Air Date: 4-24-2026

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. Today we explore how Viktor Orban spent 16 years transforming Hungary into a blueprint for 21st century autocracy, how that blueprint traveled directly to the United States, and what Hungary's stunning defeat of Orban can teach Americans about fighting back against authoritarianism. For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes in about 95 minutes today includes Radio Atlantic, The Majority Report, Last Week Tonight, DW News, Stay Tuned with Preet, Takes by Jamel Bowie, and The Dean Obadiah Show. Then in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more in three sections. Section A, Origins, Section B, Tactics, and Section C, International. But first, a reminder to check out our new show, Solved, on the Best of the Left YouTube channel. We're really proud of the show we're making and think you'll get real value out of it. Plus, you checking it out will help us find new viewers on YouTube, so thanks in advance for all of your views, likes, subscribes, and comments.

That's all on the Best of Luck YouTube channel linked in the show notes. And now, on to the show.

Back overseas in a major defeat for President Trump's closest ally in Europe. Hungarian voters ousted longtime Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who was also close to Russia's Vladimir Putin. I was on the streets of Budapest. I was in the middle of the mass. I'm sure that you saw the pictures that thousands of Hungarians were dancing and celebrating and crying on the streets, hugging each other. which itself was a really really interesting experience because the Hungarian society is quite closed in a sense that it's really hard to see people to dance and to hug each other and it happened I was 11 years old when the system change happened in 1990 and I still remember that the adults were really happy but it was like uncomparable on the streets of Budapest on Sunday night because I was walking with my microphone, talking to people, and I got so many hugs from people who I had never met.

It was really something. Everybody was crying, and it was a really, really one-of-a-lifetime kind of experience.

So you're just walking around the streets and people are just like dancing and hugging and crying?

Yes, that's correct. It was a festival feeling. There were children and dogs and elderly people. So yeah, it was like a really big happy festival. Even the future government members themselves were dancing while they were announcing their winning. There is this viral video of your health minister dancing, and it's totally out of contact for us. We just see him sort of dancing across the stage. Yeah, but basically he was reacting, I think, for the vibe that he was seeing from the thousands of people in front of him. But at the same time, he is a dance king, right? So our future health minister appears to have these very good moves.

One day, 16 plus years ago, Hungary was just a democracy and Veronica's life was pretty much like any journalist working in a free society.

Then it was very similar, like the American journalists experience, like when we ask questions, the leaders of the authorities or the politicians or the hospital directors answered. I did have all the important phone numbers in my phone as a political reporter, and I haven't got any problems to get into a press conference or asking questions and getting answers for it. And that started to stop after 2010. That was the year Orban came into power for a second time. He had blamed the media for his previous loss. So when he was elected as prime minister again in 2010, this would be the start of his 16-year reign, he was determined to do things differently. First, the ministers started to stop answering their phones and even answering any questions by email. So generally speaking, access to information became extremely hard. And the second thing was that they started to bolt up media companies.

They bought up media companies, people with a lot of money who were very pro-Orban. It was not like a red phone that they put some loyalist in every independent newsrooms and they called on the red phone and said that you should always write nice things about Orban. But they basically bolt up the whole company. And actually that was what happened with me. Veronica worked for 18 years at Index, which was one of the biggest independent news sites in Hungary. She was then its deputy editor-in-chief. A new management came and the new management started to restructure our independent operation. And they fired my boss, the editor-in-chief. Last month he publicly raised the alarm over political interference in the outlet's operations.

of 2020. More than 80 journalists from the country's most read news site called Index have resigned from their jobs. It was a very, very sad moment. It was the easiest and the hardest decision of my life. Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who once branded it a fake news factory. One of his allies... Now, years later, Veronica saw Orban's defeat on Sunday as a lesson. As much as Orban wanted to control the narrative. He wanted to own the media, wanted to reshape the information provided about reality itself. He just couldn't do it anymore. The people had had enough. Enough inflation, enough corruption, enough division, enough distorted reality. And I think it is a valuable lesson for every political leader, every autocrat, that propaganda and democracy are incompatible. You can have one or the other, but never the both. It does seem like a beacon of hope for liberal democracies around the world that are worried about tipping into illiberal democracies.

Does it feel that way to you?

I believe so that it is a crucial moment for other similar populists or autocrats because even 16 years of ruling can be demolished in a day.

It's a very good message for the other populists that people will raise their voices, especially new generation will raise their voices if they don't like what they see. it seems that hungarians started to feel that they need to raise their voices they need to step up for themselves on a democratic way casting their votes and sending out the autocrats from the country so i think the biggest lesson is if you slightly not agreeing to the politics or it affecting your life badly, don't stay silent. Be critical and step up for yourself. I guess what I'm asking is, I mean, if someone was to ask me, like, how did we get Trump? I would say it's a combination of anemic growth after the financial crisis and the sort of like maybe the sort of the offshoring of industry and the hollowing out of cities. And then I would also say co-mingling with a long history of racism in this country.

And and those two things sort of like came together and it ignited on some level. And that got us Trump. I mean, you know, he didn't win with all the votes, but but, you know, he had enough at that point. Was there other factors in Hungary? Yeah, no, I don't think there's, I don't think that those worldwide, I don't think there's one single explanation for the rise of global fascism. I think, you know, to tell that story of economic decline and failure of institutions globally, you'd have to explain the Sweden Democrats' rise, the rise of the Swedish fascist party, one of the first or second most popular party in Sweden, by saying Sweden's economy failed or nothing like that happened in Sweden. So it's not the global. There isn't one single global explanation. Hungary, Hungary was, you know, was was a struggling Eastern European country that was in the EU and was rising slowly.

So it wasn't like there was, yes, the financial crisis hit. But I don't think that was that was a significant. Just general frustrations that Orban figured out. Here's how we exploit that. And what cultural it was cultural politics and scapegoating. It was the attack on the attack on woke. It was it was latent anti-Semitism. It was it was telling people it was true. when I got there in 29, 2010, it was all about like the loss of greater Hungary. You know, so we talk about the Nazis rising with the Great Depression, but you've got to remember that it was also the Treaty of Versailles. And the Treaty of Versailles in the 2010 election was front and center. It was trianon. It was the loss of greater Hungary. It was those very classic fascist themes. It was anti-Semitism and Trianon and the loss of greater Hungary.

Those were the themes. And so it was, we're going to make Hungary great again. That's literally what he ran on. So it was literally the mythic past of fascism that we were once great. And then immigration, then he vilified, this was well before the Syrian war, but he vilified immigrants, He talked about white Christians being the most persecuted group on earth. He pioneered the cultural politics that is Trumpism. But isn't it also true that these ideas only have a salience with a certain population if there is a failure economically? And that's what history tells us. I would posit that, you know, well, we could we could go back and forth on that. But just where those issues become more politically powerful, it seems to me like in 2010 and after the Great Recession, there was a failure to adequately address class politics in general. So then you have a more simulated politics of keeping immigrants out, even though Hungary never really had an immigration issue prior to this, you get a convenient scapegoat.

And Orban can go in there and rail against globalists, of course, with the anti-Semitic undertones, but blame a gesture towards an economic system of kind of global cooperation or cooperation with other European countries as the failure, as opposed to, you know, say, broader capitalist forces being the failure. Yeah, I mean, I am, Emma, I'm very sympathetic to that explanation in the United States. I would say it's some, I do think the financial crisis played a role in Hungary, without a doubt. But the EU was helping Hungary. So, you know, the globalist structures were, Hungary relies on EU money. And this isn't just 2010. This is four straight elections that Orban won with this politics, all the while while other European countries were economically rising and leaving Hungary way behind. And generally, I think Sweden is a good example to look at. I think, you know, Swedish fascism rises because of sort of purely cultural vilification and racism.

So Hungary, I don't think one can turn away from the fact that Hungary has a deeply socially conservative Christian base that's rooted in the old right and horty. Remember, Orban is bringing back the structures of Hungarian far-right nationalism very explicitly. So I don't think, you know, I'm not sure how much, you know, Hungary had a rich base for anti-Semitism. Hungary had a rich base for this cultural politics. And remember, Peter Meigar is right wing and conservative. Right. He's not he's not like some type of progressive. I was just about to say, like he replaced a sort of a fascist with like a just less fascist guy on some level. he's a social conservative. And so you have to, you know, you have to, and he ran completely on corruption on saying, I'm dropping all the anti-LGBTQ stuff, dropping all the Islamophobia and just saying, look at what that was covering up for. And so, you know, I think that we have to accept that on some level, there is a percentage of the population, at least in the West, I mean, probably everywhere, that is like just really open to scapegoating segments of the population.

OK, when did Bannon so Bannon sees this and this is also the era in the years that follow before Trump runs is the era that Breitbart, uh which bannon um was a partner of with breitbart goes international and uh they start like trying to like they're adopting in many respects there's sort of like a symbiotic relationship going about both ways um with uh i think breitbart opened up in europe and then you know all around the world in those like five years after uh you know from like 2010 maybe to 15 or something like that. And Bannon brings back these ideas. Is that right? Well, I think that Orban ran, if you look back at the 2010 campaign and you look at the world's reaction, which was horror, people were like, wow, this is like really explicitly fascist and anti-Semitic. And now you look back at that campaign and you're like, wow, that's just Trumpism. So, you know, attacking Soros going after private businesses for essentially DEI, pro-LGBTQ policies like DeSantis did with Disney. But Hungary became, Hungary, this inconsequential, small, poor European country, becomes the kind of global center for the global fascist project.

They used taxpayer money at the Danube Institute and government-funded think tanks to bring in conservatives, Rod Dreher, journalists, right-wing, far-right intellectuals. He was the crunchy – what was he, the crunchy conservative at one point, that guy, Rod Dreher?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he moved to Budapest as a fellow. So they were like Tucker Carlson. Everyone's visiting. And they're using government money to support this global network. And they're exporting Bannon's, they're exporting Orban's techniques. So what we're living through in the United States, and it's national humiliation for us, because Hungary is not a country you want to emulate, destroying the country using scapegoating and, you know, and targeting, destroying universities, destroying all the great institutions, using anti-wokeism as an excuse, and then pocketing profits while everyone is chortling over the suffering of the scapegoats and the cultural elites. So this was the buying of the media. So 80% of the Hungarian media is owned by Orban's allies. The government sort of forced that. This government pressure campaign on the media that we're seeing in the United States. Larry Ellison buying the media. That's all the Orban's tactics.

And obviously the attack on universities.

Part of the way he's won over the Hungarian public is through his control of the media. After returning to power, his government created a new agency to impose heavy fines for coverage that it considered unbalanced or offensive, as well as founding a new state media organisation called MTVA, overseeing all public media across TV, radio and the internet. Listen to one anonymous employee there explain just how much editorial control Orbán has. Every single thing connected to domestic politics is restricted.

You can't write anything bad about the government.

For example, if something is politically sensitive, I get instructions.

In some cases, I have the whole ready-made article, so I don't need to do anything, no editing, just Ctrl-C, copy and paste, the whole article, really.

It's unimaginable, to be honest. Yeah, those conditions clearly aren't ideal for a news outlet. There is a reason they typically don't give out the Pulitzer for excellence in control V. A study of one public TV nightly news show found that over six months there wasn't a single instance of governing party politicians appearing on screen in a negative light. Literally zero seconds of negative coverage, which just should not be possible. Politicians attract negative coverage about everything they do, whether it's about their offensive fashion faux pas or their court-ordered liability for sexual abuse. to pick two equivalent examples. And Orbán's reach goes well beyond state media, as his allies brought up tons of private independent outlets and then centralised many of them under a single foundation. According to the investigative journalism outlet Adlazzo, since 2010, allies of the Prime Minister have been buying up numerous Hungarian media outlets.

Men like former Hollywood producer Andy Viner and old-school friend Lawrence Meserosh are among a group of 14 Orbán allies who've collectively bought 11 radio stations, 20 television channels, and close to 500 online and print organisations. Wow. A far-right leader's friends and allies just buying up all the media outlets in the country and turning them into conservative sycophants. Can you imagine that? I sure can't. That's definitely not something I've had recurring nightmares about for the past month. And the result of all this has been Orban's party currently controls roughly 80% of the media market. And this level of influence over laws, courts, elections, and the media has allowed Orban to reshape Hungary virtually unchecked. On the international level, that's meant being a constant thorn in the EU side, especially when it comes to dealing with Russia. Orban's consistently had the friendliest ties to the Kremlin in the European Union.

