The backers of Donald Trump’s attack on his country’s institutions — an assortment of plutocrats, activists, far-right think tanks, conservative academics and cynical media moguls — hold a constellation of not always compatible beliefs. Their ranks range from intellectuals like the Catholic political scientist Patrick Deneen, who wants to replace the hated liberal meritocracy with a new elite made up of people like him, to the anti-egalitarian blogger Curtis Yarvin, who favours a United States run by a monarch. Somewhere in between are the hardheads at the Heritage Foundation, authors of the Project 2025 blueprint for neutering the “deep state.”
If anything unites them it’s admiration for Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Deneen especially likes its policies to encourage larger families (designed to avoid the need for any immigrants whatsoever). Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts believes Orbán’s “defeat” of progressives and promotion of conservative Christian values “should be celebrated.” Vice-president J.D. Vance is a longstanding fan; conservative polemicist Rod Dreher seems happiest reading the latest edition of the Hungarian Conservative on the banks of the Danube.
So it’s no mystery that Princeton University’s Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist who once worked in Hungary’s constitutional court, has been in high demand in recent weeks. A partial list of her media engagements includes interviews by Associated Press, PBS News Hour, Slate, CNN, Democracy Now! and her “old friend,” the redoubtable Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, in his indispensable Substack newsletter.
Outside the world of right-wing punditry and activism, Orbán is probably best known for having announced that Hungary has transformed into an “illiberal democracy.” Illiberal it may be, but “democracy” is a stretch. In her analysis of the 2022 election, the fourth consecutive win for Orbán’s Fidesz party, Scheppele shows how Hungarian elections “hinge less on party platforms, campaigns, and attractive candidates than on election laws — laws that Orbán intentionally shapes to disadvantage the opposition.”
The Hungarian electoral system’s shortcomings go back to compromises struck when communist governments were teetering across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. Hungary already had a multiparty system, but it was so heavily constrained that party leaders had to try to imagine what rules would give their party the best chance of success once elections were freer. Some favoured a system of “party lists,” others wanted single-member electorates. All of them wanted to exclude small parties.
The compromise, writes Scheppele, was a new election law that “lacked any mechanism to ensure that parliamentary-seat distribution would match the distribution of party votes.” The results of the first election under the new system, in 1990, made this vividly clear. “The largest vote-getter, the centre-right Hungarian Democratic Forum [later dissolved], won 25 per cent of the vote but received 43 per cent of the seats. The second-highest vote getter, the centre-left Free Democrats, won 21 per cent of the vote” — almost as much — “but only 24 per cent of the seats.”
Orbán took a bad system and made it worse. Having won government in 1998 and then lost it in 2002, he set about devising the means not just to regain government but also to hang onto it indefinitely. Although his main opponents at the time, the Socialists, managed to retain government in 2006, their mishandling of the global financial crisis gave Orbán the opening he needed. His Fidesz party returned to government in 2010 with more than 80 per cent of seats, a dangerous super-majority:
He could amend the constitution at will, which he did twelve times during his first year in office — including removing, early on, the four-fifths hurdle for rewriting the constitution. Less than a year into his first term, Orbán unveiled a new constitution drafted behind closed doors, debated before parliament for only nine days, and passed on a party-line vote. The new constitution was accompanied by hundreds of new laws, many affecting elections.
The new constitution left to the government the drawing of new electoral boundaries. Predictably, Fidesz drew the boundaries to suit its own interests, locking up opposition voters in larger electorates and maximising its own yield from its supporters. Writes Scheppele: “A study of the initial districts showed that if Fidesz and the left-opposition won equal numbers of votes under this new map, Fidesz would come out ten seats ahead.”
The list of electoral fiddling since then combines dubious practices — changes in the qualifications needed to vote, coercion at polling booths, new rules for allocating “excess” votes under the party-list system — with broadscale efforts to restrict public debate and undermine the rule of law. Media proprietors have been forced to sell their outlets to the government’s friends; judicial independence has been undermined; the Constitutional Court’s powers have been curbed. In the words of a European parliament resolution, Hungary has become a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.”
