Part 1/2 Hungary

On election night in 2026, Péter Magyar stood in front of a crowd in Budapest and waited for the numbers to come in. When they did, they were not close. Sixteen years of Viktor Orbán’s rule ended with a record number of voters walking into polling stations and choosing to say “we’ve had enough”. Younger voters broke decisively against Fidesz and Orbán conceded.

It didn’t start out how many people think it did. Orbán began as a young anti-communist liberal, backed in part by a Soros Foundation scholarship, rising through a youth party that originally supported market reforms and European integration. Fidesz began in 1988 as an anti-communist liberal party for young people. Orbán became internationally known in 1989 when he called for free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. His first period as prime minister, beginning in 1998, was more conservative than liberal, but it wasn’t the full authoritarian project that later emerged. That deeper democratic hollowing accelerated after his return to power in 2010 with a two-thirds parliamentary majority.

What happened, happened in stages.

The Long Turn

1988: Fidesz is founded as an anti-communist, liberal youth party. Promoting market reform and European integration, and even restricts membership to people under 35. Orbán is one of its founders.

1989: Orbán becomes nationally known as a young dissident after publicly calling for free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. At this point, he is widely seen as part of the democratic future. Not a warning to start.

1990: He enters parliament as part of Hungary’s new democratic system. Fidesz is still broadly liberal at this stage.

1993: Fidesz begins its decisive ideological shift away from liberalism and toward a civic-national conservative identity. The future strongman project began with a reorientation of the party.

1998: Orbán becomes prime minister for the first time. His government still pursued Hungary’s EU membership. The later “illiberal state” was not fully built yet.

2002: He loses power. When Orbán returned in 2010, he came back determined not to be vulnerable in the same way twice.

The Authoritarian Timeline

2010: Orbán returns to office with a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority. That gives him the power to rewrite rules. By the end of the year, Hungary passes a sweeping new media law that draws sharp criticism in Europe because it expands state control over media oversight and opens the door to punishment for coverage deemed “unbalanced.”

2011: Orbán’s government adopts a new constitution, the Fundamental Law, without opposition participation. Armed with its two-thirds majority, his government also changed hundreds of laws, rewriting the constitutional frame and making the rest of the system answer to him.

2012: Hungary faces EU legal action over laws involving the judiciary, the central bank, and data protection. A forced-lower judicial retirement age pushes out many judges, and even when parts of that move are later struck down, the institutional disruption is already underway. Courts don’t need to be abolished to be weakened.

2013: Electoral rules and political conditions continue to shift in ways that help entrench Fidesz. From the outside, these years can look less dramatic, but later retrospectives describe this entire period as one of systematic change to the rules and institutions.

2014: Orbán wins again and keeps the power to keep reshaping the system. He says openly that he wants to build an “illiberal state.” By then, what many critics had already concluded becomes explicit. He is no longer merely governing conservatively but arguing against liberal democracy as the organizing principle of the state.

2015: During Europe’s migration crisis, Orbán hardens his political identity around nationalist border politics. This becomes a central way of power, to create a permanent emergency, then use that emergency to justify a harder state, a more fearful public, and a more obedient political culture. (Step 2 in the 7 Step Strategy that Authoritarians use to take over)

2016: One of Hungary’s biggest opposition newspapers, Népszabadság, is abruptly shut down. Human Rights Watch described it as Hungary’s biggest opposition daily and linked the closure to a larger environment of political pressure and shrinking press freedom. By this point, state media purges and pressure on independent outlets continued.

2017: Orbán’s government targets civil society more aggressively. A law requires NGOs receiving significant foreign funding to register and label themselves accordingly, while the so-called “Lex CEU” threatens Central European University, the institution founded by George Soros. Orbán, once helped by Soros funding, now builds power in part by turning Soros into a political villain.

2018: Orbán wins again. Open Society Foundations leaves Budapest, citing an increasingly repressive political and legal environment. CEU is effectively forced out. Dozens of pro-government outlets are folded into the Central European Press and Media Foundation, or KESMA, which the International Press Institute described as an immense pro-government media portfolio of approximately 500 outlets. Parliament also passes the “Stop Soros” package, which criminalizes some forms of aid to asylum seekers. His ecosystem control: media, universities, NGOs, migration law, all moving together.

2019: By now, the earlier changes have matured into a governing model. Independent media is thinner, civil society stays under pressure, and Orbán’s system no longer depends on one law per year. After enough capture, maintenance becomes easier than takeover. Reporters Without Borders described the level of media control by the government as “unprecedented in an EU member state.”

2020: The pandemic becomes an opening for one of Orbán’s most significant expansions of authority. Human Rights Watch warned that emergency legislation allowed rule by decree for an open-ended period and created harsh new penalties around so-called false or distorted information.

2021: Hungary passes its anti-LGBT “child protection” law, banning the “portrayal” or “promotion” of LGBT content to minors. Human Rights Watch describes it as part of the government’s broader scapegoating on the LGBT community.

2022: Orbán wins again, but the cost becomes harder to hide. The EU suspends approximately €6.3 billion in funding over rule-of-law concerns tied to corruption and judicial independence. Orbán’s model was concrete enough to trigger financial punishment from the European Union.

2023: The clash with Europe continues. Some funds are later unfrozen, but legal and political fights over Hungary’s democratic backsliding remain active.

2024: The structure still holds, but strain is visible. The longer an “illiberal” system lasts, the more it depends on people accepting it as normal, not just making dissent harder but making people feel tired enough to stop imagining reversal. By 2024, the public mood is clearly shifting. Magyar’s eventual victory was driven in part by economic stagnation, healthcare frustrations, inflation, and years of tension with the EU.

2025: Hungary deepens its anti-LGBT crackdown again, this time with a law banning Pride and similar public events. Human Rights Watch calls it a draconian law that outlaws public support for LGBT. Thousands protest in Budapest. Even after years of erosion, people are still willing to take to the streets when the line is crossed again.

2026: The breaking point. Orbán is ousted after 16 years in power. Voters turned out in extraordinarily high numbers, and after the final count, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party secured 141 of Hungary’s 199 parliamentary seats, giving it a two-thirds supermajority. Orbán’s Fidesz was reduced to 52 seats. Younger voters were especially decisive, with Fidesz performing disastrously among voters aged 18 to 29.