In fact, he's long weaponized Hungary's veto power at the EU to block Russia-related sanctions, tie up financial aid to Ukraine, and repeatedly stall urgent EU decisions. And it says something that even a decade ago, this is how the then-president of the European Commission greeted Orban at a summit. The dictator's coming.

It's pretty good. It's pretty good. And while I do not condone violence, there are a few scenarios where I think it's fine to slap something. When you're trying to revive them, when you are Cher and you really need Nick Cage to snap out of it, and of course, whenever you have the chance to hit an authoritarian in the face. Meanwhile, domestically, Orban's reshaped Hungary into what's basically a theme park of reactionary talking points. For instance, he's railed against Europe becoming a mixed race society and opposes allowing asylum seekers into Hungary, despite EU and international laws. During the migrant and refugee crisis a decade ago, Hungary was accused of unlawful detention and violence against asylum seekers. And he made a big show back then of being openly hostile toward them, even going so far as to build an electrified border fence, which inevitably got this rave review from Tucker Carlson.

Hungary began building the fence in June of 2015. By September, it was done. Well, they're serious about the border, though. It's not a high-tech border wall. It's a double fence with a road in the middle. But the difference is they're willing to protect it. They're not kidding. It's their border. They control it because they're a country. It's also really pretty. Pretty? Look, there are three things you can rely on in this life. Death, taxes, and if you build a fence to keep out immigrants, Tucker Carlson is going to want to fuck it. Although, if he really does want to kiss some electrified barbed wire, who am I to stop him? Love is love. But even as migration to Europe has declined, Orbán has continued to fear monger about how, if it weren't for him, Hungary might be forced to accept millions of refugees, who he has falsely characterised as disease-ridden threats to public health, extremists planning terrorist acts, and agents of a plot to replace native Europeans with foreigners.

All while reaching for a now familiar scapegoat suggesting George Soros was masterminding a nefarious plan to overrun Hungary with refugees, and posting billboards and full-page media ads with the caption, Don't let Soros have the last laugh. And it wasn't just billboards. Orbán's government also passed a law officially called Stop Soros that made it illegal to help asylum seekers even just with their paperwork, and led a campaign to shut down the Hungarian university that Soros founded. Though what is a little strange about Orbán's anti-Soros vendetta is that back in 1989, he actually received a Soros-funded scholarship to study at Oxford University, where I presume he majored in irony. But immigrants at Soros aren't Orbán's only punching bags. His government's also gone after Hungary's LGBTQ community, something that he bragged about at CPAC. To sum up, the mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our kids alone.

Full stop, end of discussion. We decided we don't need more genders, we need more rangers.

Less drag queens and more Chuck Norris. What? That doesn't make any sense. The number of genders has nothing to do with the number of rangers, and the number of drag queens has nothing to do with the number of Chuck Norrises, especially because the most Chuck Norrises you can have is one. And that number went down to zero last week. And if this is how you are finding that out, surprise!

But it's not just rhetoric. Orbán's government officially redefined family, which meant an effective ban on adoption by same-sex couples, and banned trans people from changing their gender on their IDs. In 2021, Hungary even passed a law banning depicting or promoting LGBT plus content in schools and the media. And if that sounds at all familiar to you, it may be because just nine months after that, Florida's Ron DeSantis signed his version of it, focused on classroom instruction, the so-called don't-say-gay law. But perhaps the policy that sums up Orbán's obsessions the best, from Christian conservatism to panic over migrants, is his relentless focus on Hungary's low birth rate. He's tried to increase it by introducing incentives like tax exemptions and interest-free loans of about $30,000 for parents, which then get cancelled if they have three children. And that's a pretty good deal, but does make giving kids the talk a little more complicated.

Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much, but also get a sick, low-interest loan from the Hungarian government, that's how babies are made. Orbán's framed the need for Hungarians to procreate as an existential crisis, because to hear him tell it in this ad that his government posted, the alternative is for the country to be overrun by migrants.

[Viktor Orbán speaking Hungarian]

Okay. Obviously that's yet more great replacement fearmongering. But as for "you can make fish soup from fish, but you can't make fish from fish soup" — is that folk wisdom or is that just how soup works? I'm just saying if your nana pointed at a bowl of soup and said you can't make fish out of that, you'd be looking at retirement home brochures that afternoon. Also for what it's worth, that metaphor cuts both ways because I've found with fish soup, as with countries, when you add more ingredients, it tends to taste better.

Otherwise, what you have is hot fish water. But Orbán is serious about this. He spent about 5% of Hungary's GDP on programmes incentivising families to have kids, but it hasn't worked. Hungary's fertility rate recently dipped to the lowest in a decade and their population is still shrinking. And that might be because people just don't feel optimistic about raising kids in Orbán's Hungary, a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as bad, or where even the Conservative Heritage Foundation has put his government at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity. And that is the thing about Viktor Orban. For all the fear-mongering he's done, all the fences he's built, and all the laws he's passed to protect Hungary from the threat of migrants, gays and George Soros, he's fundamentally failed when it comes to the basics of good governance.

Funding for school and hospitals there has gotten so dire, he had to sign an executive order to ensure medical facilities were stocked with toilet paper. Although, to hear his health secretary tell it, Any complaints that people had about that were completely unreasonable.

In an operation as big as the Hungarian hospital system, which is three million square meters and has tens of thousands of people visiting every day, I consider it a mathematical impossibility that there should be toilet paper in all hospital bathrooms at all times. To this day, I maintain that this is a mathematical impossibility.

I've heard some bad talking points in the past, But it's mathematically impossible for our hospitals to have toilet paper is right up there. I'm really only surprised that he didn't go on to suggest hospitals just hang a sign in every bathroom reminding people that using their socks is always an option. And it's not a great sign for Orban that some of his heaviest-handed tactics now do seem to be backfiring.

Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz, he says that Mogyar's victory shows right-wing populism suffered a heavy defeat in Hungary. Is that the right way to look at it? Yes, I think this is the right way to see it. Actually, the Hungarian government of Prime Minister Orban has been a vanguard of autocratization and illiberal politics, both in the European Union, but lately also at transatlantic stage. And now the 16 years of illiberal rule was put to an end by a landslide election victory that we can also categorize as a sort of democratic revolution on the part of the Hungarian society. I mean, that's quite a strong statement to lay out there, that this is a democratic revolution. You know, Peter Magyar used to be part of Viktor Orban's Fidesz party. So I'm wondering how much of a break in political tradition does he really represent?

We can focus on the person of Peter Magyar, but just to support my claim with potentially two arguments. Yesterday we have seen the highest turnout ever in the history of democratic elections in Hungary. And actually we can observe much more than just a change in the government. Because Hungary has been evolved to a sort of authoritarian regime. Now a start of a redemocratization somehow equals to a regime change. But of course you are entirely right. Peter Magyar has been socialized in the Fidesz party and actually has been part of that power structure in the second and third ranks. But notwithstanding this, I think even that phenomenon is not so different. So how, for example, regime change happened in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, 1990, where at least in Hungary, former members of the ancient regime, so the previous regime, also played a very crucial role in the democratic transition.

But with regard to the ideological characteristics of Peter Magyar, of course, he's a right-wing and conservative person. But first and foremost, I see him as a very successful political entrepreneur. And I think his main motivation will remain to keep actually this track record of astonishing political success, what he just created with the opposition party Respect and Freedom over the past two couple of years. And I think what we will see from him is much more very pragmatic, output-oriented policymaking than anything that's really ideologically influenced. So you're describing a champion of democracy, not necessarily a champion of liberal democracy, it sounds like. I mean, do you think we're going to see Peter Mogliar rolling back these Orban policies that we've seen in the last couple of years? I'm thinking about the restrictions on LGBTQ rights, for example, in Hungary.

I think he got a mandate to redemocratize the country, and his political future depends on delivering on that mandate. In his victory speech, he referred actually to the equal right of every Hungarian citizen to live and love as he would like. So we have certain promises that he might also address the issue of the discrimination of the LGBTQ community in the country. On the other hand, as a rather realist political analyst, I expect that the focus will be on the non-divisive issues in the next couple of months, which primarily relates to the anti-corruption fight and the legislation in the country, bringing back the frozen and suspended EU funds and potentially normalizing the relationship of Hungary with the European Union and in a broader sense in the Western alliance system. How is he going to do that? Because we know that Hungary is still dependent on cheap, very cheap energy from Russia.

How is he going to square this circle? Because you know that Brussels, the European Union, will be demanding that Hungary fall in line and cut those energy ties to Moscow.

I absolutely agree with you. And this is a very good question. I think we can start at the point that the new Hungarian foreign minister nominee, Miss Anita Orban, who shares the same family name with the past prime minister, but they are not related, she stands with all of her professional career actually for the diversification of Hungary's energy supply and the phasing out of Russian fossil energy. So I think this is a credible promise that she might deliver on the fight. But I fully agree with you that because the Orban regime hasn't been working on the diversification in the past four years. Actually, Hungary's dependency on Russian fossil fuel is bigger now than it used to be in 2022. This will be a large challenge. And personally, I don't think that the phase-out deadline at the end of 2027 set by the European Union is feasible for Hungary.

It can be with regard of crude oil. Their alternative supply routes exist. the Adria pipeline via Croatia or the Odessa Brody pipeline on Ukrainian territory. But if we take a look on the natural gas supply to the TurkStream pipeline system, then I think the task is much, much bigger. And against that background, what I would expect is potentially a deadline extension request that might come sooner or later from the Hungarian government. And obviously, also a phase-out requires in some way the constructive and predictable behavior of Russia. So if I need to describe the potential future relationship of the Hungarian government with the Kremlin, I think that will be a cold but slow divorce. What about Hungary's relationship with the U.S.? During his visit in Budapest, J.D. went and fazed that the United States will see every potential Hungarian government as a partner. And honestly, if we put the ideological connections between the MAGA movement and FIDOS aside, At least our government is much better aligned with United States' interests than FIDAS, particularly when it comes to China.

And also the energy cooperation agreements that were signed between the Trump administration and FIDAS, and which also serve actually the phase out of Russian energy, can continue actually in a very smooth way between the two administrations or two governments in the future. So I don't think that this change in the government will put an end to a closer cooperation that just a couple of days or weeks ago by the Hungarian government was highlighted as actually the golden era of transatlantic relationship between Washington and Budapest. a couple weeks ago on your substack you wrote something called the next coup attempt and talking about the problem that trump faces you know an uphill battle electorally at the moment quote some variant of terrorism is trump's best bet and so one should be preemptively now skeptical of Trump's account of any future terrorist attack. We can be sure, that's pretty strong, we can be sure that whatever its true origins and character, Trump will provide a self-serving account meant to serve a coup and a dictatorship. It is utterly predictable that he will attempt to pass responsibility for any act of terror to his domestic political opponents and discredit or undo elections. Really? I think that there's the presumption in favor of something like that is much, much stronger than the presumption in favor of if there's a terrorist attack in the United States, Donald Trump will suddenly revert to something he's never been before, which is a person who cares about the interests of the United States and its population.

That I certainly agree with. Or that Trump will do something that he's never done before, which is generate a foreign policy response, which comes from the interests of that country or those people. Look, I mean, I realize our default in the media is that we would like for the president to be the president, and we'd like to imagine that in a drastic circumstances, he would revert to some kind of type, but Trump has never been that type. There's no reason to think that he would react the way we would like for him to react. And so we have to imagine how else he'd react. And that's my version. Second point is that it is totally normal for US presidents actually to take advantage of terrorist attacks. That's what the Bush administration did in the war in Iraq. That was taking advantage of a terrorist attack. He took advantage of a terrorist attack in the way that conformed to his character. Now let's ask about Trump's character. Trump, you know, if you think through that analogy through, what Trump's character is about is preserving personal power for Trump. That's what he cares about. And I don't think he's making any illusions about that.

And the final thing I want to point out is that, and again, this isn't meant to be a doomsane prophecy. This stuff can be beaten and it can be counterproductive. But the final thing I want to point out is that this just happened in Hungary. It just happened a week ago. Orban just generated a false flag terrorist attack. He just made that up. It's not exactly the same because nothing actually, I think happened. But Orban said, we have uncovered a terrorist attack on our pipeline, and it was our enemies who did it. He claimed it was the Ukrainians, and he associated the Ukrainians with the Hungarian opposition. Now, why didn't we hear a whole lot about that? Outrageous though it is, because it didn't work. And why did it not work? Because the Hungarian opposition ahead of time said, it's pretty likely there's going to be some kind of electoral terrorist stunt and we can't let Orban take advantage of it, right? So what you and I are doing right now is that same kind of inoculation. There are two desperate moves that a leader like Trump can make. The first is fight a foreign war. Check. That's happened. And the second is to generate or take advantage of, generate a terrorist attack, take advantage of a real terrorist attack, or take advantage of a fake terrorist attack, something that never actually happens, right?

