Lessons from Hungary

Last week, the ranks of the world’s rightwing dictators got a little thinner following the overwhelming defeat of Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orban by his anti-corruption challenger Peter Magyar.

Like many pundits have claimed in the aftermath of this stunning democratic victory, my Fighting Fascism co-hosts and I have always been experts on the politics of Hungary. (Just kidding. I’m often reminded in moments like this of an Onion article that came out shortly after September 11th, “Area Man Acts Like He’s Been Interested in Afghanistan All Along.”)

So we invited two actual experts who have spent a great deal of time studying Orban’s regime—senior Vox correspondent Zack Beauchamp and political scientist Dr. Jennifer McCoy—to join us on the podcast to talk through how Magyar beat Hungary’s longtime strongman and what lessons this victory might offer for our fight against fascism here in the United States. If you were excited about Hungary’s watershed election and want to understand the dynamics better, I definitely recommend checking out this episode—you can find it here on Apple Podcasts or here on Spotify.

There’s one takeaway in particular I want to stress from this political earthquake. But first, I should share a caveat: International comparisons are tricky. As Zack Beauchamp warned us of Hungary, “It’s a different country from the United States, with a fundamentally different political context and culture.”

Still, I’d argue that there is a lesson for Democrats from Magyar’s victory, and it’s this: We need to redraw the lines of conflict that define our politics. As Dr. McCoy put it during our conversation, “When we’re experiencing what we call ‘pernicious polarization’—extreme toxic polarization that’s harming democracy—then simply trying to depolarize may not work, because it’s very hard to bring together these two sides that have been so polarized. Instead, we need to shift the axis of conflict that the incumbent government has polarized around—whether that’s left-versus-right, or in the case of Hungary, EU-versus-Russia—to another definition of the conflict that can galvanize a large majority of people.”

So what was the axis of conflict around which Magyar sought to repolarize the Hungarian people? As Dr. McCoy explained, “Magyar defined the conflict as the nation versus the clan, referring to Orban’s clan, by which he meant a corrupt oligarchy. And by the nation he meant the good of the people.”

It is indisputable that Magyar ran against the corruption of Orban’s billionaire buddies. He decried how “a few families own half the country.” He proposed a wealth tax on the ultra rich. He promised to end the culture of elite impunity that flourished under Orban. As Dr. McCoy summarized, “It used to be called the 99% versus the 1%. It’s the people of the country versus the billionaires, versus the corrupt oligarchy.”

Magyar’s approach here should sound very familiar to anyone who’s heard James Talarico say, “It’s not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom,” or Graham Platner growl, “The enemy is the oligarchy—it’s the billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell us out,” or Zohran Mamdani announce, “We’re taxing the rich,” or Elizabeth Warren declare, “The wealthy have avoided accountability time and again,” or heard Bernie Sanders speak for more than two minutes at any point in his life.

This is an axis of conflict that can appeal to any society defined by extreme inequality, where the system feels rigged and the wealthy and well-connected get away with murder. And it’s an approach that Democrats absolutely must embrace if they want to build the kind of big-tent majorities necessary to do to Trumpism what Magyar just did to Orbanism.

Most rank-and-file Democrats seem to understand this. Indeed, the only real obstacle standing in the way of this populist turn is the corporatist wing of the party—the elected officials, consultants, think tanks, and pundits who continue fighting like hell to protect their Wall Street, Big Oil, AIPAC, crypto, and AI patrons. In my opinion, if there’s one lesson we should draw from the defeat of Orban, it’s that these corporate shills are threatening our ability to achieve a victory like the one we saw last week in Hungary. If we want to build the kind of repolarized supermajority that Magyar was able to bring together in opposition to Orban, we need to break the corporatists’ stranglehold on the Democratic Party—and once it’s broken, we must never look back.