How Hungarians Broke Free

First, they made corruption personal.

Orbán’s system had long been criticized for cronyism, media capture, and rule-of-law erosion, but this corruption doesn’t always move people. More Hungarians began connecting the system to their own daily lives such as stagnant wages, strained hospitals, rising costs, neglected public services, and the sense that a small circle around power was doing very well while people were told to be patient. Magyar pledged an anti-corruption drive and economic revival after Hungary’s economy had been near stagnation for three years.

When someone’s grandfather waits eight months for a surgery that an Orbán ally’s family member gets in a week, corruption becomes personal. That’s what happened across Hungary.

Second, the opposition gave people drive.

People needed somewhere to put their frustration. Magyar’s Tisza party became the resistance because it looked viable. Authoritarian-style politics depends on making opposition feel useless and to believe that every alternative is just as corrupt and broken, so why bother. Once people believe there is a real alternative, fear begins to lose weaken.

Magyar is not a left-wing figure. He is center-right, a former Fidesz insider who turned against the system he once worked within. This was a broad democratic rejection of corruption, stagnation, media capture, and exhausted strongman rule.

Third, young voters changed what would be tolerated of the country.

Independent polls showed more than 60% of voters under 30 supporting Tisza, compared with only 15% supporting Fidesz. These were voters who had come of age entirely under Orbán. They had never known a different kind of politics, and they still chose a different kind of politics.

Younger voters are often described as unreliable or disengaged. But many are not apathetic. They just need politics that feels honest enough to trust, practical enough to mean something, and urgent enough to join.

Fourth, people kept showing up before election day.

Hungarians protested attacks on civil society, universities, media, and LGBTQ rights. When Hungary passed a 2025 law banning Pride and similar events, thousands gathered in Budapest to protest. It reminds people they are not alone. This tells the state that fear has limits.

Fifth, independent media and civil society survived long enough to make a difference.

Orbán’s media system was enormous. Reporters Without Borders described Hungary’s media market as heavily concentrated under the pro-government KESMA foundation, which brought together roughly 500 national and local media organizations. An estimated 80% of the country’s media landscape was under pro-government control.

Independent media didn’t disappear entirely. A captured information environment is dangerous, but it’s not the same thing as total silence. Every surviving outlet, journalist, local organizer, civic group, and truth-teller helped preserve a piece of democratic reality until it could become the foundation for something larger.

Sixth, voters treated turnout as power.

Authoritarian politics wants people to believe the system is rigged, voting is pointless, opposition is weak, and nothing will change. However, Hungary’s voters answered that with record turnout because voting can still become a mass act of refusal when enough people use it together.

A rigged carnival game is designed so you never win. But if every person in line walks away from the booth at the same time, the guy running the game doesn’t have a show anymore. Orbán’s system depended on participation, on people showing up to a game he had tilted. When they showed up and played against his tilt in overwhelming numbers, the tilt wasn’t enough.

What Hungary Teaches

It begins with legal language, regulatory boards, constitutional amendments, friendly media mergers, pressure on universities, smears against NGOs, manufactured moral panics, emergency powers, quiet fear, and public exhaustion. Over time, people begin adjusting to each new line crossed because each line is presented as temporary, necessary, patriotic, or protective. Gradually enough that many people keep telling themselves it’s an overreaction to call it what it is.

None of this made Orbán unbeatable. Even if he built a system to feel unbeatable. He spent years manipulating institutions, narrowing media space, politicizing identity, and making the opposition look futile. And still record turnout came. Younger voters broke away. A broad appetite for democratic repair emerged. And the man who spent years teaching Hungary to fear pluralism lost his power.

Hungary still has work to do.

The damage will not be easy to undo.

The new government is talking about constitutional reform, term limits, and restoring democratic norms, but rebuilding after institutional capture is not usually fast. Poland’s experience after its own democratic recovery in 2023 showed that institutional repair is measured in decades.

Still, the result matters because even a long-running illiberal project can be challenged, rejected, and reversed.

Democracies can be lost in paperwork, media capture, judicial weakening, and public numbness. Democracy is defended by telling the truth early, naming the dysfunction clearly, refusing normalization, and continuing to act before the damage feels irreversible.

Q&A: How Orbán Kept Winning

Hungary’s election raises a few obvious questions. How did Orbán stay in power for so long, why did voters keep backing him, and what finally changed?

Why did people keep voting for Orbán for so long?

Short answer: He gave voters a story about protection.

Orbán combined nationalism, cultural grievance, anti-immigrant politics, anti-LGBT messaging, economic benefits, patronage networks, and attacks on outside “enemies” like Brussels, George Soros, NGOs, universities, and independent media. Orbán’s messaging promoted hostility toward migrants and LGBTQ rights, distrust of the European Union, and conspiracy claims about George Soros.

The takeaway: Authoritarian politics often survives by convincing people that the leader is not attacking democracy. He is “defending the nation.”

How did he keep winning if the system was so damaged?

Short answer: The system was tilted, not abolished.

Orbán kept elections, but his government changed rules, expanded pro-government media, weakened institutional checks, and used state power in ways that benefited Fidesz. Human Rights Watch found that government-collected personal data was repurposed for Fidesz campaign messaging in 2022, contributing to an unequal electoral field.

The takeaway: Modern authoritarianism does not always cancel elections. Like this example, it sometimes keeps them while weakening the conditions that make elections meaningfully fair.

Was Hungary still a democracy under Orbán?

Short answer: It still had elections, but it was no longer a healthy liberal democracy.

Hungary still had opposition parties, courts, protests, and some independent media. But rule of law, media pluralism, judicial independence, civil society, and minority rights were weakened over time. Freedom House rates Hungary “Partly Free” and says Fidesz pushed through constitutional and legal changes that consolidated control over independent institutions.

The takeaway: Democracy can erode without formally disappearing.

How did Orbán go from pro-democracy reformer to authoritarian ruler?

Short answer: Gradually, then structurally.

Orbán began as an anti-communist liberal, but Fidesz shifted right in the 1990s. After losing power in 2002, Orbán returned determined not to be politically vulnerable again. In 2010, his two-thirds majority gave him the power to redesign the system around Fidesz. Oxford’s overview of EU democratic backsliding describes Hungary’s illiberal project as involving centralization of power and limits on judicial, media, and civil-society independence.