Those are very, very different things. That's what I was trying to get at. Yeah, sure. The difference between one and two are vast. Taking advantage of politically, as you say, has been done many, many times before, including a 9-11, of a, you know, quote unquote, legitimate, actual, genuine terrorist attack versus concocting one or generating one are huge, hugely different. And you're saying we have the possibility of both. These things, look, I just want to normalize all this because it happens all the time. How did Putin come to power? Who are the two people Trump and Matt? Who do we think Trump admires in the world? Putin and Orban. How did Orban try to stay in power? By inventing a plot which probably didn't happen and blaming domestic enemies for it. How did Putin come to power? There were several elements to this, but one of the elements was that the Russian secret services quite literally bombed a series of Russian apartment buildings and then blamed it on Muslims.

This happens in the world, right? And it's done by the people who Trump admires. And as Americans, we just can't do this thing, which we keep doing, which is saying, oh, there's some things that happened in history or they happen in foreign countries, but I would like to reserve the right to be very surprised when they happen in the United States. No, we cannot reserve the right to be very surprised when these things happen in the United States, because if we're surprised by them, our surprise becomes the political resource that other people use. Yeah, I totally get that. the only thing that gives me the heebie-jeebies a little bit is when you speak from a position, as you do and I do and many other people do in good faith, about being wary of conspiracy theories and evidence-free hypotheses about things, whether it's landing on the moon or who did 9-11 or what happened on October 7th or anything else, to suggest, and I know you don't mean to do this. To put out there in advance, without anything having happened, if something happens, you must immediately doubt it. To me, you know, a little bit gives grist to the conspiracy theorists who we've been trying to fight intellectually and politically for a long time.

Does that make any sense? No, no, I totally take that point. But what I said in the piece, and I stand by it, is that one should not take seriously what Trump says. I'm not saying what You shouldn't take seriously what local police on the scene say. I'm not saying you shouldn't take seriously what reporters say. I'm saying that one in that, precisely in that situation, where something very frightening has happened or seems to have happened, precisely in that situation, one has to pull back the impulse to trust a leader, especially when you have a leader like Trump. Because what we know of history is that these things get taken advantage of precisely on people like Trump. I take your point. there will be authorities on explosives. There will be authorities on the relevant political parties who might be involved. There will be local investigations. All of those things are serious, and all those things should be taken seriously. I'm afraid what's not serious in that circumstance is what the President of the United States says. Yeah, no, I think that's an important distinction.

I'm going to stick to that. I just don't want us to be doing what they do. If I had more time, I would go through each one of the 20 lessons in the 20th century in your great slim volume on tyranny. And I had not looked at it in a while and I had forgotten the order in which they appear. And I literally went to go look for it over the weekend to see what number your lesson was entitled, do not obey in advance. Cause that's the one that seems to be quoted the most. That's the one most relevant sort of in my professional sphere. Why'd you put that first? And how are we doing on that? It goes first because it's the first thing you have to do. if you fail to do that then the lessons two through 20 don't matter really nothing matters when something surprising happens like you know somebody you didn't expect to win an election or somebody who wins an election and they try to change the system you have to not obey in advance you have to have your own sense of what is normal and follow that because if you if you don't do that then you will normalize which we're all very good at but if you normalize then you're not going follow the rest of the lessons. That's the main reason why it's first is that psychologically, morally inside of us, it's first. There's another reason why it's first, which is that, as you probably noticed, if you're flipping through it again, the lessons go from in a way, least severe and least demanding to most severe and most demanding, right? They're following a trajectory of how the regime changes. Number 20 is be as courageous as you can. That's the tall order. Yeah. I mean, it is. But remember the nice people we're talking about in Hungary, who just won this huge election.

They were afraid that they, I mean, independent journalists in Hungary were being investigated by the state. The leaders of the opposition movement were legitimately afraid of prison if they failed. Like people were being courageous. And I mean, Hungary is just one example. So how courageous we can be, depending upon whether we're like, you know, middle-aged white guys with tenure or whether we're undocumented people, like people can be differently courageous. But I think without that little element, without that little moral vector, I don't think we're going to go anywhere. which gets to my next point and we're looking for ways to minimize both the significance of the election and minimize the authoritarianism of orban and this the second point i want to make is that the one big reason why orban's defeat is so significant is that orban was this nexus connecting the international far-right, the fascism international.

He funneled money and support to far-right groups and individuals in the United States, in the United Kingdom, in France, in Italy, often money coming from Putin's Russia. He convened those individuals and their parties and so on and so forth in Hungary so they could meet each other and share ideas and strategies. The Conservative Political Action Committee here in the United States has held multiple of its annual conferences in Hungary, and according to the new opposition leader, Orban was directly funneling money to it. And in turn, reactionaries here drew inspiration from Orban. Ron DeSantis' attack on higher education, on LGBTQ people, on critical race theory in Florida, directly inspired by Orban. Really an attempt to make Florida like Hungary on the Atlantic. The Trump administration, similar assaults on DEI, on gender ideology, on higher education, on universities and federal research, on everything that could be an independent base of knowledge and resistance to the administration, directly inspired by Orban. Russell Vogt, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, who destroyed USAID, among other agencies, inspired by Orban. There are real connections here. And so removing Orban from power is really removing a critical node in the dissemination of ideas and money and influence between the international far right. It's significant. Now, here are some things that might be useful for us in the United States. The first is that the opposition campaign, although it did focus quite a bit on what we might call affordability, on cost of living, on making life better for ordinary Hungarians, also focused a great deal on corruption and connected the two, connected the gross and rampant corruption of the Orban regime. And the Orban regime more or less was just a sophisticated ideological gloss over naked theft from the Hungarian people funneled to Orban's friends and cronies and supporters, connected that corruption to the poor economic prospects for ordinary Hungarians. And that's a strategy I think needs to be replicated here. The Trump regime is extraordinarily corrupt. They are raking billions of dollars. They're betting on outcomes. They're betting on decisions of life and death to make money. This corruption is egregious. And it's a simple, really political task to connect that corruption to the way that so many Americans are feeling left behind. That the corruption, the impunity is the reason why our economy is so tilted against ordinary people. I think that's a winning message. And people just hate corruption.

They really hate it. And this administration is, again, extraordinarily corrupt. It will, of course, rely on Democrats to also crack down on corruption in their own ranks, ban stock trading, right, that kind of thing among lawmakers. But I think that's worthwhile, and I think this is a winning message against the administration. Part of the corruption messaging in Hungary was also the promise of accountability, the promise of bringing in justice people who have committed crimes. And that is, I think, an especially critical message to have here in the United States. No more will the people in power be able to commit crimes, to steal, to violate a sacred trust, to violate the public trust without consequences. And if that means actively prosecuting people, if that means Congress using its subpoena power and also its power to arrest people who refuse subpoenas, that's what it means. This might seem like escalation, might seem like norm-breaking, but I think this is precisely the kind of norm-breaking necessary to bring the system back into equilibrium. No more escaping consequences because you happen to have a little money in your pocket or know the right people.

Final thought here is that, and this is actually a lesson from Orban, which is that the strength of Orban's regime came in part from its international connections, from the attempt to build an international community of right-wingers, of fascists. This used to be very much a part of the American left, right, of building connections internationally. This is something to emulate for those of us on the broad American left. When I say broad left, I'm not getting into stupid debates over liberals and leftists. I'm talking about the broad community of Americans who are left of center, from socialists to social Democrats and left liberals like myself to ordinary liberals. Building connections between our counterparts around the world, not just in Europe, but in South America as well. Trading ideas, lessons, strategies for pushing back against the far right. I think this is going to be a necessary part of both responding to the far right in their own country and helping push back the far right worldwide.

So yeah, Hungary, very significant. Not because Hungary is a great, important country, no offense to Hungarians, but it's a pretty modest small place in the middle of Europe. Part of why it was so odd that American conservatives became obsessed with it, but that's a different video. But Orban's defeat is significant nonetheless.

So what is the lesson that we take from Peter Majer that applies to us here? He went around corporate media. Because in America, we have corporate consolidation as well. We have the Ellisons owning CBS News. They're about to own CNN. We have more and more of the corporate media bending the need of Donald Trump the same way these do, the way they did in Hungary, because he used the government to fine people the same way Trump has done. So what did Peter do? He went around the media by using one, independent media, because there was still some beneath the surface and doing events that get press coverage that were unlike things people had seen before. And I have some examples here from, I was reading a lot of articles from him in the last two years, because Peter Meijer came out of nowhere two years ago.

He was part of the Fidesz party, which is Victor Arbanes. He was married to a woman who was one of the top ranking justice ministers, but he broke from them two years ago. In fact, he got divorced from his wife. And he said partly for political reasons, because he could not stomach she was part of the Fidesz party anymore. But here's some of the things he did to get media coverage. He did a tour of the country that no one had ever seen, visiting literally every municipality before the European Parliament elections in June 2024. So he did something, just toured every municipality in Hungary. Again, a smaller country, but the idea is no one had seen this. It gets press. It gets attention. It gets buzz. Also, he used social media all the time because he had to. Because corporate media was owned by Viktor Orban and the Fidesz party, which smeared Peter with lie after lie after lie.

But it didn't get traction because people were used to the propaganda. And so it became noise. So he's reaching people's social media. That's important. He also did a symbolic gesture. In May 2025, Peter walked 250 kilometers from Budapest to Romanian city of Oradea to win support of the Hungarian minorities living there that used to vote for Fidesz. So again, here's a young guy in his mid-40s doing these things like walking hundreds of kilometers, whatever that means in miles. It's a lot to get press coverage. It reminds me here in New York was Zora Mondani during the campaign walked the entire borough of Manhattan at one point. It got a lot of press. The point is, and this lesson for us is corporate media is going to get more and more consolidated. For Democrats, it's not throw your hands up and go, well, there's nothing we can do.

The lessons here are twofold. Social media, go right to the people, independent media, social media. Second, come up with creative ideas that people have not seen before that get attention, that excite people, that inspire people. That's what Peter did. It's also what Zoran did. It's what other Democrats have done in the past. Barack Obama did things that we take for granted now. Massive rallies, hundreds of thousands of people. Victor did that. Peter did that as well in Hungary. Those are the kind of things. Three, leaning into the fight against corruption. Usually in America, running against a political party, you know, with Democrats, Republican party, running against the GOP and their corruption, I'm not sure how much traction it would get. But I think it will now. And it did in Hungary. What Viktor Orban did is very much like Trump. It was not just Viktor Orban who got wealthy.

His family got wealthy. His inner circle, his son-in-law got wealthy, just like Jared Kushner. I'm not exaggerating. Literally copying the same playbook where Trump watches Orban, goes, why can't I do it? One of the things that really got a lot of attention was not too long ago, there was drone footage of this massive estate. And who owned this massive estate with manicured, I'm reading right from a beautiful pool, underground garage, manicured gardens. It was Victor Orban's father who didn't do anything to have this. But on the property, there were zebras. Yes, zebras, like at a zoo. He had zebras. That became the avatar for corruption. People at the anti-Orban rallies would bring little stuffed zebras. zebras. They put images of zebras on the billboards in the government, on their billboards, a little zebra, and people will know that was a form of protest. The idea being that, in this case, corruption and running against it actually, I think, is relevant. We've never seen the corruption of Donald Trump. Donald Trump put the New York Times and his family last year took in more than $1 billion in the White House. More than $1 billion. We're talking about crypto investments from the UAE, Qatar giving Trump a plane. U.S. media outlets, and let's not forget, because sometimes it's not reported that well.

When Trump got money from CBS to settle a lawsuit, millions of dollars, that went to Trump personally. That was not DOJ. Those were personal lawsuits. When he sued other many outlets and they paid millions of dollars, that was to him. That was a shakedown where Trump, that's just corruption. What I like here, what Peter Mujar has done is he ran on zero corruption, but more than zero corruption. He ran on the idea of holding people accountable who are involved in corruption. Yes, folks, holding people accountable, not hiring Merrick Garland, I'm sure, to be AG. In fact, he's going to rejoin the European Public Prosecutor's Office instead of a national office. I'm reading right from it, from Asset Recovery and Protection. They will go back looking for 20 years at all the members of parliament, ministers, and the prime minister for corruption. Now, Viktor Orban was in charge for 16 years.

