steady stream of enemies. Orbán found plenty: NGOs, liberal universities, George Soros, the LGBTQ movement, the European Union.
But eventually you run out of dragons to slay. Much of Orbán’s campaign vilified neighboring Ukraine. Budapest is plastered with posters of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Some read: “Danger!” Others read: “Don’t let him have the last laugh.”
Without a thriving economy, or a well-run healthcare system, or other policy achievements to point to, Orbán’s campaign instead aimed to scare Hungarians into voting for Fidesz by posing as the “safe choice” to protect Hungary from threats allegedly posed by Ukraine. “He is always talking about sovereignty, but to believe that the major threat to Hungarian sovereignty in Ukraine (became) comical,” said Krastev.
To counter Orbán’s vague warnings of danger from abroad, Magyar simply had to point to his record at home – with which Hungarians were less than impressed.
Fourth, opposition leaders have varied backgrounds:
the sharpest message from Budapest should be for the Democrats, strange as that may sound.
That is because Orbán’s ouster represents a new triumph for a particular brand of disruptive politics: one defined by reformist candidates who launch new parties and blow up old ones, winning elections by rendering traditional political structures obsolete. Hungary’s Peter Magyar, the leader of the anti-Orbán Tisza party, is the latest victor in this mold. There is no equivalent figure among Trump’s American opponents …
What these politicians have in common is a path to power. And it is one that Democrats have resisted for a decade since Trump became the dominant figure in American politics, killing off the traditional Republican Party along the way.
The American party system is heavily armored against disruption. It would be all but impossible to replicate here what Magyar has done in Hungary — or what France’s Emmanuel Macron and Argentina’s Javier Milei did before him — and turn a fledgling political organization into a personal vehicle and bring it to national power in a flash. We do not have secondary political parties that can surge to prominence in a single campaign, like Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia or Rob Jetten’s D66 in the Netherlands.
Yet as Trump himself has shown, it is possible to devour a major party from the inside — commandeering an old institution with grassroots support, casting aside its entrenched leaders, remaking it in a new image and earning a fresh look from voters who didn’t like the old version. Mark Carney has done something similar in Canada, with a very different political agenda. So has Lee Jae Myung in South Korea.
It takes a special kind of candidate to carry a political project like this, and probably not one likely to win popularity contests with members of a conventional party committee or legislative caucus. Magyar… is viewed by his peers as stubborn, imperious and self-absorbed, and also manifestly the most lethal rival Orbán ever faced. I remember hearing from a senior Canadian lawmaker that Carney was an academic stiff sure to flop in electoral politics, only a few months before he freed the Liberal Party from Justin Trudeau’s shadow and led it to an astonishing upset.
If Democrats want to take the hint, they’ll give a closer look to the leaders frustrating their peers in Washington and defying their home-state political bosses, and less time measuring the applause meter at various special-interest conventions and donor retreats.
Like the Democrats frustrating their peers in DC? Check out the Win The Middle slate of reformist disruptors.