MAGA is obsessed with Viktor Orban. Liberals should be too

By Marc Champion

Why are Donald Trump and MAGA America so fascinated by Viktor Orban, the prime minister of a small, landlocked central European nation that many of them likely couldn’t find on a map? Because, as he said in 2022 when he addressed a US Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas, Hungary’s leader just keeps “winning and winning and winning.”

Orban has created a model MAGA country. In a speech to CPAC’s only European franchise in Budapest on Thursday, he offered himself up as living proof that conservatives can survive in an “ocean” of liberal pretense, to “make Europe great again!” Others due to speak included US Republicans such as Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, Congressmen Andy Harris of Maryland and Keith Self of Texas, as well as former presidential hopefuls Vivek Ramaswamy and Rick Santorum.

After a recent visit to Hungary’s capital, still elegant and redolent of the days when it ran a small empire, I think liberals have even more to learn.

Hungary’s leader wants to change the world in his image. That’s not a metaphor or hyperbole. You don’t have to like him or his goals, but don’t discount the 60-year-old’s voracious ambition, political talent and sheer chutzpah. Hungary’s experience under Orban offers at least two takeaways for liberals: First, build a united opposition and don’t wait to fight back. Second, focus that fight tightly around the rule of law and democratic institutions. Mix it up with the culture wars and you will play into populists’ hands.

Orban’s a lot smarter than his clownish UK counterparts. He doesn’t want to leave the European Union, which would only make his country poorer and him less influential, but to “occupy” it. He wants to stoke a revolution of like-minded populists across the bloc that would capture EU institutions, including the European Parliament, which opinion polls suggest will have an expanded far-right contingent after elections this summer.

He’s also openly rooting for a Trump victory in November and makes no secret of his preference for the political systems of countries such as Singapore, Turkey, India or Russia, over so-called liberal democracies. “At the beginning of the year we were alone, by the end of the year we will be the majority in the Western world,” Orban told supporters in a March address to mark Hungary’s heroic, but ultimately failed, 1848 revolt against the Hapsburg Empire. Everyone will be welcome in his new world of nationalisms, Orban said — except for traitors who worked with the EU institutions in Brussels (in his eyes, a new incarnation of the Hapsburgs), and those who want to open the floodgates to migrants, or “hand our children over to unhinged gender activists.”

You know you’re in Orban’s new order from the moment you get off a plane. Ads promoting Hungary as “family friendly” line the walls of the jet bridges. The borders are proudly resistant to (non-European) refugees and migrants. The government has forced out academically free universities, or simply starved them of funding. Meanwhile, the prime minister’s chief ideologue, Balazs Orban (no relation), took charge of a private academy called the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and supersized it, endowing it with $1 billion and an overtly Orbanist agenda.

He can do that, because Orban’s friends and loyalists now control much of the economy, including advertising and media, where they bought up 500 outlets and bundled them into a single government-friendly entity. And in the deepest of ironies, the whole project has been funded with the help of EU aid that at times accounted for close to 5% of gross domestic product.

Driving into the city, billboards show Orban’s main political opponents daubed with dollar signs as if it were graffiti, to portray them as the unpatriotic, paid lackeys of America. Previously, the same billboards had attacked Ursula Van der Leyen, president of the European Commission. Before her it was George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist whom Orban has sold to his voters as a Bond villain. Keeping voters mobilized against enemies, real and imagined, has been critical to Orban’s success.

The gay US ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, is also on the hit list. In a remarkable speech last month, Pressman warned against Orban’s backsliding on democracy under cover of “rhetorical shell games that tell you to look anywhere other than where the actual ball is hidden.” That was typical of Soviet bloc countries during the Cold War, and in Russia still, he said. “But this is not something we expect from allies.”