You get the idea. They're not turning the other page. They're not saying, we're going to let bygones be bygones. He leaned in on these people are getting rich. You're struggling. Look at, and even Victor Orban had the, I think called the Orban Versailles, a walled off estate with mansions owned by prime ministers by his family. Another big issue that Peter ran on. So the point was he leaned in on not just anti-corruption, but holding people accountable. And that's what's so important. I'd like to see Democrats, I think it will resonate. It will show a different side to Democrats saying, when we take power, we're going to do oversight of the corruption of Donald Trump and everyone in his administration. Kristi Noem's family who got the campaign contracts for the ad she did. Just go down the list. Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner. And that when we get the White House again, we are going to prosecute these people.

Talk about this. Don't be timid. The stakes are too high, my friends. To me, that's lesson number three. Lesson number four is people power. People power. They had huge rallies in Hungary. It's almost embarrassing for us. except for no kings, which was remarkable. In a country of 10 million, they'd have rallies with 100, 200,000 people on the street. In Budapest, unbelievable. In fact, they had Victor Orban, because he is this right-wing Christian supremacist, ban the LGBT annual march. Well, 100,000 plus people marched this year at the annual pride parade in Budapest, far more than ever before to stand up to Orban. And it was so many, he couldn't do anything about it. Now, the lesson there is our no kings protests are great. And I hope we see another one in the spring. I hope we see others leading into 2028. But that's another lesson.

People power, it becomes contagious. It makes people in a nation like Hungary, which is quasi-autocratic. It's not a true autocracy. It's not Putin's Russia. It's somewhere in between. It makes people feel less fearful. It's great books like Timothy Snyder's book, Jason Stanley's book on fascism, even How Democracies Die by Stephen Levitsky. talk about. When people see others in the street and they are not crushed or shot or put in prison, it inspires others to take a chance and go forward. So we take it for granted still. But in Hungary, there were some around the edges where Viktor Orban was going against dissent. But in this case, the people came out in huge numbers and they couldn't do anything about it. And the final lesson is this. Number six, the economy. It's still the economy. The winning argument, when you read about it, was all these issues I went through, including bringing democracy back to Hungary.

But people are struggling. People, economic, they said there's sputtering economy, stagnant economy, poor health care, prices rising. So you have this whole one bucket of prices rising, health care, unaffordable, all sound familiar, folks. Inflation going up, sound familiar? And at the same time, the split screen, Viktor Orban and his inner circle getting richer and richer and richer. and just talking about himself and building things to honor him. Sound like America? It is. I'm telling you, Donald Trump and the GOP has copied Viktor Orban. They've loved Viktor Orban. They had CPAC in Hungary. They've invited Viktor Orban to speak at CPAC here in America. Trump has invited him, called him one of his favorite strongmen. They admire it. So the economy is still such a key issue.

We've just heard clips starting with Radio Atlantic featuring journalist Veronica describing the jubilant Budapest streets after Orban's 16-year rule ended. The majority report traced Orban's 2010 Make Hungry Great Again campaign as the blueprint for Trumpism. Last week tonight walked through Orban's consolidation of Hungarian media, anti-migrant fear-mongering, and LGBTQ crackdowns, while noting his government failed basic governance, including keeping hospitals stocked with toilet paper. DW News described Magyar's election win as Hungary's highest turnout Democratic vote ever, signaling a regime change. Stay tuned with Preet featured Timothy Snyder warning that Trump will exploit any future terrorist attack to consolidate power, drawing direct parallels to Orbán's recent fabricated pipeline plot and Putin's apartment bombings. Takes by Jamel Bowie laid out why Orban's defeat dismantles a critical node of the international far-right and drew direct lines from Orban's influence to DeSantis, Trump, and Russell vote. And The Dean Obadiah Show outlined six strategies, including bypassing corporate media, creative campaigning, and prosecuting corruption for Democrats to counter Trump. And those were just the top takes. There's a lot more in the deeper dive sections. But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support of our members who get this show ad-free as well as early and ad-free access to our other show, Solved, including a members-only backstage segment, all via podcast. We've also launched Solved on the Best of Left YouTube channel, but episodes are delayed there. The show features our team of producers discussing a carefully curated selection of articles and ideas to then solve some of the biggest issues of our day. It's important to remind you that each episode of Best of Left takes about 25 hours of human labor to produce, and Solved isn't too far behind.

Plus, I need to mention that we are currently experiencing a serious adpocalypse situation here at the show. Ad revenue has dropped by more than half compared to just a couple of months ago, and we're finding ourselves suddenly in pretty bad financial shape and could really use your help at this particular moment in time. So if you get value out of the show and want to support all of the work that goes into Best of Left and Solved and get both delivered ad-free to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com slash support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app. Members are always appreciated, but it's particularly appreciated when people step up to support us in times of need like this one right now. But still, as always, if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show, you can record a voice message re-recording until you're happy with it by tapping the link in the show notes. You can message us on Signal at the handle bestofleft.01 or you can simply email me to jay at bestofleft.com. As for today's topic, a quick story. In 1985, a federal prosecutor in Buenos Aires named Julio Cesar Strasera stood up to close the case against the leaders of Argentina's military junta. The men in front of him had overseen the disappearance of tens of thousands of people. Union organizers, students, journalists, priests, pregnant women whose babies were stolen and given to regime loyalists. It was the first time in Latin America that a democracy had put its former dictators on trial. Strasera ended his closing argument with a phrase he borrowed from the Argentine people themselves, Nunca más, never again.

Five of the nine defendants were convicted. Two got life. The courtroom erupted.

Four years later, a different Argentine president pardoned them all. So the story is either a triumph or a tragedy, depending on where you end. But in reality, the story still isn't over. Human rights groups kept pushing. The grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo kept searching for stolen children. Lawyers kept filing cases. In 2005, the Argentine Supreme Court declared those previous amnesty laws unconstitutional. The trials resumed, and as of this year, according to one of the grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo speaking on PBS, more than 1,200 people have been convicted of crimes against humanity in Argentina. Forty years in, the trials are still happening. The grandmothers are still identifying stolen grandchildren. But the story's not over. The current far-right president and Trump bromance friend, Javier Mille, is right now cutting the budget of the National Genetic Data Bank by more than half, shutting down the investigative unit that searches for the disappeared.

And as of a few weeks ago, he suspended the DNA identification kits that Argentine consulates abroad had been using for 20 years to help identify the stolen children. Argentina is 40 years past defeating an authoritarian government. Hungary is a few days past. In Hungary, Orban built a laboratory of authoritarianism that the American right imported wholesale. And now he lost. That's huge, but we can't treat this moment like a verdict that will stand untested. We want a finish line, but there isn't one and there never really will be. Argentina in 1985 said never again, but not as a verdict or a conclusion. It's a commitment to a practice that has no end point. And every thoughtful person watching American politics has understood for years now that we are going to be cleaning up after Trumpism for decades to come, regardless of what happens to Trump personally.

Any future prosecutions of Orbán's or Trump's governments will matter, but they won't resolve the matter. That's what Argentina figured out a long time ago. So the question is, who carries out the work of rebuilding the institutions that make accountability mean something decades after the prosecutions are done. It should go without saying that prosecutions are needed because we know what happens when we choose to forgive and forget. In 2009, Barack Obama came into office and said repeatedly that he wanted to look forward, not backward, on Bush-era torture. The Brennan Center's Elizabeth Goyton told Roll Call at the time that Obama should have looked forward a little further to a future president with a different attitude toward torture. Seven years later, Donald Trump was campaigning on bringing back waterboarding and, quote, a hell of a lot worse. Obama wasn't wrong just because he declined to prosecute. He was wrong because declining to prosecute was the whole policy.

There was no parallel project to rebuild the machinery that had failed. The Office of Legal Counsel that wrote the torture memos, the CIA chain of command that carried them out, the oversight committees that didn't stop any of it. Both things got skipped at once, and that's a pretty direct line from 2009 to January 6th. The version of this that actually works needs an institution carrying the load over decades in alliance with organized civil society pushing from outside. In Argentina, Alfonso signed the decree ordering prosecution of the junta three days after taking office, and the grandmothers had already been organizing since 1977. In Hungary, Magyar ran on corruption as the organizing frame, and the institutional rebuild will be the follow-through. He's agreed to join the European Public Prosecutor's Office, which means EU investigators will have jurisdiction over Hungarian corruption cases. That's a politician voluntarily giving up some of his own power in the name of greater accountability for himself and future leaders. In the United States, the institution that's going to be on the hook for this work, whether anybody likes it or not, is the Democratic Party. Nonprofits can't do it alone, and civil society pressure alone can't do it either. A party apparatus has to carry a project this long, with the rest of us pushing them to do it and do it right.

A couple of weeks ago, the House Democrats launched what they're calling the anti-corruption and Democracy Reform Task Force, chaired by Joe Morrell, with Jamie Raskin, Robert Garcia, Greg Cesar, Brad Schneider, and AOC all on it, plus a couple of dozen other members. Progressive Caucus leadership and moderates and the Oversight Committee heads all at the same table. That's the right instinct and the right moment, and I'm genuinely glad it's happening. It's also, as currently scoped, nowhere near big enough. The public reporting has the task force focused on things like a stock trading ban, a congressional code of ethics, Supreme Court term limits, and highlighting the Trump family's business dealings. All of which matters, but it's a small fraction of what anti-corruption has to actually mean if the work is going to match the scale of the damage. Rebuilding the civil service that's being actively hollowed out, restoring independence to a Justice Department that's being captured in real time, protecting inspectors general and whistleblowers, reforming a Supreme Court that granted the president immunity for so-called official acts.

It's hard to imagine the current task force left alone scoping to all of that, which is where everybody listening comes in. A lot of us have real ongoing fights with the Democratic Party, health care, housing, labor, genocide, foreign policy. Those fights are legitimate and they're not going anywhere. But anti-corruption is one of the rare spots where the Progressive Caucus and the Moderates and leadership are actually aligned. The membership of the task force itself proves it. So on this, we need to show our support. We don't drop the other fights. We just notice where the party can show some collective strength, and we lean in there. We can keep arguing about Medicare for All, but right now, the sign says stop the corruption. And the follow-through is to rebuild the civil service, protect the inspectors general, restore DOJ and penance, reform the courts. Bring that to your town hall.

Donate to candidates running on institutional restoration. Call your rep and ask specifically what the task force is going to recommend on civil service protections. Without pressure, they'll scope this too narrowly. But with pressure, they can be moved. None of it ends with Trumpism. Prosecution doesn't end it. a blue wave doesn't end it, a 2028 landslide doesn't end it. The movement, the judicial appointments, the personnel networks, the permission structures, all of it outlasts Trump personally by decades. And I'm not saying that as a bummer. I'm saying it because the alternative is pretending there's a finish line coming. And pretending that makes people quit when the finish line doesn't show up. Argentina didn't finish in 1985. They're still working on it 40 years later with a far-right government actively trying to roll back the memory infrastructure, and they're going to keep working on it because that's what having a democracy actually is, something you keep doing. The Democratic Party is the vehicle available to us for the American version, flawed as it is, and the job for us is to push it to be stronger than it currently wants to be. Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube, so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them. Link in the show notes. And now we'll continue to dive deeper on three topics today. First up, section A, origins, followed by section B, tactics, and section C, international.

The reason I want to talk about Hungary is it's set for elections on April 12th. Voters there will choose a new National Assembly, their parliament, which in turn will mean either a new prime minister or the re-election of their current one, Viktor Orban. He's been in office since 2010, with an absolute majority in Hungary's government for the entire 16 years of his tenure. He's actually the longest-serving current head of government in the EU. And if you want a quick taste of what kind of leader Orban's been, take this testimonial video that he posted, featuring a real who's who of people I've called arseholes on this show, including Netanyahu, Marine Le Pen, Javier Millet, and a fourth person that I'll let you discover for yourself. Security cannot be taken for granted. It must be one, and I think Viktor Orban has all those qualities. He has the tenacity, the courage, the wisdom to protect his country.

It is thanks to leaders like Viktor that the camp of patriots, defenders of nations, and sovereign people is winning in Europe. I fervently support Prime Minister Orban and the Fidesz party. And I want to congratulate him, and also to encourage all Hungarians to continue to move forward to protect your great culture and your amazing country. Yeah, it's none other than Academy Award-watching actor Rob Schneider. And that is a pretty weird cameo there. It's like if the Avengers movie starred three Avengers and also Rob Schneider. But it's not just those celebrities and also Rob Schneider. Orban has a close relationship with many conservatives in this country. He's not only been invited to speak at CPAC, CPAC itself has been holding a satellite conference in Hungary for the past few years, where numerous U.S. conservatives have shown up, arguing that America really should be taking a lesson from Orban's work.