The takeaway: Democratic erosion usually comes from elected leaders who decide to change rules than keep competing under them.

Why was media capture so important?

Short answer: It controlled the political reality many voters lived in.

Orbán’s allies built a vast pro-government media ecosystem while independent outlets were pressured, bought, weakened, or marginalized. Reporters Without Borders says Hungary’s media market became heavily concentrated under the pro-government KESMA foundation, which brought together about 500 media organizations, and that Fidesz controlled about 80% of the country’s media.

The takeaway: Propaganda is powerful when it doesn’t really feel like propaganda.

Why did young voters turn so sharply against him?

Short answer: They judged their leader by their future, not his past.

Many young Hungarians grew up entirely under Orbán. Younger voters were concerned about corruption, housing, public services, poor prospects, and rising emigration, while Fidesz was backed by just 8% of voters ages 18 to 29 in one Median survey before the election.

The takeaway: Authoritarian systems hold older voters through nostalgia and promises of stability. Younger voters are more likely to ask whether the system offers mobility, freedom, and a livable future.

Why did people finally turn against him in 2026?

Short answer: The gap between propaganda and daily life became too wide.

Economic stagnation, healthcare frustration, inflation, corruption, strained public services, and Hungary’s isolation from the European Union made Orbán’s image as protector harder to sustain. Magyar’s victory triggered hopes for a reset in EU ties and the possible release of EU funds suspended over rule-of-law concerns.

The takeaway: The official story no longer matched their lived reality.

Why did voters choose Péter Magyar if he was a former Fidesz insider?

Short answer: He became a viable drive for change.

Magyar’s insider status made him complicated, but it also helped him reach disillusioned conservatives, former Fidesz supporters, and voters who wanted change without simply returning to the old opposition. Tisza was identified as center-right and says Magyar defeated Orbán in a landslide while pledging to restore democratic institutions and the rule of law.

The takeaway: Anti-authoritarian coalitions are often broad and imperfect. Democratic repair may require defectors, moderates, progressives, conservatives, organizers, journalists, and voters moving together sometimes for different reasons.

Does this mean Hungary is fixed now?

Short answer: No.

Winning an election removes a ruling party from power. It does not automatically repair captured courts, media structures, public institutions, corruption networks, or years of political distrust. Magyar’s two-thirds majority may make it possible to undo many Orbán-era policies, but institutional restoration still has to be carried out after the election.

The takeaway: Democratic recovery has 2 stages. Defeating the authoritarian party electorally, then rebuilding the institutions it damaged. The second stage is slower and harder.

What is the biggest lesson for Americans?

Short answer: Authoritarianism depends on us believing the outcome is already decided.

Orbán’s system used media capture, institutional pressure, fear politics, scapegoating, and exhaustion to make opposition feel pointless. Hungary’s election shows that inevitability is a political tool.

The takeaway: The antidote is early pattern recognition, independent media, turnout, youth engagement, civil society, broad coalitions, and refusal to normalize democratic erosion. Hungary’s election does not tell us to relax. It tells us not to surrender to inevitability.

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Next in This Series: Turkey, how a crisis became a permanent emergency.

Sources

2026 Hungarian parliamentary election

Magyar’s parliamentary majority in Hungary increases after final count

Hungary’s Orbán concedes after Magyar’s projected supermajority win

Peter Magyar wins Hungary election, unseating Viktor Orbán after 16 years

Hungary’s Magyar announces ministers after landslide election win

Viktor Orbán

Viktor Orbán | Biography, 2026 Election, Ideology, & Facts

Hungary: Controversial New Media Law Defended by Government

Hungary: Media Law Endangers Press Freedom

Hungary: Media Freedom Under Threat

Viktor Orbán’s Government and European Reaction

Hungary’s Biggest Oppositional Daily Shut Down

Hungary: Editor’s Sacking a Blow to Press Freedom

The Open Society Foundations in Hungary

Hungary dismantles media freedom and pluralism

Hungary’s Orban Uses Pandemic to Seize Unlimited Power

Hungary’s President Should Veto Anti-LGBT Law

Rule of law conditionality mechanism: Council decides to suspend €6.3 billion

Freezing EU funds: An effective tool to enforce the rule of law?

Hungary Bans LGBT Pride Events

Younger Hungarian voters spurn Orbán, some say they will leave if he is re-elected

Hungary | Reporters Without Borders

Hungary: New Government Needs to Restore Rule of Law

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This is where we are headed. Please take a moment to read and review this article on how Hungary fell into an authoritarian regime.

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On the morning of October 8, 2016, a Saturday, Márton Gergely was making French toast for his kids when his phone started buzzing. Colleagues from Népszabadság, Hungary’s oldest and most widely read newspaper, in print since the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule, were calling in a panic. No one had been warned an no memo had gone out but when reporters tried to log in to their systems that morning, everything was locked. The website went dark and decades of digital archives, vanished. The paper’s new owners, a media company run by a childhood friend of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, had shut the whole system down overnight.

Gergely, the deputy editor, later described the moment as the kind of thing you know is coming but can never quite prepare for.

The paper had been investigating Orbán’s inner circle: the central bank governor, the man known as Orbán’s “propaganda minister.” The closure wasn’t announced as censorship. It was framed as a business decision. The company said the paper was losing money.

Hungary stopped being a democracy while every outward feature of democracy (elections, a parliament, a constitution, a free press) stayed in place.

Right now, as you’re reading this, Hungarians are days away from an election that could end Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year hold on power. Every independent poll shows the opposition leading. A former insider named Péter Magyar, a man who once worked within Orbán’s system and then turned against it, is drawing enormous crowds across the country, including in rural areas that were once Fidesz strongholds. If Hungary holds a clean election on April 12, 2026, Orbán may actually lose.

Previously, we reviewed How Authoritarians Take Over. The 7 Steps.
Before continuing to read this article, give our previous one a read to help understand these steps in further detail and to help solidify the concept.

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Step 1: Win an election

Viktor Orbán won his first election fairly. In 2010, Hungarians were furious at the governing Socialist Party, which had presided over a financial crisis and a humiliating leaked tape in which the prime minister admitted lying to voters. Orbán’s party, Fidesz, won in a landslide. Not just a majority, but a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority. In Hungary’s system, two-thirds is the magic number, it essentially means you can rewrite the constitution.

