Orbán Viktor reign ended after being prime minister since 2010. Quite interestingly, this happened after US government policy switched under Trump in 2025 from funding opposition media against Orbán to be pro-Orbán. I’m not sure exactly why this happened but it feels remarkable to me.
I don’t think that’s the cause. I think there are two main causes:
Incumbent governments around the world have had a super tough time since around 2023. The chart below only goes up to 2024, but I think it has held up: the party in power has consistently been doing really poorly across the world.
Separately, I think that some of Trump’s aggressive foreign policy actions (such as tariffs against allies) have made right-wing parties do worse since he became president. Most famously, this led to the Liberal Party unexpectedly holding onto power in Canada, despite looking like it was going to lose in a landslide before Trump took power.
We used to be told that Orbán concentrated power in a way that Hungary isn’t a real democracy anymore. That was the justification for the US to meddle in it’s politics to fight Orbán.
Even when stopping the meddling and reversing course didn’t cause Orbán administration to fall, I think this illustrates both the emptiness of the propaganda claims of Hungary not being a democracy and the relative lack of power of the meddling attempts.
How much are you familiar with the specific details about elections in Hungary?
Orbán changed the election law so that it was only possible to replace him if:
a majority of the population could coordinate on the one person to replace him
while the state media provided zero space for the opposition, and regularly broadcasted all kinds of lies
the votes of rural voters had 2x as much weight as the votes from big cities
In other words, you had to coordinate rural voters to agree on one person to replace Orbán, while the state media are doing their best to disrupt this process.
Technically possible, but way more difficult than usual. And this is happening in a country that historically had a multiple parties system—unlike USA, where people who strongly want to get rid of a specific person have the obvious solution of voting for the other party, and don’t have to further coordinate on which one.
You seem to be satisfied with “still technically a democracy”, as if it’s a yes-or-no question. While many people in Hungary were probably like “hey, it used to be much easier in the past to vote against someone”.
It is a simplification, but that’s how it works in practice (under certain assumptions).
The votes are counted both per district, and per entire country. The original (pre-Orbán) system was designed in a way that simultaneously achieved these two things:
people could vote for a representative from their own district
the proportions of the political parties in parliament reflected how many votes in the entire country they received
Both of these properties are desirable (in my opinion), but in the most simple implementations, they allow gerrymandering. As a simple example, if each district can nominate 1 representative, and there happen to be exactly 60% fans of Party A, and 40% fans of Party B in each district… the result of a naive implementation is that in each district a representative of A wins, and the parliament is 100% Party A.
The pre-Orbán system had a way to fix this. Yes, each district would elect a representative of the Party A. But then, the votes would be counted for the entire country, and if the result is that 60% of people want A, and 40% want B, additional representatives would be selected (country-wide, now ignoring the individual districts) so that the resulting parliament would contain 60% of representatives from Party A, and 40% of representatives from Party B. (This contains some simplifications.)
...is my impression from reading about the system online; I am not Hungarian.
When Orbán won for the first time, he had a majority sufficient enough to tweak the law in a way that it no longer does this. Instead of balancing the outcomes from the district, it actively unbalances them. What specifically that means… that depends on… many things, like the relative sizes of the districts and the proportions of people voting for various parties in them. In effect, under usual circumstances, the new system amplifies the strongest party, especially the party strongest in the smallest-population districts, which are usually the rural ones.
Historically, that meant amplifying Orbán’s party. Now the system turned against him, but only because the entire opposition could agree on one specific person to replace him. (And if now Magyar decides to become Orbán 2.0, the system will keep working in his favor, too. I hope he will revert Orbán’s changes instead, but that’s up to him.)
Maybe I am wrong. Check the algorithm how exactly the votes from districts are transformed to the seats in the parliament, both the pre-Orbán version and the Orbán’s version.
Democracy isn’t perfect in any country and I don’t claim it’s perfect in Hungary. The fact that you can have peaceful regime change through an election is what democracy is about.
In Germany we have a discussion about banning the AFD because they would presumably create too much regime change. I don’t think that automatically means that Germany isn’t a democracy anymore.