There are many conservative members of Congress who, like me, want to see Hungary as a beacon in the West. Hungary's immigration policy should serve as a model to the United States. One place where Hungary clearly has led Europe is in reasserting its national identity, specifically with regard to rejecting mass migration. Little did I know I would walk into Budapest and basically see all of the policies that we dream for in Arizona. Okay, well first, based on that blouse, I don't think Carrie Lake came from Arizona as much as from 1987. But also, if you love Budapest so much, please know that you can and should go live there. The point is, Republicans love Viktor Orban. He's even been officially endorsed in this upcoming election by Trump, who once praised him like this. You know, I was very honoured as a man. Viktor Orban, did anyone ever hear of him?

He's probably, like, one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world. He, uh, he's the leader of... Right? He's the leader of Turkey. No, no, no, he isn't. Close, though. You are thinking of the right planets. though in Trump's defense, Hungary and Turkey are both in the same region, both ruled by an authoritarian, and both words that a caveman would say while ordering a sandwich, so you can see why his brain went there. And the love fest between Orbán and American conservatives is a two-way street. In fact, just last Saturday, he spoke at the latest CPAC Hungary and outlined exactly how he sees himself fitting in to a global conservative movement. Since President Trump's win, the Western world has become a better place.

Gender propaganda and woke ideology have been pushed back. People can proudly embrace Christianity as the foundation and sustaining force of our civilization.

What's happening now is the largest political realignment in Western civilization in 100 years. The epicenter of this change is the United States, and its European forward base is Hungary. Wow, there is a lot there, but citing the West's largest political realignment in 100 years is pretty striking, given, you know, what started happening in Europe around 100 years ago. That's right, Winnie the Pooh was first published. I don't know what you were thinking about, but you should know, things in Hungary aren't actually going great. on Orban's watch has become one of the poorest countries in the EU. So it's frankly no surprise that in recent years, there have been plenty of protests against Orban's government like this one. There are two of them.

Freaking dirty.

What's up with the zebra? What does the zebra symbolize?

According to the rumors, Orban has an estate in the countryside where zebras were spotted. The sign back there? that's kind of the center of this, as Hungary is a dictatorship.

And then I'm being told O1G means Orban is a sperm.

Orban is a sperm. Yeah. Orban is a sperm. Which I assume is an insult and does just mean that he tastes slightly better when you eat pineapple. Also, that rumor about zebras being spotted is amazing if true, as all the zebras I've ever seen have been striped. Boom! Yeah! Boom, boom! I got that guy so good! This show is your only source for animal puns and jokes about drinking semen in, frankly, too rapid succession. Orban's Fidesz party has actually been trailing by double digits in most polls ahead of this election. But they may well still win anyway for reasons that we'll get into later. So, given Hungary's election is just around the corner and just how invested in Orban conservatives here clearly are, We thought tonight it might be worth taking a look at Viktor Orban. And let's start with a little history. I'll skip past the stuff that we all learned in school about Hungary, like how it, say it with me, was part of the Soviet bloc for much of the 20th century, where it operated under a communist dictatorship.

Exactly. We're all on the same page, thanks to America's famously thorough and globally curious education system. But when the communist bloc began to crumble, began to crumble, Orban was in the right place at the right time. Here he is in 1989 as a 26-year-old, calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops and free Hungarian elections. And while I am no fan of Orban's later work, I will admit, he was a late 80s snack.

He's like Mel Gibson there. He's got the hair, the intensity, and the looming sense that things will eventually take a dark turn.

Now, after the fall of Soviet communism, Orban took part in talks that eventually led to Hungary's democracy. And at the time, he and Fidesz were actually a relatively liberal youth movement. In fact, early on, only people under 35 could even join the party. Just look at one of their early 90s campaign ads.

Here and something different.

A blank slate.

A new democracy.

A new Hungary.

Vote for Fidesz. Király.

That ad has got everything 90s kids loved. Maps and Orange, Domino's, and a bunch of guys who look like they're running for the president of a college radio station. There was Viktor Orban, Hungarian Anthony Michael Hall, a steakhouse waiter on his smoke break, and, of course, Virgin John Mayer. Back then, Fidesz campaigned on adopting Western European economic and political standards and limiting the role of the state and the influence of religion on public life. But after Orbán was elected to Parliament in 1990, he started moving the party to the right. He eventually became Europe's youngest prime minister in 1998, only to lose after just one term. And in his years out of power, he continued moving to the right, amping up nationalist populist rhetoric and starting to wrap himself in religion. And as he tells it now, he developed a pretty stark philosophy. In order to win, it is not enough to know what you are fighting for.

You also have to know how you should fight. My answer is, play by your own rules. Now, on the surface, play by your own rules is a pretty banal sentiment. It's the live, laugh, love for people who haven't been divorced yet. But Hungary soon found out what he meant by that in a political sense. Because in 2010, after the global financial crisis and the scandal in Hungary's ruling party, Orbán was swept back into power with a two-thirds supermajority, and immediately began tampering with the rules to make sure he never lost again. As he put it, we have to win once, but then win big. Essentially meaning if he ever gained power, he'd use it to fortify his position indefinitely. And we only have to win once is one of the more ominous things to hear from a leader. It's right up there along with, trust me, you're gonna love the Kool-Aid.

Open the gates, Papa gotta get a closer look at that big old horse. And no smoking, what is this? A blimp for dorks? Pass me my lighter. Sure enough, once back in power, Orban moved swiftly to solidify control. In his first year in office, the government rushed through hundreds of new laws and ushered through a brand new constitution that was drafted behind closed doors and debated in Parliament for only nine days. There were also big changes to Hungary's election system, including gerrymandering maps to stack the odds heavily in Orban's favour. As a result, in 2014, his party won 45% of the vote, but 91% of the districts. In fact, thanks to that and other tweaks, independent observers have deemed Hungarian elections since then free but not fair, which is an interesting combination. You are free to vote for anyone you want, whether it's Orban or whoever inevitably loses to him.

And while changes like those could theoretically have faced legal challenges, Orbán's also co-opted Hungary's court system, packing it with loyalists and passing a constitutional amendment that removed the court's power to evaluate any new constitutional amendments. And when he's taking all of that together, as this scholar points out, it was basically a coup, but a very 21st-century one.

Can you make explicit this concept of soft authoritarianism and why does soft authoritarianism always turn into hard authoritarianism? And why did some start at soft and then go to hard as opposed to hard and hard? Great. I think the concept that is super useful here is my colleague Lucan Way's concept of competitive authoritarianism. Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way's concept of competitive authoritarianism. So they look at a country like Russia as just an authoritarian, hard authoritarian country in your terminology. terminology. So competitive authoritarianism is when you've got gerrymandered seats, control of the media. Control of the media is so powerful in Hungary because Hungary is a much less educated country and most people just speak Hungarian. So if all the Hungarian media is owned by the Orban's allies, then most of the population who only reads Hungarian can only read that. So it becomes really important to have presses outside the country who publish in Hungarian.

For instance, my book, How Fascism Works, that sold very well in Hungary, published in 2018, was translated into Hungarian and sold in Hungary. It was published by a French press that translates Hungarian stuff, stuff into Hungarian and sells it in Hungary because it's harder for a Hungarian press to do that. So competitive authoritarianism, we do things like that. You buy up the media. You put pressure campaigns on presses. So the elections are not free and fair. Democracy isn't just majority vote. You know, the people of North Korea are going to vote for their leader every time because the press is not free. You need a free press to have a democracy. A competitive authoritarian system is when you don't have a free press, you have pressure on the election systems, the ruling party controls the election apparatus, but you still have elections. And so you can beat an autocrat in competitive authoritarianism, but you have to have an overwhelming win like we saw just now in Hungary.

You can't beat an autocrat in competitive authoritarianism with a 2% or 3% win. You need a 10 percent, a 15 percent win. And that's what we saw in Hungary, a win so overwhelming that, you know, Hungary would be ejected from the European Union if they tried to to do anything about it. So that's what we need here. I want to ask as to as to why that happened in a moment. But yesterday, I think I think it was yesterday, it was revealed by Peter Magyar, the I guess the prime minister elect, that Hungary has been bankrolling CPAC. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I said. Hungary has been banked. That's what I referred to earlier, that Hungary has been the bank account for the global fascist right. That's why these far right journalists and intellectuals can go to Hungary and get paid. They've been using Hungarian taxpayer money. And remember, Orban is in Putin's pocket.

So, you know, he explicitly is in Putin's pocket. So CPAC has been bankrolled by Putin's lackey.

What's just stunning is like, you know, we've spent the past couple of weeks mocking Dave Rubin. I don't know if you're familiar with these names. I hope you're not. You're not just for your own sake. But Dave Rubin and Rob Schneider, maybe you know him as the copy guy from Saturday Night Live, all of whom would just return from from Hungary. You know, also J.D. Vance. You've heard of him. I mean, all of them going to Hungary ostensibly to sort of, I guess, help or bond or just to visit or to, you know, I think I can't help but think like that. also sort of like when when tucker carlson went through that period of time where you sun your your anus uh red light under your testicles or something to that effect all sort of like hardcore fashion hardcore fascist politics right hardcore fascist so what so and and i get the idea of like you need to have a 10% or 12% win here. We have that same dynamic, you know, in various gerrymandered States across the country. And there's going to be, you know, Trump is going to deploy more and more things that are going to make it, make the actual will of the people muted in some fashion in the way it shows up in the votes. We don't know exactly how, but it might make it harder to vote in some places, might shut down certain polling places.

I don't think they know exactly how yet. I think they're in the planning stage now. They're trying. They've moved so fast. I think they think we're going to shut this midterms down in some way, but I don't think they've totally figured out how yet. What was it that got that 10, 12 percent to vote against Orban? Was it just that they got tired of Is there a natural sort of like or was it that the nature of of an Orban is so corrupt that there that Orban's agenda doesn't really have time to placate the people because he's running out of time. He wants to live the good life, I guess, after office. I mean, is that what it is? Because I feel like that's what's happening with Trump on some level. I mean, no, I don't think, or I think Orban's going to continue because he has, he has stacked the courts. He has, you know, I think he might, he will try to come back and I don't think he's going to walk off into the distance. I might be wrong about that, but that's just my prediction.

I think that it was I think it was a 14 percent win. I think it was that finally, and Magyar was very effective here. People saw like like Orban ran on, you know, it was all great replacement theory. We're going to build up the white race like white Christians are under threat. We're going to build up the Hungarian family and Hungary collapsed. All these fascists like Trump is destroying the United States. They destroy their own countries. And, you know, the Hungarian birth rate was at its lowest ever last year. And fewer live births than in modern history, I believe. 20,000 less than when he was elected. So people saw, I think, and this is what Magyar just relentlessly focused on rather than his socially conservative beliefs, that all the scapegoating is just there to rob the nation, to build giant villas for Orban's family, to enrich himself, his family and his friends.

And it just became more and more obvious that the cultural politics was just utter rubbish, that the cultural politics just was a meaningless way to, it was meant to sort of, people got sick of owning the libs. They finally saw through owning the libs. They're like, wait, maybe maybe I actually want a country more than I want to see some, you know, lower middle class college professor squirm. You know, maybe I want a future for my children. It just became so obvious that Orban's kids and his son-in-law and family were packing their bank accounts with Hungarian taxpayer cash and state contracts that people finally saw through it. They finally saw through that the cultural politics is just a smokescreen.

I wanted to comment real quick with a little more substance on, I think, the big political event of this week, which is simply the successful ouster of Viktor Orban from power in Hungary, the Hungarian people. After years, Orban was in power for 16 years. After years of hard work and perseverance, we're able to assemble the kind of commanding electoral supermajority necessary to oust Orban and his party from power and win enough seats in the legislature to really begin to undo so much of Orban's twisting of the political system to keep himself in power. The opposition candidate, Peter Majar, which I think I'm saying correctly, assembled a center-right coalition, admittedly, but a broad coalition of opponents, pro-European integration, supporters of democracy, to oust Orbán. And it really is a remarkable success. And huge congratulations to the Hungarian people for doing it. I think that this election does have a few lessons for Americans.

