Hungary Didn't Stop Looking Like a Democracy
That's what made Viktor Orbán’s rise so dangerous. The institutions remained and looked democratic yet the balance of power changed underneath them.
This is where we are headed. Please take a moment to read and review this article on how Hungary fell into an authoritarian regime.
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.
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.
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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In 2022, Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts said the quiet part: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.”
He also said this: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
https://cloudpublica.org/article/why-it-works
Here’s a taco to eat!