At the root of Hungary’s appeal to figures on the American right (and some on the Australian right) is a recognition that their political vision doesn’t have majority support. Hungary seems to show how a determined minority can capture government by keeping its real aims secret — by running as a populist and governing as a plutocrat, as one journalist described Trump’s approach early in his first term — and then tightening its grip on power.
Trump is doubling down on the side of the plutocracy this time round, which probably explains why the polls are already revealing growing concern about Elon Musk’s assault on government and why his own approval ratings are already falling. (Just yesterday, pollsters at Morning Consult reported that “comfortable majorities of voters would preserve or expand funding for the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” all targets of Musk’s offensive.) Orbán knows his real aims aren’t popular either: otherwise, why the need to rig the system?
The American journalist Zach Beauchamp uses the term “the reactionary spirit” to capture this belief that any tactics are acceptable in the war against liberalism. It’s different from other forms of conservatism, he writes in his recent book, “because it produces a particular form of extreme-right politics, specifically an anti-democratic one.” Not surprisingly, the United States and Hungary are among the four countries he discusses in detail (the others are India and Israel).
In each, he writes, “a conservative party in a seemingly stable democracy has become a vehicle for the ambitions of a far-right strongman bent on locking his opponents out of power.” And, in each, “that party has undermined basic principles of democracy through measures like changing election rules, politicising the judiciary, attacking independent media, and abusing regulatory powers for political advantage.”
As Scheppele told journalist Peter Geoghegan, “Orbán has been to US conservatives what Sweden once was to American social democrats. In a small country, far, far away, there is proof of concept that one’s political philosophy works.”
Of course, there are many reasons why Trump and Musk can’t simply take the Orbán path. In a country of fewer than ten million people it’s much easier to control the media, the judiciary and the population at large. Many much larger and quite powerful American states are outside the control of the Republican Party. The US opposition is much more united than the splintered anti-Fidesz forces have been in Hungary. The US Congress is a separate centre of power, and in a fair election the House of Representatives is likely to be back in Democratic hands in two years’ time.
Nevertheless, Trump and his coterie are already doing enormous damage, at home and abroad, in the attempt. “American conservatives have embraced Orbán for his anti-woke agenda and for winning election after election in the heart of Europe,” Scheppele told Geoghegan. “But what I worry about most is not the ideological affinity. Orbán is really no ideologue and neither is Trump… Ideology brings people in but in the end, both are transactional. In the heart of government, Orbán already has and Trump is quickly acting to consolidate power in very few hands.”
Project 2025 drew heavily on Orbán’s strategy, Scheppele added. “First you defund everything your opponents do. Then you purge the civil service of those who are not loyal to you. Then you threaten the media with economic sanctions so they fall in line. You pack the courts; you cow the parliament. All major actions of state are designed to cut off any form of accountability to anyone outside the tight inner circle. The point of all this is to shove public money into private pockets. Orbán is teaching all of those things and the Trump team are not dull pupils.”
Ironically, just as Orbán’s influence on the American right has become crystal clear, the popularity of his own party has plummeted. Politico’s poll of polls shows Fidesz’s support, 54 per cent at the last election, down to 37 per cent and the opposition Respect and Freedom Party — a more conventionally conservative newcomer also known as Tisza — rocketing to 41 per cent.
Fidesz’s current problems started with a paedophile scandal early last year that cost the country’s president and justice minister their jobs. “But the underlying discontents,” says Timothy Garton Ash, a distinguished historian of Central Europe, “are much deeper: all the accumulated dissatisfactions of fourteen years under one and the same government. Inflation last year was 18 per cent. People see the failings in public services and read about Orbán’s cronies getting fabulously rich.”
Hungary’s often-divided opposition is no doubt learning from the experience of successive defeats (and so are voters). The country’s next election, due next year, will be the big test of Orbán’s quest to impose one-party rule. •