But before we get to those, I want to talk about some of the significance of this, beyond just the significance of removing from power a real-deal autocrat in a European country. The first, and this is more of a response to some commentary sense, is that, yes, Orban's Hungary, authoritarian country. It absolutely is. You may ask yourself, well, how can it be authoritarian if you can remove people through elections? I will note for you, first of all, that we have plenty of examples of uncontested. We all agree these are authoritarian countries or authoritarian regimes that had regular elections. Elections were regular in the Jim Crow South. And it was theoretically possible, right, to remove Jim Crow politicians from power through elections. That's in part why Jim Crow politicians did everything they could to reduce voter participation, to put hard barriers to being able to participate in the political system, not just for blacks, but also for whites who might not be on board with the entire Jim Crow program, specifically the Jim Crow economic program of gross exploitation of labor.

Apartheid South Africa had elections, regular elections, and theoretically, again, it was possible to remove them, remove the apartheid regime through electoral means. But the apartheid regime, like the Jim Crow South, like Orban's Hungary, relied on malapportionment, relied on gerrymandering, relied on hard barriers to keep itself in power. And then we can look at authoritarian regimes in Chile, under Pinochet. Again, we all agree this was authoritarianism removed through elections. So the idea that the ability of Hungarians to remove Orbán through elections therefore proves that Orbán's Hungary wasn't authoritarian, in addition to being a literal example of begging the question, assuming your conclusion in your premise, just doesn't fit with what we know about authoritarian regimes. They have been removed by elections. There is an argument that, oh, of course, in every democracy, winning parties try to entrench themselves by bending the rules and such. And this, too, is a canard.

In mature, stable, healthy democracies, do winning political parties attempt to hold on to power through patronage? Yes. Do they try to hold on to power through finding ways to strengthen their electoral coalition by delivering benefits to the people who support them? Yes. Do they even, here in the United States, for example, engage in tinkering on the margins, right, with the boundaries of districts and so on and so forth? Yes. But do they outright try to disenfranchise their opponents? No. Do they leverage the weight of electoral laws against their opponents and let things for their supporters slide by? No. They don't do these things. These things represent backsliding from democracy. They are not a normal part of democratic contestation. And the assertion that they are, again, is a canard. It's coming from people who are ideologically sympathetic to Orban, who might have even supported Orbán's regime, whether you've even taken money from Orbán's regime.

Viktor Orbán seems nervous.

This was the scene at a recent rally in opposition's stronghold Dürr, when he responded to heckling from opponents with a tirade against those who wanted a pro-Ukrainian government to take power in Hungary, he said, and send Hungarian money to Ukraine.

In the last few days before the election, allegations are swirling of Kremlin interference, fake assassination plots, burner phones to call Moscow during EU summits, all of which the Orban government denies. Viktor Orban may seem on the ropes, but some analysts argue he spent years engineering a political system that is unusually resistant to change, from a redesigned electoral map that favours his party to a media landscape now largely aligned with the government. Taken together, it leaves the opposition facing a far steeper path to unseating him than headline polls might suggest. But whichever way this vote goes, leaders throughout the region will be watching closely, especially Andrei Babiš in the Czech Republic and Robert Fyczo in Slovakia. Martin Poliacik is a former MP and political consultant affiliated with the opposition Progressive Slovakia Party. The biggest threat to Russia is free, independent and democratic Ukraine, because the Russian people would see that this is possible.

Very similar pattern is between Slovak pro-FITSO people and Orban. The biggest threat for FITSO is a pro-European Hungary, because then the Slovaks would see that this is possible, that he's not going to be there forever. I would assume that the new government in Hungary would come up with all the information about corruption and what's been happening since Orbán was in power. And Fico would lose his closest ally and also his diplomatic representation towards both Trump and Putin. Robert Fico has already threatened to continue blocking the EU's 90 billion euro loan to Ukraine if Viktor Orban is no longer in a position to do so. Martin Poliacik is in fact sceptical that Fico really has what it takes to become the new Orban. He's rather tired, he told me, and also lacks the diplomatic backup that Viktor Orban enjoys.

Here in Prague, Jindrich Šidlo, a leading political commentator and satirical journalist at Seznam Spravy, will be watching the election closely. The conventional wisdom is that a loss for Orbán will be a loss for Prime Minister Andrei Babiš and his plans to unpick the stitching of the Czech Republic's liberal democracy. But Jindrik Szilo says it's a little more nuanced than that.

I think Andrei Babiš realized during his first term that he can't run the country like Viktor Orbán.

That's because Orbán has been in power much longer, has completely different electoral results, there's no Senate in Hungary, and he was able to effectively write the electoral law to suit himself. Babiš may well aspire to this, but I think he now realistically understands it isn't possible. You can't do that in the Czech Republic. Even changing the electoral law requires agreement. You can't push it through by force. The Senate and the Chamber of Deputies both have to agree, and that doesn't happen easily. So in that sense, he's a much weaker version of Viktor Orban. Szydl says that Andrei Babiš is so good at politics that whether Orban wins or loses, he'll spin it to his advantage and will soon establish contact with Petr Madjar if he does indeed emerge victorious. He's a pragmatist. But if Orban does lose, there will be something of a reckoning. A lot of dirty laundry will be aired, and that could have consequences, says Andras Ledere, head of advocacy at the Hungarian Helsinki Committee.

In the case of the urban regime, you have an unimaginable amount of financial resources available supporting like-minded regimes. The effect of these resources on assisting like-minded regimes is, I think, unreasonably under-studied and explored. That Hungarian pipeline of support for other illiberal governments could be turned off virtually overnight this weekend. Or perhaps Viktor Orban will defy the polls and win this election, and the flow will be strengthened. There's a lot to play for, and no one's ready to write off Europe's great survivor just yet.

Next, Section B, tactics.

Orbán's been around for a very long time. I mean, he's been a fixture on the political scene in Hungary since the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 80s. But here he is with a very credible opponent in the election. When did you first come across this character, Peter Magyar? Well, I think he generally rose to prominence with the 2024 European parliamentary elections, and his party did very well in those elections. And again, using the shorthand for the EU Brussels was cock a hoop, because they thought right here, there is a credible opposition to Viktor Orban. Peter Magyar used to be in Viktor Orban's party. So we're not looking at a totally different political frame of mind. He is in that big group inside the European Parliament, the Conservatives, the EPP. But he probably fits very much to the right of that group. So we don't really know how much his policies will differ once he's in government.

Because if you have a look at how his party votes in the European Parliament, when it comes to migration, when it comes to these hot button issues in Hungary, they tend to vote with Viktor Orban's party. And otherwise, they'll often abstain. Might they be different when they get into government? We don't know that. They promise, at least on a foreign policy point of view and from Brussels point of view, to be interested in working with the European Union, interested also in working with the United States, but not to change the policy towards Ukraine. So what will that mean exactly? And definitely in Kiev, if not in Brussels as well, people are kind of wondering, OK, even if you move the blocker in chief, is this going to be a mini blocker? Or, you know, who is Peter Magyar really going to be? It's also been quite a spicy campaign. What can you tell us about the spicy parts of it? So Peter Magyar, who's the leader of the opposition, he said that there was possibly a sex tape out there. Now, Fidesz, the party of Viktor Orban, so they didn't know anything about it.

And we haven't seen this. I don't know if you've seen it, Tristan. It has not appeared yet. It has not appeared. But that was brought up. But it's a pretty nasty campaign as well. Peter Magyar certainly made an accusation at a big rally that there were sort of top Russian agents that were helping run the Orban campaign. And actually, I'd like to just pause there, if you don't mind, Tristan, just to say it about something about Orban and Russia, because I think this is key. He is seen as the closest to Russia. That is not what Hungarians would vote for. The way he sells it at home is that it's a pragmatic relationship with Russia. Why would you have a relationship? Well, because Russia is the place to get cheap energy from. And Hungarians would like access to cheap energy because they'd like to pay less. So it's less, I love Russia, and more Russia is a very useful partner for Hungary. It's in Hungary's national interest. Viktor Orban's also painted Russia as a reliable partner, unlike Europe that has strings attached. He's not passionate about Russia. He plays that very, very carefully. But his critics say he is in Russia's pocket. It's got to that extent that we have certain meetings inside the EU where other countries will say, let's not include the Hungarians because they're worried about leakage. And all of this has been refuted. So yeah, it's become quite nasty and personal and yeah, and the allegations of this sex tape as well. So I would say that there is a case that the spicy sensationalist aspects of this election campaign are actually germane to the coherence of the future of European politics, because these suggestions that Russia is now might be a player that interferes in elections, as some people have suggested is the case in Hungary, is going to become a regular occurrence in European politics. What would you say to that? Those allegations are nothing new, the idea of Russia misinformation or disinformation. And sometimes there's been proof that's been kind of presented by European governments. And in other cases, it's allegations made and assumptions made because the way that Russia operates is plausible deniability. I don't think this is a big secret or is it a scandalous or an outrageous thing to say that Russia is involved in what we call hybrid warfare. And so that is not getting the guns out and it's not getting the tanks out, but it can be sabotage, subterfuge, espionage or or disinformation, misinformation. So I think there is nothing new about that. Is it paranoia?

Part of it is paranoia. But paranoia, you could argue, is a very useful weapon as well for Russia if it wants to destabilize, which it seems to want to, and reduce coherence amongst European Union countries. Interestingly, critics of the Trump administration would say exactly the same thing, that China, Washington under Donald Trump and Russia seek to weaken ties between European countries because they're more easy to manipulate if they are separated rather than working as a force together. What we do see with the Trump administration that you can point to directly is direct interference in European politics. You quoted Donald Trump yourself speaking out in favor of Viktor Orban winning this election. Last year, when there was a presidential election in Poland, he had his homeland defense secretary fly over to Poland to speak out in favor of the Trump friendly candidate. And I mean Trump friendly. So in the, you know, in the crowd, people were wearing their MAGA hats and so on and so forth. Steve Bannon, who is very vocal in European politics, has spoken out in favor of Viktor Orban and his playbook and why his victory will be so important. Should we be shocked and appalled that even the campaigning of one J.D. Vance didn't turn it around for him? I'm trying to unpack the levels of irony of that question. There are about four levels. Unpack one to three, if you would like. I'll try to go upwards in terms of level of difficulty. I mean, for one thing, this was a domestic election, right? And so we Americans shouldn't think that everything is all about us or that an American turning up is going to make much of a difference one way or another. Second, this domestic Hungarian election was largely about grift. And we are the grifters. J.D. Vance is a candidate of grift. He is backed by billionaires.

The people immediately around him are grifters. So he can come and talk about God as he did, but that the resonance that the Trump administration has for most folks outside the U.S. is that it's a collection of mad grifters. And mad grifters are what Madhyar was campaigning against. And then the final thing one has to realize is that J.D. Vance doesn't actually know anything about democratic politics. I mean, he won the race in Ohio when he was backed by Peter Thiel. He was carried along as vice president. But the idea that you're going to send Vance off on a mission to get votes, whether it's in Peoria or whether it's in Budapest, is a little bit silly. But I mean, I'm just going to add this, though. I was also offended by what he did. I mean, I just don't think we have any right to be going to other countries and telling them how to vote.

And we certainly don't have any right to go to other countries and tell them that we know how God thinks they should vote, which is what Vance did. Because it looks kind of bad now because God was wrong for Vance, right? It's kind of bad on... Although the other thing that I wasn't going to mention, but it seems apropos of your remark, Trump is Jesus. Did you see this? Yeah. No, it is very much off-repos because they are self-deifying. They're in the self-deifying phase of their politics. How many phases are there? How many phases are there? How many post-deifying, self-deifying phases do we have to live through?

Well, in the case of the Roman Empire, the deifying habit, you know, expanded until the whole thing collapsed. Are we penultimate? I just wanted to say penultimate. Yeah. No, who can blame you? Are we penultimate or are we anti-penultimate? I think whether we're penultimate or anti-penultimate, you know, depends on, I mean, not to make the easy point, it depends on us, right? So the lesson of Hungary is, to return to where you started, is that you can beat these aspiring authoritarians in unfair elections. And you can beat them badly. You can beat them so soundly they know they've been beaten. But you have to do it. You can't just observe the stages of development, right? It is interesting that Trump is right now, he's not in a beef with Leo. Yeah, the Pope. His problem with Leo is that Leo believes in God. That's his problem with Leo.

And for Trump, there's no God but Trump, right? Trump's whole Christianity is about worshiping himself. So it's interesting to observe. But this kind of decline and fall, it may have a dynamic of its own. But where it goes, that depends on what people do. That depends on what we do. So the election in Hungary, as far as I understand, as you say, was a domestic election and it turned on grift slash corruption and also the economy. It did not turn on these broad issues of authoritarian rule and the supposed dismantling of the judiciary and the independent functioning of various institutions in Hungary. All these things that we rail about, some of the things that you've written about, were they at the center of the election defeat or not? Or were they indirectly? That's a really great question because I think it speaks to something important about how you have to run on the issue of democracy.