Within a year, Orbán pushed through an entirely new constitution. Not amendments or reforms but a new foundational document, written and approved exclusively by his own party. It restructured the judiciary, the branch of government that’s supposed to check the other branches. It created new oversight bodies stacked with Fidesz loyalists. It redrew electoral districts so that Fidesz could win future supermajorities even without a supermajority of the vote.

In most democracies, a constitution is the thing that limits what the government can do. When that’s reconstructed and changed by those in power to favor their own voices over the voices of the people, there are no institution left that can say “you can’t do that,” because the institution that was supposed to say that just got rewritten.

Imagine a basketball game where one team gets to rewrite the rules at halftime. They don’t change the name of the sport and the court still looks the same. The referees are still there, technically, but now traveling isn’t a violation, the three-point line moved, and the refs work for the team that’s winning. The game continues but not in the same way. That’s basically what happened in Hungary.

Step 2: Manufacture a crisis

Every authoritarian needs a reason to expand power beyond what’s normal. The reason doesn’t have to be invented from nothing. Usually there’s a real situation that gets amplified and distorted until people accept things they’d never normally accept.

For Orbán, the gift was the 2015 European refugee crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people, many fleeing the Syrian civil war, were moving through Hungary on their way to Germany and Western Europe. It was a real situation that required a policy response. But Orbán turned it into something much larger, he declared it an existential threat. Not a humanitarian emergency to be managed, but an invasion to be repelled. He built a razor-wire fence on Hungary’s southern border and he launched a massive government advertising campaign, billboards across the country, warning Hungarians that migrants were coming to take their jobs, commit crimes, and destroy their way of life.

Most refugees didn’t want to stay there but Orbán treated it as though Budapest were under siege. And the crucial move was that he used the fear to justify new powers. He created new laws restricting asylum seekers that also, conveniently, restricted civil liberties more broadly. Organizations that helped refugees were targeted as threats to national security.

If your neighbor told you they needed to install cameras pointing at every house on the street, you would probably say no. But if they told you there had been a wave of break-ins and your family was in danger, you might agree to things you would never normally accept. That’s what a manufactured crisis does.

Step 3: Name a scapegoat

The refugee crisis gave Orbán his external scapegoat. But he needed an internal one too, someone to blame for the opposition to his response. He chose George Soros.

Yes. That Soros.

Soros, a Hungarian-born American billionaire, had funded pro-democracy organizations across Eastern Europe for decades through his Open Society Foundations. Orbán used Soros the way authoritarians always use a scapegoat, as the face of a conspiracy. The government spent tens of millions of euros on a propaganda campaign claiming that Soros was funding illegal immigration to destroy Hungary. “Stop Soros” became a political slogan, then a package of legislation, then a legal framework for investigating and punishing civil society organizations that received foreign funding.

The campaign had layers of bigotry running through it, antisemitic imagery barely veiled, but it also served a structural purpose. It allowed Orbán to redefine who was a legitimate participant in Hungarian political life. If you ran an NGO (a nongovernmental organization, meaning any independent group working on issues like election monitoring, press freedom, or human rights) you could be labeled a Soros agent. If you were a journalist publishing unflattering stories, you were part of the Soros network. The scapegoat redirected anger and drew a line between “real Hungarians” and everyone else, and it put Orbán in charge of deciding which side you were on.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. The same George Soros has become one of the most reliable villains in American right-wing media, accused of funding migrant caravans, bankrolling Black Lives Matter protests, installing progressive district attorneys, and orchestrating everything from election fraud to the No Kings movement. The rhetoric traveled directly, Orbán’s political network has deep ties to American conservative institutions, including the Heritage Foundation, and has hosted CPAC conferences in Budapest. The Soros strategy works the same way on both continents. It takes a person who funds organizations, then inflates that person into an all-purpose boogeyman so that any opposition, any protest, any inconvenient journalism can be dismissed as bought and paid for rather than engaged with on its merits.

Step 4: Expand executive power

With a manufactured crisis fueling public fear and a scapegoat absorbing public anger, Orbán had room to do what he’d been planning since 2010, concentrate power in his own hands until the rest of the system was decorative.

He packed the Constitutional Court, Hungary’s equivalent of a body that decides whether laws violate the constitution, with loyalists. He expanded the number of seats and filled them with Fidesz allies, then extended their terms from nine to twelve years to make sure they’d outlast any future change in government. He lowered the mandatory retirement age for judges, which forced out hundreds of experienced, independent jurists and let the government replace them with friendlier ones. When the European Court of Justice ruled that this violated EU law, Orbán reinstated the judges, but not to their original courts. He complied with the letter of the ruling while gutting its intent.

He fired civil servants across the government and replaced them with party members, blurring the line between the state and Fidesz until it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. He used his parliamentary supermajority to pass a law during COVID-19 that allowed him to rule by decree, meaning he could issue orders with the force of law without going through parliament. That law has been extended repeatedly, first for the pandemic, then for the war in Ukraine, and it remains in effect today.

None of this was a coup, there was no declaration of martial law. Every step was done through legislation with bills introduced, debated (briefly), and passed by a parliament his party controlled. The political scientist Kim Lane Scheppele called it a “Frankenstate,” stitched together from legal parts, technically alive, but something fundamentally different from what it was before.

Step 5: Attack the courts and the press

Orbán didn’t shut down independent media by passing a law banning free speech. That would be too obvious, and it would trigger international backlash. Instead, he used money.

Hungary’s government controls enormous advertising budgets, the kind of spending that keeps media companies going. Under Orbán, state advertising was redirected almost entirely to pro-government outlets. Independent outlets saw their revenue dry up. Then came the pressure on private advertisers: companies that bought ad space in critical publications found themselves facing regulatory scrutiny, tax audits, and difficulties getting government contracts.

Meanwhile, Orbán’s allies, wealthy businessmen who’d gotten rich on government contracts, went on a buying spree. They purchased television stations, newspapers, radio networks, and online outlets. Sometimes the purchases were followed by editorial shifts, as new management pushed critical journalists out and replaced them with loyal voices. Sometimes, as with Népszabadság, the purchase was followed by the outlet simply ceasing to exist.

