Viktor Orbán has been defeated. That is good for Hungary, good for Ukraine, and good for anyone who believes the will of the people should mean something. It is also, if we are being honest, a problem for a certain kind of political analysis—the kind that spent years insisting Orbán was something that the election results now suggest he wasn’t.
Orbán was a right-wing strongman: genuinely reactionary, an obstinate bully on the world stage, and, by any reasonable accounting, corrupt. He was an intellectual hero to J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump. He proudly called Hungary an “illiberal democracy”—his way of saying that the institutions would serve the party, not the other way around. For a while, Hungarians liked what he was doing. Then they didn’t. And they voted him out.
That last sentence is the one I want to linger on.
On his HBO show a week before the election, John Oliver said “independent observers have deemed Hungarian elections” since Orbán took power and started changing laws, “free but not fair, which is an interesting combination. You are free to vote for anyone you want, whether it’s Orbán or whoever inevitably loses to him.” The audience gave a big laugh.
He then threw to the Princeton sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele, who argued: “We tend to think of a coup as happening with tanks in the streets, you know, and the military takeover and the announcement on radio that all civil liberties have died. That’s not what autocracy looks like anymore. You don’t get phalanxes of tanks. You get phalanxes of lawyers.”