Because I don't, I mean, I care deeply about democracy. I really think the idea that the people should rule is the best idea we've had. but that word democracy doesn't rally people and i think it's understandable because people at least americans they'll associate democracy with this thing that they've got and the thing that they've got is pretty flawed it could be a lot better the way that it works and the way that it did work in hungary is to connect the issue of abuse of power with the things that people feel in their everyday lives. So in Hungary, you have independent media, not the big media, but the independent media that remained revealing scandals. And those scandals, one of which interestingly was also a sex abuse of minor scandal, but those scandals then connect the issue of abuse of power with people being poorer than they ought to be. And I think those dots have to be connected. If you just try to run on affordability as the Democrats, some of the Democrats want to do, you're aiming for a conventional victory and you're also not preparing yourself for dramatic things you have to do after you win. You can't just say affordability. You also can't just say democracy. You have to say abuse of power, grift, oligarchy, making everybody poor. It's only going to get worse.

What's the particular grift or corruption or abuse that is the winning formula as a matter of of street politics for Democrats in this country. I mean, I'm going to speak to that, but I just want to point out the converse. Since we're talking about Hungary, and I think this is related to your question, one of the things that the Hungarians who won didn't hesitate to say before and after the election is that there will be legal consequences for abuse of power, right? It's one of the things that Maduro said in his victory speech. And I think that Democrats have to be ready to say that too. What does that mean? It means that there are people committing crimes in the United States right now who are not being prosecuted and who are not afraid of being prosecuted. And if you want to deter further abuse, especially around the November election, you do have to make it clear that on the other side, there will be prosecutions.

Well, are you talking about Donald Trump? Is Donald Trump one of those people? Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to play devil's advocate for a moment. So we've been down this road. There was a first term of Donald Trump. People said there will be accountability. There were two impeachments. There was a special counsel investigation. And there were prosecutions. There were four indictments. And some, you know, not insane people will say whether that was right and proper and just and backed by the evidence or not, it fueled the comeback of Donald Trump in spectacular fashion. Do you have a reaction to that? I don't think that was a big campaign issue either way in the summer and autumn of 24. But I mean, I think regardless, you're paying a long term price if you don't prosecute the big criminals. And in the case of the second Trump administration, there are lots of them.

And if they attempt to rig the elections in some of the ways they've been talking about, there will be many more of them. So, no, I think in normal democratic countries, like France, like Italy, heads of state or heads of government get prosecuted on a regular basis. And this American notion that we could just make an exception, and I mean, forgive me, you're an expert on this and I'm not, but the way we went about it with Trump was pretty half-hearted. And I think that is the mistake and not the actual prosecution of him. But I don't want to personalize this because it's not personal. And this goes to your question about what the winning message is. One of the reasons why Americans are upset about the economy is because they understand that some people are doing extremely well and they're not. And they're coming to understand that some of those people are the people, you know, like the Witkoffs, like the Kushners, who are personally around the Trump administration, that the economy is being rigged in this very particular way.

You know, that's the way you make a reckoning. Like a reckoning is both an economic reckoning, it's a policy reckoning, but also there are going to be cases of people, I mean, I don't want to overdo this point. I just think you can't actually win an election without it. I think if you say, we're going to keep kicking that can down the line, then people think that you're cowardly. And, you know, what's the point?

You've been reporting on Orban's Hungary for years. You called his election loss a real turning point. What do you mean by that? A turning point for what? Although Hungary is a very small country, under 10 million people in Central Europe, it came to have, under Viktor Orban, an outsized significance. And that's because Orban, although democratically elected, although the leader of a member of the European Union and NATO, set out to build what he himself called an illiberal regime. So he became the first leader of a European democracy who said, I want to have a different kind of state. And he then began to export this model. In other words, to say, this is the way to do politics going forward. He had a particular form of propaganda that he used to justify it. He told Hungarians they were under threat. They were in great danger.

initially it was from immigrants who were supposedly diluting the blood of the Hungarian nation. Later, it was from the degenerate gender policies of the West. And he created this idea that he was fighting against some kind of modernity. And that model of doing politics spread and was copied and was emulated by a lot of other people, including by a lot of Americans. Right. So how did it influence the U.S.? I remember you wrote a story, I think it was last year, America's future is Hungary, which is a very strong statement. So what similarities were you noticing? I think that was in March. So that's about a year ago. The influence was very direct and specific. Hungarians came to Washington and Americans went to Hungary to learn how they did it. The leader of the Heritage Foundation described Orban not just as a model, but as the model for going forward.

And many aspects of what the second Trump administration did were copied from the Hungarians. And so, for example, the most obvious one is the takeover of the bureaucracy, the firing of state employees, the conversion of state employees from neutral people who are promoted based on merit to party hacks, which is part of what Trump and his people are trying to do, most obviously in the Justice Department and the FBI, but in all branches of government. This was a direct copy of what Orban did. And so they see him as a model and they talk about him as a model. It's not a kind of secret or underground movement. I mean, he was an open source of ideas for the illiberal and even autocratic part of the American MAGO movement. I don't think I realized the degree to which Orban innovated some of these ideas, like even the term illiberal democracy, because it's not exactly autocracy as we have in our imagination.

It's something in between. Like we spoke to a Hungarian journalist who described it wasn't exactly like a takeover of the Hungarian media. It wasn't literally controlling what people can and can't see on the Internet. A lot of it was more rich allies buying up media companies. Because I think when you understand that gray zone, you start to see the similarities between what's happening here more closely. Absolutely. I mean, and the media is another area where they are, I am 100 percent certain, they are directly copying what Orban did. They're using their friends in business to buy up media, whether it's CBS or whether it's CNN, in order to shape it so that it's more aligned with what the Trump administration wants it to be. That's the Hungarian model. And you're right. I didn't know that Orban was the very first to do that. In some ways, it's not that different from what Putin did.

But he was the first person to do it from within a democracy and to do it while bragging about it. So let's move on to the campaign. I remember this phrase you called Orban's campaign the first post-reality campaign. What did you mean by that? Orban, as I said, tried for many years to create some kind of scare, some kind of threat, something, an existential fear in Hungarians that was so important that it would justify his attempts to overthrow or change the political system, the political order. By this year, he'd run out of threats. And so the threat that he was using this year was the threat of Ukraine, a Ukrainian invasion, Ukrainian sabotage, some kind of Ukrainian influence inside Hungary. But the idea that Ukraine was going to invade Hungary was crazy. So Ukraine is not going to invade Hungary. Ukraine is fighting a war with Russia.

Ukraine does not want to invade another country. And so in order to create this idea, they built this whole world of AI videos with Zelensky snorting cocaine on a golden toilet. Also posters of him all over Budapest, all over the country with the headline, don't let him get the last laugh, sort of sinister versions of him and Ursula von der Leyen, who's the leader of the European Union, with Peter Magyar, who is the leader of the Hungarian opposition, you know, they're the risk, you know, Fidesz, Orban's party, we represent safety. In other words, they were building up this huge threat. And if you took one step back and thought about it for five seconds, you realize that this was nuts. It was not a real threat. It was invented by Orban. And so when I was there a few weeks ago, the real question that people were asking was, will people believe in it? I mean, can you invent a completely fictional threat online and in your rhetoric and in your political campaigning? And by the way, he was using the institutions of the state to do it as well. So he sent Hungarian soldiers to guard Hungarian energy installations, supposedly against Ukrainian sabotage. So they were using the state, they were creating these actions in order to make people afraid. And the question is, would people believe it? And now we know the answer, which is that they didn't, or at least not all of them did. Then we see the news that Orban loses the election and concedes to Peter Magyar, which is, you know, not inevitable.

It's certainly not the way it happened here in the 2020 election so smoothly. What did you think when you saw that? I was extremely surprised. Even on the day of the voting, people around Orban in the government were warning of terrorism. They were talking about threats. They were talking about violence. They were talking about the election being stolen. They were preparing verbally and in terms of propaganda to announce that the election was false or would be falsified. And that was another topic that came up a couple of weeks in advance of the election as well. People were ready for all kinds of different outcomes, you know, that the election would be challenged. And there were lawyers who were prepared for that. I mean, just like in the U.S. People were prepared for a challenge and they were prepared to fight it. I mean, my guess is that Orban resigned because the gap between the parties was so large and the number of seats in parliament that the opposition won was so uncontrovertible that there was nothing to challenge and that he would have lost, he thought he would have lost by challenging it. And my guess is that he and his party will try and make a comeback in other ways. I mean, that's another, maybe another conversation.

Right. OK, this has been implicit in a lot of our conversation. Now I just want to make it explicit, which is what does this mean for the U.S.? How does this reverberate over here in a country which, as you said, has used Orban as a model? I mean, J.D. Vance went to Hungary. Trump supported Orban. Do you have a sense of what this might mean for their project of cultural overhaul, which is modeled on Hungary? I think this offers an important corrective. They believe that what they are doing is inevitable. In other words, they will win and then nobody will be able to challenge them again. And what the Hungarian election shows is that these systems can end and they can be overthrown by enough people voting, enough people caring, enough people being involved. And I think that will inspire people who dislike what Trump is doing to the American state, whether those people come from the center right or the center left.

It shows that these changes don't have to last forever. It's a reminder that nothing is forever. You don't get to change the American political system and say, right, we won. It's over. Democracy ended. And now we run the show indefinitely. And the Hungarian election, I think, reminds people of that. And that will affect both people in power. And I think it will affect people who are campaigning in the midterms this year and in the presidential election a couple of years down the road. What about at one level broader, the momentum? I mean, one way to tell the story is this election kind of halted the momentum of what seemed like a fast growing, you know, rise of autocracy, a liberal democracy. What do you think about that? I think this election absolutely halted this sense of forward motion that you had from the European far right as well as the American MAGA movement.

They were acting like this was their time and their moment, and it was just a matter of days and weeks or months before they took control and before they changed everything. I think that Trump's war in Iran was a breaking point for a lot of them. It's very, very unpopular in Europe. Suddenly it made closeness or proximity to Trump or to MAGA seem less attractive to a lot of European leaders, including on the far right. And this will serve as a further reminder that you can get too far away from the ideals of democracy and the rule of law that people still believe in in Europe. And I think it will definitely have a chilling effect on the language and maybe even the political momentum of the European far right.

And finally, Section C, International. Voters in Hungary have ousted the country's longtime prime minister, Viktor Orban. The TISA party of center-right candidate Peter Mogiam won the election in a landslide victory, garnering the two-thirds majority required to enact constitutional reforms. As you see right there in Budapest, Mogiam's supporters celebrated his victory deep into the night. And European equities, they surged on the news of the election of a pro-European candidate.

Peter Moglia just wrapped up a long three-hour press conference. Let's take a listen to part of what he said.

We'll do everything in our power to ensure that this truly marks the beginning of a new era. For the Hungarian people did not vote for a mere change of government, but for a complete regime change. It's all change at this metro station in Budapest as Hungarians celebrate the beginning of a new political era.

The overwhelming victory of centre-right newcomer Peter Madja after 16 years of rule by Viktor Orbán's nationalists has come as a welcome surprise for many. Genuinely unbelievable we had Fidesz ruling for so long. I'm only 24. I essentially grew up with Fidesz. and now there is a glimpse of hope that we have a chance to change everything. We weren't part of the European Union that much and I really want to be part of the European Union. So, yeah, I mean, I travel a lot, so it's very important for Hungarians, I think. Many Hungarians hope Orbán's defeat will unlock billions of euros in European Union funds that had long been frozen over concerns about Hungary's democratic standards. For me it's very important that we work intensively with the new Hungarian government on funds that have to be delivered, reforms that have to be delivered, but funds then that can be delivered because the Hungarian people deserve it.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the clear election result highlights the resilience of democratic societies.

Right-wing populism suffered a heavy defeat in Hungary yesterday, and this does not only concern Hungary. A very clear signal is being sent out from Hungary against right-wing populism throughout the world. Orban's defeat by his former colleague turned opposition challenger has deprived Moscow of a strong ally. The Kremlin's initial response was muted.

Hungary has made its choice, and we respect that choice.

We expect to continue our highly pragmatic contacts with Hungary's new leadership. We've heard statements about a willingness to conduct a dialogue.

Obviously, that will be beneficial for both Moscow and Budapest.

Respect and freedom is the full name of Peter Madza's Cisapati, and hopes are high, both within and outside Hungary, that that's exactly what it will deliver.

