Hungarian election exposes the weaknesses of a strongman
An insurgent agenda can bring out enough people to overcome even the most entrenched authoritarian
For the American resistance to Donald Trump, the fall of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban on Sunday was a moment of celebration, envy, and learning.
Orban had entrenched his power so thoroughly in his 16 years of political dominance – destroying judicial independence, controlling the media, eliminating academic freedom, enriching his cabal – that, until quite recently, he seemed invulnerable.
He was everything Donald Trump wanted to be.
But now, his massive electoral defeat is an object lesson in how to restore a democracy.
What’s needed, if Hungary is a model, are at least these three things:
A blowout election, which is fueled by
A focus on corruption – on how well the oligarchs are doing while everyone else suffers
And the promise not just to restore democratic checks and balances but to bring to justice those who, in Hungarian prime minister-elect Peter Magyar’s words, “plundered, looted, betrayed, indebted and ruined” his country.
Here in the United States, a blowout election may seem unlikely given the extreme partisan tribalism that divides our country. But if Hungary is indeed an example, it appears that the way to motivate voters across party lines is with a more aggressive, principled, and insurgent pro-democracy agenda than anything the current Democratic leadership is offering right now.
Lessons From a Victory
Anne Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic that Magyar’s “construction of a broad, diverse, and patriotic grassroots social movement” overcame the illusion of illiberal permanence:
Orbán’s loss brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement, as well as the belief—also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric—that illiberal parties are somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the “real” people. As it turns out, history doesn’t work like that. “Real” people grow tired of their rulers. Old ideas become stale. Younger people question orthodoxy. Illiberalism leads to corruption. And if Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.
Over at Protect Democracy’s blog, Michael Angeloni and Ben Raderstorf wrote (even before the election) that Magyar’s campaign “suggests a clear pro-democracy political playbook to emulate:”
Build a multigenerational political campaign that leverages grassroots anti-corruption energy and a genuine reform agenda.
Construct a broad-spectrum opposition singularly focused on voter discontent with the regime and refuse to engage in the autocrat’s culture-war narratives.
Unite behind a singular, charismatic leader with credibility to bridge disparate opposition factions.
“America can do this too,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in her newsletter. Her prescription for Democrats is to “come up with platforms that make people feel respected and cared for as they also address the distress and difficulty that cuts to social assistance, corruption, brutality, and neglect by the Trump administration have created.”
In an interview with the Contrarian, Princeton autocracy expert Kim Lane Scheppele credited Magyar’s campaign with focusing attention on how “Orban’s getting rich from corruption while public services are going downhill.” She continued: “You could just transport this to United States right now, right? It’s the campaign promise you need.”
Writer and organizer Micah L. Sifry relished Orban’s defeat in his newsletter, but, he warned:
Look closer, though, and Magyar’s rise offers a clear warning to Democrats who think merely being anti-Trump will deliver their party a convincing mandate in 2026 and 2028. Magyar was a renegade from Orban’s Fidesz party who took a brave risk and told the public the truth about the regime’s corruption. Then he created a non-party movement called “Rise Up Hungarians” and brought it into a relatively new centrist, pro-European, and populist party, Tisza. As a new party, Tisza was unblemished by corruption and could make that its central issue, while sidelining the other opposition parties as too much part of the old system. To me, what Magyar’s rise suggests is that an independent, populist truth-teller (think Ross Perot) could do very well in the 2028 presidential election. Or, maybe a Democratic renegade—but one thing we know from past elections is the Democratic establishment is still strong enough to block such contenders.
On her MS.NOW show on Monday, Rachel Maddow credited Magyar with setting out a clear agenda for pro-democracy reform. “I think it’s a salient lesson for the Democratic Party in the United States in thinking ahead about their electoral platform,” she said. She urged Democrats to back “a program of re-democratizing the United States that undoes and bans permanently the things Trump has been trying to do to turn our country into a strongman state, to undo our constitutional republic.”
The Spirit of 76
Historian of tyranny Timothy Snyder has published the text of the speech he gave at No Kings 3 on March 28 in Cincinnati.
What does it mean, he asked, to be commemorating 250 years of the American republic?
To an uncanny degree, what the Trump people in this 250th year are doing is repeating the abuses that the American founders complained about: arbitrary taxation; taxation without representation; imperial attitudes; wars without consent. The point… is not that the founders were right about everything, but that they were rebels in their time (I was borrowing this from Frederick Douglass and his famous speech “What to a slave is the Fourth of July?”).
To honor the origins of our republic doesn’t mean going back to the eighteenth century. It means being rebels in our own time. It means demanding freedom, aiming for something radically better in the future.
So the way that the Trump people are trying to rule us is about ending the republic. For the republic to survive, it has to be better -- we have to have liberation that includes schools, and health care, and justice, and opportunity, excludes mass incarceration, and concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing, and senseless, criminal wars. We have to be able to speak together rather than have our conversations determined by oligarchs and algorithms. We have to work together rather than allowing ourselves to be isolated.
The Horror of Warehousing People
Grassroots movements opposing the construction of ICE detention facilities inside warehouses are having growing success.
The Associated Press credits the fierce opposition against these facilities with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s decision to review his predecessor’s warehousing plan. The New York Times writes about how “In a Deep Red Town, Locals Vent Over a Planned ICE Detention Center.”
Meanwhile, reports from inside existing facilities are exposing horrifying, inhumane conditions for detainees.
