Hungary Is America in Miniature
Hungary's test is on Sunday. America's will come in November.
Garry Kasparov is the founder and chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.
If you’re an American, there is one event you should be watching this weekend, and that is the Hungarian parliamentary election—set to take place on Sunday, April 12.
Hungary right now is America in miniature.
It is not quite a functioning democracy. The country’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán took back the prime minister’s office in 2010 and hasn’t left since. Orbán has taken steps to extend government control over media and academia and make it difficult for opposition parties to organize. On the global stage, Budapest is squarely aligned with Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran (and, of course, with the demagogues running the show in Washington).
Yet Hungary is not a police state either, despite Orbán’s best efforts. There aren’t really political prisoners. There is still independent media, although it’s cornered and under severe strain. And elections in Hungary, like elections in the United States, still matter.
For a more concrete assessment, we can look to our friends at Freedom House, who rate the health of democracy on a scale from a totalitarian “one” to a liberal democratic “one hundred.”
The latest Freedom House report was just released the other day. Russia scores a dismal 12. America received a 90 a decade ago; now, it’s dropped to an 81 (call it a B-). Hungary gets a 65—earning it the uninspiring label of “partly free.”
The juncture Hungary is approaching this weekend is the same one Americans will find themselves at in seven months. If current polls are to be believed, then Orbán’s opponent, Péter Magyar, will pull off a fairly convincing win.
The question is: What does the wannabe-dictator do next?
Orbán has been able to consolidate power more or less bloodlessly because he has not faced a serious challenger in the 16 years since he returned to office. There was no need to dispute election results or violently suppress the opposition because even in a perfectly fair system, they probably would not have won anyway.
That is, until now.
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Orbán is set up to declare victory no matter what. The false-flag operation kicked off with the recent discovery of “explosives” on the Hungary-Serbia border.
(A “terrorist plot”! Come on. We’ve seen that movie a thousand times before. I need an aspiring dictator who engineers something more original. How about claiming an extraterrestrial invasion? Enemies controlling the weather?)
The last time Donald Trump lost an election, he pressured state officials and incited an insurrection to try to overturn the results. Yet even then, there were a handful of people surrounding the president—people like Mike Pence—who did their duty (the bare minimum) and ensured that the democratic process was carried out.
There are no such people in the second Trump term. If the Democrats win the midterms and Trump rejects the outcome, who in the administration is going to stand in his way?
The corridors of power in Budapest are likewise crowded full of sycophants. Who in the prime minister’s Fidesz party is going to tell Orbán that he has lost?
If no one in the Hungarian government will do the right thing, what about Hungary’s international partners? Which world leader will get on the phone and inform Hungary’s leader that the jig is up? Certainly, Putin will tell the anti-Ukraine Orbán to cling to power. JD Vance and Marco Rubio, who paraded through Budapest to do stump speeches for Orbán, will side with him too.
I’d like to believe the Europeans can do something useful, but a strongly worded letter isn’t going to cut it here.
In such a situation, the people are at the mercy of the men with guns: the army and the police. It’s an ugly truth, but coming from Russia, I can tell you that this is often the final line separating democracy from dictatorship.
What the Hungarian security services do (and don’t do) after Sunday’s election could foreshadow how ICE and the US National Guard behave come November.
Democracies don’t turn into fully-fledged dictatorships overnight. There are tests along the way that determine a nation’s direction. Hungary’s test is on Sunday. America’s will follow in short order. Pay attention.
More from The Next Move:
‘Patriots,’ Populists, and Putinists
A ‘whole global movement,’ as Nigel Farage said, gaining in political strength.
“I’d like to believe the Europeans can do something useful, but a strongly worded letter isn’t going to cut it here.”
At the very least, the EU can:
- accuse all the key people in the election-stealing government of being criminals, and issue corresponding European Arrest Warrants (which won’t be acted upon as long as the criminals remain in Hungary, but it’d still be a powerful symbolic step);
- explicitly not recognise the criminals and those who act on their behalf as representing a EU member country; this would in practice mean that Hungary’s government would no longer have any voting rights at the EU level — in particular Orbán would lose the ability to hold up, or use as leverage, decisions that require unanimity;
- stop the flow of euros from the EU budget to Hungary’s government and businesses and other organisations which are close to it.
Micro America!