In 2018, more than 470 pro-government outlets were merged into a single entity called the Central European Press and Media Foundation, or KESMA, cable news channels, radio stations, newspapers, websites, all under one entity. The government declared KESMA a matter of “strategic national importance,” which meant it was exempt from the country’s antitrust laws. No investigation or regulatory reviews. Nearly five hundred outlets, all aligned with the ruling party, operating as a coordinated propaganda outlet.

One entity controlled roughly 80% of Hungary’s news landscape. State advertising made up 86% of the revenue flowing to pro-government media. Independent outlets survived, but they were small, underfunded, and constantly under threat.

And Orbán could always say, truthfully, that Hungary still had a free press. Independent journalists still published, opposition voices still existed online and nobody was arrested for writing an article. The system didn’t need to ban dissent, it just had to make dissent expensive, exhausting, and invisible to the majority of the population who got their news from the outlets Orbán’s loyal friends controlled.

Step 6: Destroy internal accountability

Once you control the courts, the press, the constitution, and the civil service, the last thing left is the accountability system in place: the safety net inside the government that’s supposed to catch corruption, waste, and abuse.

Orbán’s government drove independent oversight organizations out of the country. NGOs that monitored elections or investigated corruption were targeted under the “Stop Soros“ laws. The police began conducting investigations into civil society groups, as a form of harassment in the way that the investigation is the punishment, regardless of whether charges are ever filed.

His childhood friend, Lőrinc Mészáros, went from being a small-town gas fitter to one of Hungary’s richest people, a transformation fueled almost entirely by government contracts. Between 2018 and 2020 alone, Mészáros’s companies won contracts worth roughly €1.67 billion, with the European Anti-Fraud Office finding evidence of collusion and inflated pricing. The Hungarian government declined to pursue the case.

Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index ranked Hungary last among all EU member states. Its score has dropped 14 points since 2012. The EU has frozen billions in funds over rule-of-law concerns, but Orbán has treated those freezes as political attacks rather than consequences of his own government’s behavior, and his captured media apparatus ensures that most Hungarians hear only his version of the story.

Step 7: Make it all feel normal

This is the step that makes Hungary different from a dictatorship, and in some ways more dangerous as a model. Orbán never needed to suspend elections or declare himself president for life. Elections continued and the opposition exists. People can still protest and their system of democracy remains standing.

Fidesz created fake political parties to split the opposition vote. Electoral districts were redrawn so that Fidesz could win a two-thirds supermajority with less than half the popular vote. In the 2022 election, Fidesz received 54% of the vote and won its fourth consecutive supermajority.

In a 2014 speech, Orbán announced that he was building an “illiberal state,” openly, proudly, using the word as a badge of honor. He cited China, Russia, and Turkey as models. And a significant portion of Hungarians went along with it, because their jobs were stable, the economy was growing (for those connected to the right networks), and the nightly news told them everything was fine.

That’s normalization. A slow, steady drift until what would have been unthinkable ten years ago is just... another day.

The bridge

The reason Hungary is the first country in this series after the introduction is because it’s the most familiar to what we are currently experiencing in the United States.

On January 24, 2025, the fifth day of Donald Trump’s second term, seventeen inspectors general were fired simultaneously. They received identical two-sentence emails citing “changing priorities.” Inspectors general are the independent watchdogs inside federal agencies, nonpartisan officials whose entire job is to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse of power. They are protected by law. The law requires the president to give Congress 30 days’ notice before firing one, along with a substantive rationale for the removal.

None of that happened, they received no notice.
Just emails, on a Friday night.

A federal judge, Ana C. Reyes, ruled in September 2025 that the firings violated federal law. She called it “obvious.” But she also declined to reinstate the inspectors general, reasoning that Trump would simply re-fire them after providing the required 30-day notice, making reinstatement meaningless. “They deserved better from their government,” she wrote. “They still do. Unfortunately, this Court cannot provide Plaintiffs more.”

To put plainly, a federal judge said the president obviously broke the law, then concluded she couldn’t do anything about it. The inspectors general whose offices, in 2023, saved more than $90 billion in taxpayer money were simply gone.

In Hungary, Orbán fired civil servants and replaced them with party loyalists. The strategy being used is identical. Remove the people whose job is to watch what you’re doing, and replace them with people who won’t.

By mid-2025, a Washington Post analysis of 160 lawsuits found that the Trump administration had defied court orders in roughly one out of every three cases brought against it. Not lost the cases, defied the orders. A federal judge would rule an action illegal, and the administration would continue doing it anyway, sometimes through delay, sometimes through what legal scholars have called “legalistic noncompliance,” using legal language and procedural arguments to mask defiance of a court’s instruction.

In just one federal district, New Jersey, ICE violated 56 court orders in a two-month span between December 2025 and February 2026. The Department of Justice called them “inadvertent.” Seventeen illegal transfers of detainees after judges ordered them to stay put. Twelve missed bond hearings. One person deported to Peru despite a court injunction specifically blocking the removal.

In Hungary, Orbán captured the courts so they’d rule in his favor. The American version is different (the courts are still ruling against the executive) but the effect is converging toward the same place, a system where court orders become suggestions and where the judiciary’s power to check the executive exists on paper but erodes in practice.

And the press? The Associated Press was banned from press pool events for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico in its reporting. NPR and PBS faced funding cuts and lawsuits. Independent outlets report being frozen out of briefings. The administration hasn’t built a KESMA. America’s media landscape is too large and decentralized for that but the system of delegitimizing independent journalism, starving it of access, and building an alternative information ecosystem aligned with the executive, that system is not different in kind from what Orbán did, it’s just different in degree.

Orbán took sixteen years. The United States version is compressing that timeline.

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What the people did, and what they’re doing now

For years, the consensus among scholars of Hungarian democracy was grim. Orbán had captured so many institutions so thoroughly that it seemed impossible to dislodge him through elections. Freedom House downgraded Hungary from “free” to “partly free” in 2019. The V-Dem Institute, which measures democratic health globally, classified it as an electoral autocracy. People who study this for a living, had essentially concluded that Orbán could not be removed at the ballot box because the ballot box was no longer fair.

And then came Péter Magyar.