We also have state media in Germany who openly justified lying to viewers by saying “we considered the information we received to be deep background, and thus it was okay to lie about it”. The were delusional enough to think they could get away with that while lying about a Rezo who’s a major Youtuber in Germany. After doing an investigation they did apologize for the lying but did not think it was necessary to apologize for saying that it was okay to lie to their readers.
While many people in Hungary were probably like “hey, it used to be much easier in the past to vote against someone”.
My criticism is more about the US/EU stance regarding Hungary than the stance of Hungarians.
The claim is that he was not allowed to appear on state television, the one channel that is funded by the state. There are other private TV channels, with much higher viewership, where he could appear. And even the state TV channel didn’t fully ban him, there was a big debate between the main candidates of the 2024 European Parliament election on state TV which significantly contributed to Magyar’s rise.
Yes, the state media was highly biased, which is bad, and the government party used their governmental power to help their political campaign in a number of other very unfair ways, which would be unacceptable in most Western democracies.
But to the best of my knowledge, the votes were always fairly counted in every election, there were never any censorship laws (except some rule on LGBTQ topics) and freedom of assembly was almost always respected (except unsuccessfully trying to ban Pride).
I think Western media has been consistently overstating how authoritarian Hungary was, and I think the fact that Magyar managed to win is significant evidence for that.
Ah I see. I think the analogous thing would be if Harris but not Trump could appear on PBS. Which I think would be quite bad. But maybe not so bad that it would tempt me into calling the US “not a democracy”.
It was quite hard for RFK Jr. as opposition to the two-party system to appear on TV despite polling decently at a time. Does that also put the US in “not a democracy” territory? I would better see that as a sign that you have some bad TV networks.
Sorry but the analogous situation is clearly if Biden had banned Trump from appearing on TV. Further, the reason it was hard for RFK Jr. to get on TV was financial decisions made by TV channels, rather than political decisions made by the federal government.
In general, the population seemed to feel that he become too soft on immigration. I don’t expect that they’ll be any happier under the new administration, but no politician survives a failure to satisfy the primary concern of his core supporters.
Orbán Viktor reign ended after being prime minister since 2010. Quite interestingly, this happened after US government policy switched under Trump in 2025 from funding opposition media against Orbán to be pro-Orbán.
I’m not sure exactly why this happened but it feels remarkable to me.
I don’t think that’s the cause. I think there are two main causes:
Incumbent governments around the world have had a super tough time since around 2023. The chart below only goes up to 2024, but I think it has held up: the party in power has consistently been doing really poorly across the world.
Separately, I think that some of Trump’s aggressive foreign policy actions (such as tariffs against allies) have made right-wing parties do worse since he became president. Most famously, this led to the Liberal Party unexpectedly holding onto power in Canada, despite looking like it was going to lose in a landslide before Trump took power.
We used to be told that Orbán concentrated power in a way that Hungary isn’t a real democracy anymore. That was the justification for the US to meddle in it’s politics to fight Orbán.
Even when stopping the meddling and reversing course didn’t cause Orbán administration to fall, I think this illustrates both the emptiness of the propaganda claims of Hungary not being a democracy and the relative lack of power of the meddling attempts.
How much are you familiar with the specific details about elections in Hungary?
Orbán changed the election law so that it was only possible to replace him if:
a majority of the population could coordinate on the one person to replace him
while the state media provided zero space for the opposition, and regularly broadcasted all kinds of lies
the votes of rural voters had 2x as much weight as the votes from big cities
In other words, you had to coordinate rural voters to agree on one person to replace Orbán, while the state media are doing their best to disrupt this process.
Technically possible, but way more difficult than usual. And this is happening in a country that historically had a multiple parties system—unlike USA, where people who strongly want to get rid of a specific person have the obvious solution of voting for the other party, and don’t have to further coordinate on which one.
You seem to be satisfied with “still technically a democracy”, as if it’s a yes-or-no question. While many people in Hungary were probably like “hey, it used to be much easier in the past to vote against someone”.
“the votes of rural voters had 2x as much weight as the votes from big cities”
I haven’t heard of this and seems pretty clearly false from what I know. (I’m from Hungary.) What is the source for this?
It is a simplification, but that’s how it works in practice (under certain assumptions).