Sarah Stillman writes in the New Yorker about “how the suffering of children, including infants and toddlers, has become central to the Trump Administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy.”
Reporters, immigration lawyers, and human rights advocates continue to collect horrific, isolated anecdotes about detainee treatment.
But as Robyn Barnard of Human Rights First asked Stillman: “If these are the horrors we know about, what are the ones we still don’t know about?”
The Need for More Exposure
The eyewitness accounts and social media videos of public acts of violence by federal agents against immigrants and citizens helped foment a national revulsion to Trump’s immigration policies.
But what happens behind closed doors is, by design, out of public view. Indeed, ICE fought long and hard to block members of Congress from making unannounced visits to detention facilities.
ICE lost, and members do have access now. That leads to sporadic but highly disturbing reports from inside.
In Arizona, after a surprise inspection Thursday of the Mesa Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding facility, three Democratic representatives said they were horrified that immigrants were being stuffed into holding cells “like sardines,” the Arizona Mirror reported.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this in my entire life,” Rep. Adelita Grijalva told the Mirror. “It is frightening in there,” Grijalva said. “It is disgusting.”
The trio is now demanding answers from DHS.
Can you get your member of Congress to start making snap inspections? Is there any way you can communicate directly with a detainee?
Let’s push for more people to pierce the veil of secrecy around these detention sites and let the world know about these assaults on human dignity being conducted in our name. The public needs to start demanding improved conditions.
Anti-ICE Protesters Vindicated
Here is some great reporting by A.C. Thompson and Gabrielle Schonder for ProPublica and Frontline: “Caught in the Crackdown: As Arrests at Anti-ICE Protests Piled Up, Prosecutions Crumbled.”
ProPublica and FRONTLINE combed through social media, court records and news stories. Reporters identified more than 300 protesters and bystanders who were arrested by federal agents during immigration sweeps and were accused of crimes such as assaulting or interfering with law enforcement.
But over and over those accusations fell apart under scrutiny. Our reviews of court files found that statements made by the arresting officers were repeatedly debunked by video footage. In more than a third of the cases, prosecutors quickly dismissed charges that couldn’t be substantiated, refused to file charges at all, or lost at trial. The tally of cases that end this way will likely climb as many of the arrests remain unresolved.
It’s full of stories that will make your blood boil.
Come 2029, god willing, federal agents who abused protesters and then lied about could face prosecution for civil rights violations
Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department attorney who spent years investigating misconduct by law enforcement, told the reporters that the federal agents’ behavior “is on par with the worst protest policing and just law enforcement that I’ve seen from any department, even in their worst days.”
And here’s another one to add to the list: The Los Angeles Times reports that a Cal State professor is feeling a sense of “righteous indignation” after his acquittal by a federal jury on charges of assault on a federal officer with a deadly or dangerous weapon. He lobbed a cannister of tear gas back at agents who were rounding up hundreds of farmworkers at a southern California cannabis farm in July.
This Week in the Courts
A federal judge in Massachusetts dismissed a DOJ lawsuit demanding that the state turn over unredacted voter registration rolls. It was the fourth loss for DOJ, with zero wins, out of 30 active voter-roll cases, Democracy Docket reported. Judge Leo Sorokin wrote that the statute DOJ cited to support its action -- Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 -- actually prohibited it.
You may recall that a few weeks back, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., enjoined the Pentagon from enforcing a new policy that banished real journalists from a Pentagon workspace in favor of those “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” Judge Paul L. Friedman has now ruled that the Pentagon violated his order when it responded not by letting those journalists in, but by banishing everyone. In his ruling, the judge quoted from a New York Times interview in which a defense official bragged that “We used more words to say the same thing.”
You may recall that last week, the American Historical Association filed suit challenging a memorandum from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional and advised Trump that he “need not further comply with its dictates” regarding the preservation of official documents. Now the plaintiffs have asked Judge Beryl Howell for an immediate injunction preventing any such destruction. The government refused to provide written assurances that no official records would be destroyed in the interim, they wrote, leading to “a clear danger that official government records of the highest importance will be irretrievably lost absent relief.”
The Department of the Interior has agreed that the National Park Service will fly the rainbow Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument in Manhattan, settling a lawsuit filed in February after the flag was taken down. As the New York Times reported, it’s a “rare instance of the Trump administration’s backing down from its nationwide attack on diversity initiatives.”
MAGA Joins the Resistance?
I would be remiss in not welcoming to the resistance a number of MAGA influencers who have turned against Trump in the last week, thanks to his increased signs of mental instability. As Status News reported:
“The 25th Amendment needs to be invoked. He is a genocidal lunatic. Our Congress and military need to intervene. We are beyond madness,” wrote far-right extremist Candace Owens.
“How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter, asked on his Infowars show.
And Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host turned podcaster, denounced Trump for his expletive-laced Easter message, calling it “vile” and suggesting he might be the Antichrist. Still others, including Megyn Kelly and Matt Walsh, turned on Trump in strikingly harsh terms after he threatened to wipe out the entire Iranian civilization.
End Notes
Gustavo Arellano writes in his Los Angeles Times column: “Pope Leo isn’t afraid of President Trump. We shouldn’t be, either.”
The New York Times reports that demonstrators blocked traffic by sitting down in the middle of Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan on Monday, protesting against arms sales to Israel.
From WCCO TV in Minnesota: “Columbia Heights school welcomes back nearly 200 students who pivoted to virtual learning during ICE surge.” *sniff*