Other populists can’t copy Orban’s playbook wholesale, because it has depended on a unique weakness in Hungary’s electoral system that easily grants a supermajority of parliamentary seats. That gave Orban a free hand to legislate and change the constitution from the day he took office. He used the power to create a de-facto one-party state — he has called it “illiberal democracy” — without having to jail opponents, as in Turkey, or kill them, as in Russia.

What matters, according to Agoston Samuel Mraz, chief executive of the government-friendly Nezopont Intezet think tank and polling agency, is whether Hungary is still a democracy, 10 years into this illiberal project. “Clearly it is, because the most important question is whether the opposition has a possibility to win the election.” It does, Mraz said, it’s just that Orban’s opposition is divided and not very good. Maybe.

Technically, Mraz is right. Most Hungarians can watch TV commentators criticizing the government if they try. They could also vote for opposition parties if they wanted to. It’s just that the field is by now so sharply tilted in favor of Orban in terms of money, media coverage and gerrymandered electoral districting that it will take a minor miracle to unseat him. (The next elections are scheduled for 2026).

There are signs of fatigue with Orban’s Fidesz party, which for the first time since 2010 is overseeing a declining economy that isn’t easily explained away, with growth negative and inflation at 17% last year. The open question is whether it’s too late to unravel Orbanism, because a lot of damage has been done.

Hungary's growth slip graph.

Take the rule of law, a sine qua non for any genuine democracy. Orban brought the prosecutor’s office, constitutional court and ombudsman under his control early, before moving on to the Supreme Court and making a new position, filled by the wife of a Fidesz MEP, to take charge of all judicial appointments and training budgets for the lower courts.

Tamas Matusik was among those elected in 2018 to the judiciary's existing governing body, the National Council of Judges, who first took a stand for its independence. “We were hunted down,” he says. Some members resigned under pressure. Others were subjected to public smear campaigns. Matusik personally was the object of more than 400 negative TV and press items in a single month, as he went to seek European support. “I told colleagues there, this can happen to you.” Some laughed at the idea, says Matusik, who eventually headed the council and whose term has since ended. “They aren’t laughing anymore.”

In the end, it worked and Orban backed down. His appointee resigned and, under intense pressure from the EU, which withheld more than €10 billion ($10.7 billion) of funding to press for the reversal, powers were restored to the council to run the lower court system. That secured release of the EU funds, but Hungary's highest courts remain captured.

“The original sin of our judiciary was that no one stood up and protested when it all began,” Matusik says.

That’s one key Orban lesson for liberals: To push back early where it really counts. Another is to define much more tightly where that is, focusing exclusively on what’s required for membership in the club of Western democracies, including the EU and NATO, and is therefore open to legitimate international pressure. It’s vital to resist the overreach that’s helped Orban sell his shell game to voters by eliding issues of democracy with identity politics. After all, if illiberalism just means having a democracy stripped of “woke” diktat, what’s not to like for a conservative?

The EU, for example, is still withholding €20 billion of funding for Hungary, with the bulk of criteria for the money’s release focused on measures to prevent fraud and corruption. But when he attacks these conditions, the prime minister invariably talks about demands to repeal a law banning the exposure of minors to material that refers to homosexuality, and a requirement for asylum seekers only to apply from outside the country. His complaint resonates.

I disagree with these laws, as does the European Commission, but many Hungarians don’t. The EU’s attempt to police the area has proved a political gift to Orban, diverting attention from his erosion of the rule of law, and from the losses to Hungary – including tens of billions of euros in EU aid – that are being caused by corruption among his business allies. It also raises reasonable questions about whether policies on LGBTQ+ rights and immigration should be decided in Brussels or national parliaments.

Orban and his like succeed in part because there’s enough overreach in Brussels, Western college campuses and elsewhere that he can use it to paint “liberal” democracy as a woke authoritarianism that’s being thrust down Hungarian throats, concealing his destruction of independent institutions. So let’s stop talking about liberal and illiberal democracy altogether. It’s just democracy, it’s under severe threat in Hungary, and that’s nothing to admire or emulate.