Magyar is not a lifelong opposition figure. He’s a former Fidesz insider, a man who was married to a former Orbán cabinet minister, who worked within the system, who understood it from the inside. In 2024, he broke with the regime and launched the Tisza Party (the name means “Respect and Freedom”). What made Magyar different from previous opposition leaders was that he understood Orbán’s strategy and how it worked, where the pressure points were and how the propaganda within his system operates. He could explain it to voters in language that didn’t sound like it was coming from a Budapest liberal. He barnstormed the Hungarian countryside, going to small towns and rural districts where the opposition had never bothered to campaign.

Independent polls now show Tisza leading Fidesz by substantial margins, 48% to 39% in some surveys. Among voters under 30, more than 60% support Magyar. At campaign rallies, Magyar is relaxed, confident, drawing enthusiastic crowds. Orbán, by contrast, is stiff and defensive, appearing only before pre-selected audiences, and even then he has to deal with hecklers.

But (and this is the part that is very important for this series) the election is still not a sure thing. Because Orbán has spent sixteen years rigging the outcome. The electoral districts are gerrymandered in Fidesz’s favor. The Hungarian diaspora, which reliably supports Fidesz, gets to vote in a way that amplifies their influence. Pro-government pollsters produce numbers showing Fidesz in the lead, creating an alternative reality for viewers of pro-Fidesz media. Russia’s foreign intelligence service was recently caught proposing a false-flag assassination attempt against Orbán, staging an attack on their own ally to generate a sympathy vote.

A documentary released on March 26 detailed alleged Fidesz voter intimidation campaigns in poor rural communities. And Orbán’s campaign messaging has nothing to do with the state of Hungary’s economy, its crumbling healthcare system, or its education crisis. It’s about Ukraine, it’s about war and fear. The billboards in Budapest show opposition leader Magyar next to Ukrainian President Zelensky with the caption: “They are dangerous.”

Step 2. Manufacture a crisis. Step 3. Name a scapegoat.

Sixteen years in, and their tactics are the same.

What Hungary Teaches Us

The most important thing about Hungary is what it tells you about timing. Every step is designed to be small enough that reasonable people can disagree about whether it’s really that bad.

Rewriting the constitution? We won a supermajority, that’s what voters wanted. Packing the courts? Every government appoints judges.
Buying media outlets? That’s just the free market.
Firing oversight officials? The president has the authority.

Each step, in isolation, has a plausible defense. It only becomes obvious when you step back to see all the steps together. And by then, the people who could have stopped it (the judges, the journalists, the independent investigators, the civil society organizations) have been weakened, bought out, or removed.

The Hungarian writer and former Népszabadság journalist Márton Gergely put it this way when reflecting on the closure of his newspaper, many of the takeovers and closures felt less like ideological crusades than like a sport, oligarchs earning hunting trophies each time a critical outlet was put out of business. The casualness. That’s what normalization looks like.

In the United States, as of the end of 2025, 358 lawsuits had been filed against the Trump administration’s executive actions. The Supreme Court ruled in the administration’s favor in 20 out of 24 emergency docket cases that year. The Office of Management and Budget called inspectors general “corrupt” and “partisan” and cut funding to the council that coordinates their work, taking whistleblower websites offline. The administration got the Supreme Court to rule that federal district courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions, meaning that even when a judge finds an executive action illegal, the ruling only protects the specific plaintiffs in that case, not everyone else affected by the same policy.

Meanwhile, in Hungary, after sixteen years of institutional capture, nearly five hundred media outlets are aligned with the ruling party, the constitution has been rewritten to favor the incumbent, electoral districts have been gerrymandered, courts have been packed, civil society has been harassed, and foreign intelligence services have intervened. A man who used to work inside that circle is pulling bigger crowds than the authoritarian design.

The April 12 election won’t settle everything. Even if Magyar wins, fifteen years of media capture can’t be reversed overnight. Orbán’s allies still control most of the country’s information infrastructure and loyalists sit in courthouses, regulatory agencies, and public institutions built to last beyond any single election. Poland’s experience after its own democratic recovery in 2023 has shown that institutional repair is measured in decades, not election cycles.

Hungary’s vote on April 12 is a test of whether sixteen years of institutional capture can be undone through tactics designed to withstand it, whether a constrained system can produce a free outcome.

It’s not a test Hungary faces alone.

Next in This Series: Turkey, how a crisis became a permanent emergency.

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Coda Story. “Pro-Orban media moguls who destroyed Hungary’s media now targeting European outlets.” codastory.com

Center for Strategic and International Studies. “What Is at Stake in Hungary’s Election?” csis.org

The Bulwark. “Orbán Will Lose Hungary’s Election in Two Weeks, If It’s Clean.” thebulwark.com

Center for American Progress. “Hungary’s Democratic Backsliding Threatens the Trans-Atlantic Security Order.” americanprogress.org

Illiberalism.org. “Dismantling Democracy: The Orbánization of Hungary.” illiberalism.org

German Marshall Fund. “The EU Should Not Turn a Blind Eye to Hungary’s Media Capture.” gmfus.org

Democratic Erosion Consortium. “Viktor Orbán’s Hungary: A Democracy Backsliding.” democratic-erosion.org

Democratic Erosion Consortium. “How to Erode a Democracy: Hungary’s Illiberal Turn Under Orbán.” democratic-erosion.org

Princeton Political Review. “Viktor Orbán’s Hungary: Corruption, Repression, and Democratic Backsliding.” princetonpoliticalreview.org

International Press Institute. “The rise of KESMA: How Orbán’s allies bought up Hungary’s media.” ipi.media

Institute of Geoeconomics. “Chapter 1 Hungary: Media Control and Disinformation.” instituteofgeoeconomics.org

Diggit Magazine. “Hybrid Media Power: Viktor Orbán’s Digital and Traditional Media Domination in the Digital Age.” diggitmagazine.com

Wikipedia. “Corruption in Hungary.” en.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia. “2026 Hungarian parliamentary election.” en.wikipedia.org

NPR. “Trump uses mass firing to remove inspectors general at a series of agencies.” npr.org

Federal News Network. “Judge finds Trump unlawfully fired agency IGs, but won’t reinstate them.” federalnewsnetwork.com

CNN. “Federal judge refuses to reinstate eight former inspectors general fired by Trump administration.” cnn.com

The Washington Post. “Trump accused of defying about a third of major court orders since taking office.” washingtonpost.com