We have team coverage of this election. I'm joined now from Budapest by DW correspondent Ferenc Gahl and from Brussels, DW correspondent Rosie Burchard. To both of you, it's good to have you with us. I want to start with you, Ferenc. Voter turnout in Hungary's election was the highest since the collapse of communism back in 1989.

What issue or issues brought the voters out?

I think the single biggest issue we need to focus on here is the economic one. economy has really been on people's minds on voters minds here not only because wages have been stagnant and low here in hungary but also because inflation has been high the cost of living has been rising over the past months and years and there are several other issues like of course also um you know health infrastructure here has been underfunded for a while that has bothered a lot of people but especially the economy has been so important because for a long time people felt they were doing well under this government, even though there were accusations of corruption. There have been accusations of corruption for years. But a lot of voters seem to be putting up with that, willing to put up with it, because they felt economically they were also benefiting.

This seems to have changed now. And another important factor we need to keep in mind is that Peter Madja really managed to mobilize so many people also by campaigning heavily in rural areas, traveling the country, sometimes with five, six, seven stops a day, different villages, and targeting areas that had been Fidesz strongholds in the past. So this certainly also helped him to get this victory that has been such an impressive landslide that we've seen. Rosie, we know also that this anti-corruption message, we know that it resonated with voters in Hungary. It was a message that European Union leaders in Brussels were more than happy to hear, wasn't it?

You bet it was. There is a hope among many EU officials and diplomats that I've been speaking to press and that I've been speaking to that this is now the beginning of the end of the era of Viktor Orban as the EU's obstructor-in-chief. And I really cannot count how many EU meetings I have stood outside, reported on, where we have been covering Orban blocking some EU decision or other, whether that's with regards to sanctions against Russia, decisions on the European budget. Orban has been at loggerheads with Brussels on all sorts of issues and has regularly blamed the EU for all sorts of problems without, of course, thinking of withdrawing from the European Union, which is something that he could have done should he have wished to. Now, what's really striking is the enthusiasm that EU officials really seem to be willing to share. We heard Ursula von der Leyen saying that Hungarians are reclaiming a European path.

But, of course, it's worth noting that there are many people who are disappointed by this election result. Viktor Orban has plenty of allies within the European Union and I think many of those members of that populist right wing or far right grouping will be looking at this election carefully and perhaps drawing some lessons. One of them may be to give the US Trump administration a wide berth because how extraordinary was it to see US Vice President J.D. Vance jetting into Budapest, throwing his political weight behind, trying to get Viktor Orban re-elected. And it was a failure. Orban lost in a landslide to his rival, Peter Magyar. So, Rosie, briefly, if you could, what is the European Union now expecting from Hungary?

Big anti-corruption reforms, and they've asked for swift progress. Given that Magyar has this supermajority, there will be expectations that he can deliver on trying to improve, for example, judicial independence, then unblocking some of those things that have been held up by Hungarian vetoes, the likes of a major 90 billion euro loan for Ukraine, which has been on the table and blocked by Orban, and also a new round of sanctions against Russia. There are some other things. Orban had been blocking, for example, sanctions against some members of the Israeli government. Peter Magyar was pretty mealy-mouthed when asked about this today, and that's something I would say we don't really know what his foreign policy orientation will be and what this means for Hungary's place in the world. Yeah, Veric, you know, the euphoria of this election, some are saying, will soon be replaced by the sobering reality that Peter Mogliar is not so different from Viktor Orban.

Some are even saying that Peter Mogliar is Viktor Orban 2.0. Is he? of course at this point in time it is hard to say what we know that he shares a past that is not dissimilar to that of Viktor Orban which is that he has of course been a Fidesz insider he was part of that inner circle of that party he was married to a former minister in the Fidesz government and for many years he was just part of this whole system within and around the government Now, there is also parallels if you look at that it's not a party that has very, very different views from Fides' original worldview. It is still a conservative movement and it is very strongly focused on him as a person. But really, the main similarity, you could also say, to, for example, Fides in the early days is that it is such a strong grassroots movement as well.

So there have been so many organizational units throughout the country where people have volunteered to join this party. So it really has a very strong voter base across the country, which is a parallel also to Fidesz in its early days, which was a young democratic movement after communism in Hungary. But then, of course, now with this two-thirds majority that Peter Magyar got, it is a massive chance, but it also carries a lot of responsibility and frankly risks, of course, because as you mentioned earlier, it could enable him and it does enable him and his government to institute constitutional reforms. And that, of course, you know, just simply carries risks. And this is where the fears come in that he might turn out to be a politician that also takes advantage of these risks. We don't know simply at this stage, but this is certainly something that some people here in Hungary and also outside of Hungary fear and we'll have to keep an eye on it, how things develop.

European Union's longest-serving leader has conceded power, and there is now a new prime minister in charge of Hungary. Peter Modja has been greeted like a rock star in the Hungarian capital after the party of the opposition leader won a landslide election victory. It heralds sweeping change in Hungary. after 16 years under Viktor Orban, with ramifications across Europe. The outgoing PM is a friend of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and had often been a thorn in the side of Brussels, repeatedly blocking funding for Ukraine, which he accused of trying to force his country into war with Russia. But now Mr Madhya, a former Orban ally who became his fiercest critic, has started a new era with his TISA party. He told a huge crowd in Budapest that the country had been liberated from the Orban regime.

We did it. The teaser and Hungary have won this election. Not by a little, but by a lot. In fact, by an awful lot. Together we brought down the Orban regime. Together we liberated Hungary. We took back our homeland. Thank you. Thank you all. The congratulations from other EU leaders have been effusive. Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called it a historic moment for European democracy. Our correspondent Nick Thorpe sent this report from Budapest.

As the news broke that the Orban era was over, the Hungarian capital erupted in a sea of celebrations. People laughed and shouted and sang and danced in the streets. To the surprise of many here, Viktor Orban conceded swiftly, almost gracefully.

The result of the election is painful for us, but unambiguous, he told his shocked supporters. The possibility and responsibility of governing was not granted to us. I have congratulated the winning party. We will also serve our country and the Hungarian nation.

Reaction in the huge crowd lining the shores of the Danube opposite the parliament was instantaneous. Young people who were toddlers 16 years ago could hardly believe that Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party could be defeated. I've been waiting against the Fidesz Parliament for forever, so I'm really happy that there is finally one person who is strong enough to actually challenge him for this wealth. I hope it means that we are getting closer to Europe and I don't know, it means more democracy, just more freedom for people. Hungary is European, Hungary is part of the West and not the East. And we believe that those are the countries we should make and establish and nourish our alliances with. Peter Madja fielded phone calls from some prominent European leaders, among them President Macron of France, Kier Starmer from the UK and Ursula von der Leyen on behalf of the European Union.

Then he came on stage.

The TISA party and Hungary won this election, he told the cheering crowd. Not a small victory, a huge, enormous victory. Together we toppled the Orbán regime. Together we liberated Hungary. We took back our homeland.

Before the election, I asked András Baka, former president of the Supreme Court, what a TISA victory would mean for Hungary, and how difficult the task facing a government led by Peter Madja would be. Hungary definitely needs a new constitution. It takes time to formulate, but it's not impossible, I think. But it requires a two-thirds majority, requires a serious judicial work and taking into account the law of the European Union, which is obligatory to Hungary too. So we have to change the system. And changing the system is exactly what the Hungarian people gave Peter Magyar a mandate to do by electing him with a two-thirds majority on Sunday.

After the celebrations, an immense task faces Peter Magyar as Prime Minister. On Sunday night, he held out an olive branch to Fidesz voters, inviting them to work together to rebuild the country. All those who've stolen the national wealth, however, he warned, will have to face justice.

Nick Thorpe with that report from Budapest. So how will the election result affect Hungary's relations with the Russian president Vladimir Putin, a close ally of Viktor Orban? Here's our Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg. This is clearly very bad news for Vladimir Putin. To explain why, let me use the kind of language that Donald Trump uses about cards. Who's got the cards? Who doesn't have the cards? For years, Viktor Orban was a super strong card in Vladimir Putin's hand. A sort of Trump card, if you like. This pro-Moscow, pro-Putin leader of an EU country, of a NATO member state, who opposed further sanctions against Russia, who opposed the idea of further assistance for Ukraine, who opposed the idea of Ukraine's accession to the European Union. This is why he was so useful for Russia. And I think the Kremlin saw him as a destabilising force inside the European Union.

Having said that, I'm sure we'll see attempts by the Kremlin to try to reach out to the new administration in Budapest. Also, I think the Kremlin probably reckons it has a few other cards to play regarding Hungary. The country over the last few years has become heavily dependent on Russian energy. That isn't going to change overnight. Neither will the Russian authorities' attempts to destabilise the situation, I think, inside the European Union. Although, from what Russian commentators have been predicting in recent weeks, if the economic situation in Europe gets worse, if the energy situation in Europe gets worse, then destabilisation could be unavoidable. I've already read some comments on pro-Kremlin websites suggesting that Ukraine will get more assistance from the EU. Hungary, under Viktor Orban, had been opposing tens of billions of dollars of additional aid for Ukraine. So that might now go through. And, as I say, these pro-Kremlin commentators were suggesting that the war will continue.

First of all, Katja, we'd like to share with you a video from mid-January, Viktor Orban posted on X. I'm going to show it to you. Could you talk us through it, please? Hi, this is Rob Schneider. Dear France and Hungary. Cher Patriot Hongroi. So what we have here is Viktor Orban posting a video where you see the great and the good of the right and far right, largely in Europe, but also beyond. We've got former Polish President Morawiecki, known also to be very much on the right, sharing this idea of an anti-immigration stance, a pro-Christian stance, very Eurosceptic. Alice Weidel here of the AFD, the far right party of Germany. Giorgio Meloni, Italy's prime minister. We have a guest starring appearance of Javier Millet of Argentina, a real close ally of Donald Trump's, for example. Interestingly here, you also have Benjamin Netanyahu. We even have Rob Schneider there. He is a US comedian. And all of these figures saying, vote for Viktor Orban. He stands for the right values and he is absolutely necessary to lead Hungary. So it's sort of support for Viktor Orban ahead of his election and trying to show that although he has many opponents in Europe, within the European Union, this then was a video for him saying, look, I have loads of friends, loads of supporters, leaders of political parties and big figures in Europe and beyond. Well, all of this was followed up by praise from the Trump administration. Marco Rubio visited Hungary in February and he said, President Trump is deeply committed to your success because your success is our success. Then last month, President Trump himself appeared in a video shown ahead of Orban's keynote speech at the CPAC Hungary conference, which is a kind of conservative action committee conference, which happens regularly in Hungary.

I also want to send my best wishes to Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who I am endorsing, as you know. I am endorsing his election, which is coming up pretty soon. What does it mean that all these figures on the right are so explicitly endorsing Viktor Orban? Why is it that they are all coming out in support of him? So I think with Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, there was a particular message sent, actually. because when did he go? So Marco Rubio had just been to the Munich Security Conference and he gave a gentle-ish speech to the Europeans there, but with a very clear message. We see you as our allies, but only if you adhere to our value system. Now, who adheres to the Trump value system? Viktor Orban. What are we talking about there? Traditional family values, they would say. Christian values. So when they say his success, as in Viktor Orban's success at the ballot box will be our success, that is seen as a success for their vision for Europe. And it is a vision that Viktor Orban shares, that in his 16 years in government, but particularly in the last years, he has been outspoken about. It's also curbing woke expression, as they would see in society, you know, getting control in academic institutions over NGOs and so on and so on and so on.

That is the Orban playbook. And it is a playbook that he would say inspired Donald Trump in his re-election campaign. And certainly Donald Trump mentioned Viktor Orban on that re-election campaign. And you do have to think, I mean, I remember thinking at the time, why you mentioned Hungary? I mean, Hungary is this tiny, tiny European country. Even for so many Americans, they see, you look at Europe as it's a tiny place made up of tiny countries. Well, even within the tiny countries, Hungary is a really, really small one. And yet Viktor Orban punches above his weight on the world stage in the eyes of Donald Trump, but also here in Europe. And the reason you saw all of those right wing figures in his video is for the same reason.

That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. You can record and re-record a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes. You can reach us on signal at the handle bestofleft.01 or simply email me to jay at bestofleft.com. The additional sections of the show included clips from Last Week Tonight, The Majority Report, Takes by Jamel Bowie, Inside Edition, The Global Story, Stay Tuned with Preet, Radio Atlantic, DW News, and Global News Podcast. Further details are in the show notes. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Dion and Aaron for their production work for the show and co-starring in Solved. Thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, including her co-starring on Solved. Thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community where you can also continue the discussion.

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