In the wake of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s landslide election defeat, populist conservatives and other thinkers in the “heterodox” intellectual space have been mounting a curious defense of the outgoing leader.
Through a 16-year process of extreme gerrymandering, the weakening of checks and balances, and the dragooning of independent media, Orbán transformed Hungary into what he called an “illiberal democracy.” His strongman tactics and confrontational rhetoric earned the country, a land of almost 10 million people on the periphery of Europe, an outsize role in international affairs, eliciting opprobrium from a Western liberal establishment that portrayed him as an autocrat. But according to his quasi-defenders, Orbán’s voluntary relinquishment of power proves that he was never the authoritarian, much less the out-and-out dictator, his critics claimed him to be.
“It seems commonsensical to say that if an ‘autocrat’ loses an election, he wasn’t an autocrat after all,” my friend Mike Pesca wrote in The Free Press. Rod Dreher, one of the many conservative intellectuals whom the Orbán government welcomed to Budapest, posted sarcastically, “But. . . but. . . but, I was told by so many experts and journalists in the West that this would never happen, that Orbán is a fascist dictator who would never surrender power!” And New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asserted that “strong political parties that bend the rules to entrench their power and succumb to corruption are a consistent feature of democracy qua democracy. And if your entrenched ruling party can lose everything in a wave election, you are not living in an authoritarian state.”