Protect Democracy. “The Trump administration’s conflict with the courts, explained.” protectdemocracy.org

State of Surveillance. “DOJ Admits ICE Violated 56 Court Orders in Two Months.” stateofsurveillance.org

Wikipedia. “Legal affairs of the second Trump presidency.” en.wikipedia.org

Government Executive. “Trump fires another inspector general, raising fears about oversight independence.” govexec.com

SCOTUSblog. “Looking back at 2025: the Supreme Court and the Trump administration.” scotusblog.com

Friedrich Naumann Foundation. “Hungary’s election campaign.” freiheit.org

Euronews. “Hungary’s upcoming election and the effects of the generation gap.” euronews.com

TVP World. “How Orbán used EU money to buy media Magyar cannot reclaim.” tvpworld.com

CEPA. “Europe’s Democratic Backsliding Is Spreading Like Malware.” cepa.org

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How Authoritarians Take Over

The steps have been documented and repeatable proven by history, it doesn’t make a difference if the country speaks Spanish, Turkish or Hungarian or if the leader wears a military uniform or a red hat.

The order of operations that scholars have documented across dozens of countries over the past century recognize the sequence.

Researchers like Timothy Snyder (who wrote On Tyranny) and Ruth Ben-Ghiat (who wrote Strongmen) have tracked these steps across continents and decades.

The seven steps:

1. Win an election

2. Manufacture a crisis

3. Name a scapegoat

4. Expand executive power

5. Attack the courts and the press

6. Destroy internal accountability

7. Make it all feel normal

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It Starts With an Election

When most people picture a collapsing democracy, they picture war and a military general on TV announcing the government has been dissolved. Or they picture a coup like a sudden, violent seizure of power.

That’s not how it usually happens, anymore.

The thing about modern authoritarianism, a word that means a system where power gets concentrated in one leader or one group, and everyone else loses the ability to push back is that it almost always begins with a legitimate election. The leader wins a vote, sometimes even by a lot and that win becomes the foundation for everything that follows because the leader can always point back to it and say: the people chose me.

This is important to understand. The election is the first step. It’s what gives the public’s belief that a government has the right to govern. Authoritarian leaders work very hard to maintain the appearance of legitimacy even as they dismantle the systems.

The Seven Steps, Explained

We will keep coming back to these throughout the series, it’s worth taking a moment to familiarize yourself with what each step looks like.

Step 1: Win an election. This is the entry point. The leader comes to power through a democratic process.

Step 2: Manufacture or exaggerate a crisis. Every authoritarian leader needs a reason to demand more power than the office normally allows. The reason is almost always a crisis. Sometimes the crisis is real but exaggerated. Sometimes it’s invented entirely. (And the crisis becomes the justification for Step 4.)

If your neighbor told you they needed to install cameras pointing at every house on the street, you would probably say no. But if they told you there had been a wave of break-ins and your family was in danger, you might agree to things you would never normally accept. This is exactly how manufactured crisis works in politics. Fear changes what people are willing to tolerate.

Step 3: Name a scapegoat. Every story needs a villain. A scapegoat is a group of people who get blamed for the country’s problems, whether or not they actually caused them. In history, this has been immigrants, ethnic minorities, journalists, academics, LGBTQ+ communities, or political opponents.

The scapegoat serves two purposes :

1. It gives the public someone to be angry at

2. It gives the leader a target that justifies the use of force.

Step 4: Expand executive power. This is where structure of government starts to make way. Executive power means the authority held by the president or prime minister, the person at the top. In a healthy democracy, that power is limited by the courts and the legislature. In this step, Step 4, the leader starts finding ways around those limits. Emergency declarations, executive orders, reinterpreting existing laws to mean things they were never intended to mean. The word for these limits on power is checks and balances the idea that no single branch of government can act alone. Step 4 is where checks and balances start to weaken.

Step 5: Attack the courts and the press. Courts and journalists are the two institutions that can hold a leader accountable for the public. Courts can block illegal actions and the press can tell the public what’s happening. This is why they get attacked so heavily. The leader doesn’t usually shut them down outright, that would be too obvious. Instead, the attacks look like calling judges biased, calling reporters enemies, flooding the public with so much conflicting information that people stop trusting anyone. Their intention is to make the public stop believing in them.

Step 6: Destroy internal accountability. Inspectors general, the independent watchdogs inside federal agencies whose entire job is to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse, get fired or replaced. Career civil servants, the nonpartisan professionals who keep the government running regardless of which party is in power, get purged. Advisory boards get cut. The effect is that the executive branch no longer has anyone inside it whose job is to say you can’t do that. The leader’s own government stops being able to check the leader.

Step 7: Make it all feel normal. This is the most important step that most people overlook because you only see it if you’re paying attention. By the time a country reaches Step 7, all of the previous steps have happened slowly and gradually enough that each one felt like a reasonable response to circumstances. The crisis felt real and the scapegoat felt dangerous. The courts felt like they were overreaching and the press felt untrustworthy. None of it felt alarming at first, it felt like normal politics, it just felt like the news. Step 7 is when the public stops being alarmed because they got used to it and shrugged it off.

This is the structure that researchers use to track how democracies collapse.
Every country we cover in this series followed some version of these seven steps.
You now have the framework for understanding.
The rest of this series is about filling it with history and showing you where the United States sits in this sequence right now.

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“But America Is Different”

America has the oldest continuous constitutional democracy in the world. We have an independent judiciary, a free press, a Bill of Rights, and institutional depth that most of the countries in this series never had when their democracies started falling apart.

While all of that’s true, it’s also what Hungarians said.

Hungary was a member of the European Union, one of the world’s most developed democratic alliances, with constitutional protections, an independent judiciary, and a free press when Viktor Orbán started hollowing it out from the inside. Turkey had one of the most robust secular democracies in the Muslim world before Erdoğan turned a failed coup into a permanent emergency. The institutional strength argument is comforting, but it gets history backwards.

Democracies die when the people inside those institutions decide they don’t care enough and when the public watches each individual violation and thinks, well, that’s bad, but it’s not that bad.
They die because the sequence moves one step at a time, and each step feels small enough to tolerate, until you look up and realize you are at Step 6.

We don’t have to guess what Step 5 looks like in the United States. American judges are telling us now.

