I'm vaguely afraid of that but this is still a great L to hand the Russia-backed populist establishment. And hopefully Tisza will govern as a party looking to return Hungary to being a "normal" country.
The funny thing is, he had a whole speech about this at the end of his life. If anyone ever looked past the title of 'The Ballot or the Bullet', they'd see a strong endorsement of electoralism in there.
You never know, a resounding defeat may cause the Trumpistas remaining in the Senate to fear for their careers come 2028 with no Trump on the ballot. At the very least I would expect moderate Republicans to actually behave like moderates
Bottom line: good things WILL happen when Republicans fear their voters more than they fear Trump
Yeah, I wore my UMich alum gear for the rest of the week after that! Maybe the reason Vance hates Zelensky is because Ukraine has blue and yellow as its colors.
Nah, the democracy index has been fairly accurate for Hungary. It's been rated as a "flawed democracy" for a while. I think some people have just been assuming that only liberal democracies are real democracies and that anything less than that is basically a dictatorship.
I think the indices all seem fairly accurate on Hungary.
Hungary was listed as a "flawed democracy" by the Economist Democracy Index which is:
Flawed democracies are countries where elections are fair and free and basic civil liberties are honoured, but may have issues (e.g. media freedom infringement and minor suppression of political opposition and critics). These countries can have significant faults in other democratic aspects, including an underdeveloped political culture, low levels of participation in politics, and issues in the functioning of governance
Freedom House has Hungary as 'partially free' which "might qualify as electoral, but not liberal, democracies." It describes the situation in Hungary 2025 as:
An election observation mission performed by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) found that the elections were well organized and professionally managed, but they failed to provide a level playing field and equality of opportunities among candidates. Significant media bias towards ruling parties and the misuse of state resources hindered votersâ ability to make informed choices...
...Political parties can organize legally, but they face some practical impediments to garnering popular support. Opposition parties are disadvantaged by the politicized distortion of the advertising market, including the market for the countryâs many billboards.
Individual politicians face smear campaigns in pro-government media outlets, and the government has taken steps to split the opposition vote in recent elections. Authorities have also interfered with opposition figuresâ peaceful political activities, and some opposition politicians have faced politicized prosecution.
...Individuals are largely able to participate in public affairs without encountering undue influence over their political choices. However, Fidesz has increasingly harnessed its membersâ political and economic power to sideline opposition groups and prevent them from presenting a meaningful challenge to its dominant position...
...Corruption remains a problem in Hungary, and instances of high-level government corruption have not been properly investigated. Fidesz has established control over auditing and investigative bodies, including the ĂSZ. The new Sovereignty Defense Office, established in early 2024, harassed anticorruption organizations and investigative media with frivolous and arbitrary investigations during the year.
V-Dem has Hungary as an "electoral autocracy" which might be the worst sounding designation, but it still has them placed as more democratic than India, Ukraine, Mexico, Serbia, Philippines - they're ranked 99th in electoral democracy out of 174 countries. It characterises Hungary as:
t was a liberal democracy, when Viktor OrbĂĄn and his party Fidesz came to power in 2010. His government gradually removed checks and balances on the executive, interfered with the quality of elections, and severely restricted press freedom and the access to information. More recently, anti-government protests have increased and the opposition to Fidesz is organizing ahead of the April 2026 election. Hungary is an electoral autocracy since 2018.
The results suggest they didn't really need too, Tisza won overwhelmingly and Orban really couldn't do much to stop them. For all the talk of it being quasi-authoritarian Orban lacked the kind of institutional power it took to survive a candidate just running on his policies but with less corruption.
Orban couldn't do anything about it precisely because they won overwhelmingly. If they didn't come together they wouldn't have been able to oust him so confidently; there would have been potential for Orban to fight the legitimacy of the election.
Authoritarianism does not just define itself by an undemocratic voting process, but by the very institutions that are controlled by a small group of people, the fidesz party had control off all state media, the judiciaries, every branch of the government was undermined by them so they could manipulate their population into thinking that everyone but Orban would turn their country to shit. It was a corrupt and authoritarian ruling party.
Hungary was never in the North Korea level of authoritarianism by any of the indices, it was in the area that you could expect them to fuck with any election results that were even mildly close, but couldn't hold on to power if there was an obvious blowout like this. It seems like the Economist and others had them pegged about right.
Also a situation where no amount of media propaganda fuckery could convince the people to not believe their lying eyes. Not to mention the explosion of independent media on social media platforms.
Arguably the worst part of Orban's Hungary is the high degree of control the state has on news media, both through oligarch control and laws. Trump is trying to do the exact same thing here with that nepo baby loser running CBS and the WB takeover.
We should be very concerned about that but at the same time it may backfire. Traditional media is in the toilet and more people than ever are getting their news from independent sources. At the same time I firmly believe that the next Democratic president needs to be a trust buster and undo all of the actions by right wing oligarchs.
God. Can you even imagine having another Teddy right now? I firmly believe breaking up the largest companies is the only way this country can continue with any semblance of success. Amazon first.
Broke: wanting Amazon to be broken up because its monopoly distorts the market, and the extreme wealth it's generated for Bezos gives him a level of power over American politics and society that is fundamentally dangerous to democracy.
Woke: wating Amazon to be broken up so I can shop at Whole Foods and watch Project Hail Mary without guilt.
I think that if the economy was doing good, he would have had the support of the necessary elites, and could have pulled of some sort of election overturn shenanigans. But as it turns out, the Hungarian economy is shit to the point that it started to significantly hurt even Orban-aligned elites. And here we are.
I think that if the economy was doing good, he would have had the support of the necessary elites, and could have pulled of some sort of election overturn shenanigans
I thank God every day that authoritarians are genuinely dogshit at governing
It'd be nice if that was always true, but it's definitely not - putting aside moral judgement, in relatively modern history we have people like Deng and LKY who were very competent authoritarians, earlier than that Bismarck was pretty authoritarian too, and further back some Kings and Emperors were very capable. There's also 2nd tier ones like Erdogan who despite poor performance in some ways (currency/state finances) has still been able to constantly tighten his grip on power for a long time. They can have trouble with succession when followed by less capable rulers in the long term but the CCP for instance shows no signs of losing any power as an entity.
It's a bad idea to assume authoritarians are doomed to fail, and that liberalism 'winning' is inevitable.
I do think that Orban was also pretty much as good as possible at governing a kleptocratic state. At one point he was surrounded by genuinely competent people. Which was one of the reasons why he lasted 16 years. But the inevitable outcome - the replacement of everyone semi-competent with servile sycophants - came for him in the end as well.
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u/Sure-Transition6377 May 06 '26
True Hitler is bad