The votes are counted both per district, and per entire country. The original (pre-Orbán) system was designed in a way that simultaneously achieved these two things:
people could vote for a representative from their own district
the proportions of the political parties in parliament reflected how many votes in the entire country they received
Both of these properties are desirable (in my opinion), but in the most simple implementations, they allow gerrymandering. As a simple example, if each district can nominate 1 representative, and there happen to be exactly 60% fans of Party A, and 40% fans of Party B in each district… the result of a naive implementation is that in each district a representative of A wins, and the parliament is 100% Party A.
The pre-Orbán system had a way to fix this. Yes, each district would elect a representative of the Party A. But then, the votes would be counted for the entire country, and if the result is that 60% of people want A, and 40% want B, additional representatives would be selected (country-wide, now ignoring the individual districts) so that the resulting parliament would contain 60% of representatives from Party A, and 40% of representatives from Party B. (This contains some simplifications.)
...is my impression from reading about the system online; I am not Hungarian.
When Orbán won for the first time, he had a majority sufficient enough to tweak the law in a way that it no longer does this. Instead of balancing the outcomes from the district, it actively unbalances them. What specifically that means… that depends on… many things, like the relative sizes of the districts and the proportions of people voting for various parties in them. In effect, under usual circumstances, the new system amplifies the strongest party, especially the party strongest in the smallest-population districts, which are usually the rural ones.
Historically, that meant amplifying Orbán’s party. Now the system turned against him, but only because the entire opposition could agree on one specific person to replace him. (And if now Magyar decides to become Orbán 2.0, the system will keep working in his favor, too. I hope he will revert Orbán’s changes instead, but that’s up to him.)
Maybe I am wrong. Check the algorithm how exactly the votes from districts are transformed to the seats in the parliament, both the pre-Orbán version and the Orbán’s version.
Democracy isn’t perfect in any country and I don’t claim it’s perfect in Hungary. The fact that you can have peaceful regime change through an election is what democracy is about.
In Germany we have a discussion about banning the AFD because they would presumably create too much regime change. I don’t think that automatically means that Germany isn’t a democracy anymore.
We also have state media in Germany who openly justified lying to viewers by saying “we considered the information we received to be deep background, and thus it was okay to lie about it”. The were delusional enough to think they could get away with that while lying about a Rezo who’s a major Youtuber in Germany. After doing an investigation they did apologize for the lying but did not think it was necessary to apologize for saying that it was okay to lie to their readers.
My criticism is more about the US/EU stance regarding Hungary than the stance of Hungarians.
I dunno man, not letting your opposition appear on TV is pretty far into “not a democracy” territory.
The claim is that he was not allowed to appear on state television, the one channel that is funded by the state. There are other private TV channels, with much higher viewership, where he could appear. And even the state TV channel didn’t fully ban him, there was a big debate between the main candidates of the 2024 European Parliament election on state TV which significantly contributed to Magyar’s rise.
Yes, the state media was highly biased, which is bad, and the government party used their governmental power to help their political campaign in a number of other very unfair ways, which would be unacceptable in most Western democracies.
But to the best of my knowledge, the votes were always fairly counted in every election, there were never any censorship laws (except some rule on LGBTQ topics) and freedom of assembly was almost always respected (except unsuccessfully trying to ban Pride).
I think Western media has been consistently overstating how authoritarian Hungary was, and I think the fact that Magyar managed to win is significant evidence for that.
Ah I see. I think the analogous thing would be if Harris but not Trump could appear on PBS. Which I think would be quite bad. But maybe not so bad that it would tempt me into calling the US “not a democracy”.
It was quite hard for RFK Jr. as opposition to the two-party system to appear on TV despite polling decently at a time. Does that also put the US in “not a democracy” territory? I would better see that as a sign that you have some bad TV networks.
Sorry but the analogous situation is clearly if Biden had banned Trump from appearing on TV. Further, the reason it was hard for RFK Jr. to get on TV was financial decisions made by TV channels, rather than political decisions made by the federal government.
In general, the population seemed to feel that he become too soft on immigration. I don’t expect that they’ll be any happier under the new administration, but no politician survives a failure to satisfy the primary concern of his core supporters.
What makes you believe that the population thought the became soft on immigration?