A federal judge in Minnesota, appointed by George W. Bush, not a liberal activist, compiled a list of 96 court orders that ICE violated in a single month and wrote that the agency had likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States, the second-highest-ranking law enforcement official in the country, said the administration is “at war” with the federal courts. In Oregon, a federal judge found a pattern of warrantless arrests where agents drew guns on people during civil administrative proceedings. These are non-criminal hearings. Agents detained a grandfather with a valid work permit for three weeks and created warrants after making arrests. The court described it as arrest first, justify later.

That’s Step 5. If you think America is immune, you’re not paying attention to what American judges are telling you.

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Where This Series Is Going

We chose six countries for this series.
Each one shows different ways that these seven steps have shown up and how they might look different.

We’re not going to lay out all six here in one article. We will let them speak for themselves as the series unfolds. Here’s what’s coming first, and why:

Hungary is the closest parallel to where we are right now. Orbán didn’t overthrow the government, he renovated it. Imagine someone broke into your house, but instead of stealing anything, they changed all the locks. The walls and furniture all look the same but you can’t get into any of the rooms anymore. That’s what Orbán did to Hungarian democracy.

The country still holds elections, the parliament still meets, the courts still exist.

None of it works the way it used to.

Freedom House, an independent organization that has been rating the health of democracies worldwide since 1941, downgraded Hungary from “Free” to “Partly Free.” Orbán did it all without a single coup, a single tank in the street, or a moment dramatic enough for the world to say that was the day democracy ended. If you want to understand how a democracy dies while everyone is still insisting it is fine, Hungary is the case study.

Turkey is the crisis model. Erdoğan used a failed coup, one where part of the military tried to overthrow him in 2016 to purge tens of thousands of judges, teachers, and journalists overnight. Tens of thousands. And emergency powers were declared… they never expired. If you’re watching fentanyl get classified as a weapon of mass destruction, or immigration framed as an invasion requiring wartime authority, this is the strategy you’re watching. Take a crisis, real or inflated, and use it to claim powers that were never meant to be permanent.

The Philippines is where the law becomes optional. Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency in 2016 and launched a “war on drugs” that killed thousands of people, many of them without arrest, trial, or any evidence. Law enforcement operated outside legal constraints with no accountability, cheered on by a public that had been taught the targets deserved it. If you’ve been following what’s happening in Minnesota, agents violating 96 court orders, drawing weapons during civil arrests, an ICE attorney begging a judge to hold her in contempt because she couldn’t get her own agency to follow the law, this one is going to feel uncomfortably familiar.

The rest of the series will cover three more countries. Each one will land differently.

Throughout this series, we will be identifying specific, recurring steps and strategies from the 1-7 authoritarian sequence.

By the final post, you’ll have a complete catalog and better understanding of every move this administration makes.

Think about the last time something happened in the news that made you uneasy. Maybe it was a policy announcement or a statement from an official that felt wrong but you couldn’t put your finger on why.

You probably said something like everything is crazy right now and kept scrolling.

That feeling… the sense that something is off but you don’t have the words for it, is a feature of the system. Authoritarian moves are designed to overwhelm us. They create so much noise and political drama that no single action stands out enough to become the thing people organize around.

Naming can change that: When you look at a headline and say that is Step #3, manufacturing a crisis to justify emergency powers, you have taken the power away from the tactic. You’re making it visible. And visible tactics are tactics you can counter.

That is what this series is truly about: Counter-intelligence.

This sequence has been broken a handful of times

Portugal lived under authoritarian rule for forty years, nearly half a century under a dictator.

It ended in a single day. On April 25, 1974, a group of military officers who had turned against the regime launched a largely bloodless revolution. Citizens poured into the streets and put carnations, the flower, in the barrels of soldiers’ rifles. It became known as the Carnation Revolution.

The dictatorship collapsed because enough people inside the system decided it was over.

South Korea’s democracy movement won against a military government. Millions of citizens organized, protested, and sustained pressure until the regime could no longer hold.

The people who ran the authoritarian sequence in those countries were not amateurs. Some had secret police, state media and every structural advantage. But, they still lost.

They lost because the strategy depends on the public not recognizing what’s happening until it is too late.

Every move in the sequence relies on the last one feeling normal. The moment a population sees it clearly and names it, the entire structure becomes less stable. Authoritarian systems look invincible right up until the moment they’re not.

Every post will connect directly to what’s happening in the United States right now. The ICE raids. The federal worker purges. The court order violations. The SNAP cuts.

One more thing. Strong borders are a legitimate policy position. Enforcing immigration law is a legitimate policy position. Drawing weapons on farmworkers during civil proceedings and ignoring 96 court orders in a single month is not a policy position. Look for what’s happening and practice naming it. Most Americans believe in both border security and due process. Both enforcing the law and following it. The position that law enforcement should obey the law should be the most uncontroversial stance imaginable. The fact that it’s become controversial is a sign in itself.

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Next Article

Hungary: How a Democracy Died While Still Holding Elections.

We’ll go over how Orbán did it. Step by step.
And we will show you where those same steps are being taken right now.

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We are here with you to study authoritarianism and fascism in public, and in real time. We want to help people see what we see and to understand why we believe we are already in the fascist regime.

We don’t want strongman politics in the United States. We don’t want a country where power is personal, where loyalty stands above law, or where dissent is treated like disloyalty. If that sounds like a strong position, consider what it means that it needs to be stated out loud.

This publication has a simple job: pay attention.

When we say authoritarianism, we mean a system that concentrates power, weakens accountability, and asks the public to accept less freedom, less dissent, and fewer democratic guardrails.

When we say fascism, we mean the harder edge of that system like mythic nationalism, scapegoating, enforced hierarchy, intimidation, and the idea that domination is a form of national renewal.

Here you will find clear explanations of authoritarian and fascist behaviors, historical context when current events start to rhyme, analysis of propaganda and democratic erosion, and warnings when a line is being crossed.

This is an educational publication.

We are not neutral between democracy and authoritarianism and we are not interested in pretending that naming dangerous behavior is somehow more irresponsible than ignoring it.

If a line is being crossed, we will say so. If a pattern is forming, we will trace it. If a warning light is flashing, we will not wait for permission to mention it. That is what No Kings National is for.