Terms of Engagement – Orbán’s Ouster: Impacts on Budapest, Brussels, MAGA, and Beyond

Archon Fung: Hi, this is Terms of Engagement. I’m Archon Fung, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.

Stephen Richer: And I’m Steven Richer. I’m the former elected Maricopa County recorder and I’m now a fellow at the Ash Center.

Archon Fung: So, we’re pre-recording the show today, but one of us probably I will be monitoring comments when we go live and hopefully be able to respond in the comments chat. But we’re recording on Monday, the day before we’re airing. And so if you’d like to join the conversation, please type in the comments or send them to info@Ash.harvard.edu.

Stephen Richer: And of course, we’ll also be recording this obviously and it’s available on YouTube in all major streaming platforms and we appreciate whether you watch live or whether you watch it on recording. And as always, Archon and I are speaking on behalf of ourselves and only ourselves, not the Ash Center, not the Harvard Kennedy School, and certainly not Harvard University.

Archon Fung: Absolutely. And just in the news today, of course, everybody’s probably been following the, I don’t know, I guess it’s not really shocking because it’s happened so many times, but terrible assassination attempt or the shooting at the White House correspondence dinner. Steven, what did you think of that?

Stephen Richer: I read the manifesto and it sent chills down my spine a little bit. I think it’s going to be very interesting to see how the jury receives that, how the court receives that rather in terms of his lucidity, his sanity to be able to proceed in what obviously will be a very intense charges against him. So yeah, just sad. We can’t have anything nice in this country it seems. No.

Archon Fung: And there was a TIME story about how many of the people in the ballroom themselves had already kind of had run-ins with political violence, including Steven Scalise.

Stephen Richer: Was there.

Archon Fung: Yeah.

Stephen Richer: And Steve Scalise was there. Yeah.

Archon Fung: Right. So it’s terrible. And I’m sure that in subsequent episodes we’ll be talking about political violence. On a happier note, I was reading about the London Marathon. I didn’t see it, but not one, but the first two finishers broke the two minute, or two hour. barrier. So the winner finished at 1:59:30 and the person right behind him, 1:59:40, unbelievable.

Stephen Richer: It always feels good as a runner myself to know that somebody maintained a pace that I couldn’t even run for one mile. That person maintained it for 26.2 miles. But I think it’s amazing. And I think we’re always redrawing the line of surely a human can’t get faster than this. And I don’t know if it’s just improved technology, improved shoes and improved training, but records are made to be broken.

Archon Fung: It’s unbelievable. I can’t run any distance for twice the pace that they ran for 26 miles. All right Steven, what are we talking about?

Stephen Richer: A 40-yard dash?

Archon Fung: Yeah, right. Maybe. Maybe. All right. What are we talking about today?

Stephen Richer: Yeah. So actually, we’re not talking about things that are as recent, but still recent in the grand scheme of things, which is of course the Hungarian election because on April 12th, Hungarian voters went to the polls in record numbers. Turnout reached roughly 78% the highest in that country since the fall of communism. And they delivered results that at least to me, somebody who doesn’t study Hungary very much were a bit surprising because it was a stunning rebuke to leader Viktor Orbán who had governed Hungary for 16 years. Peter Magyar, apologies if I got that wrong. 44 year old former Fidesz insider turned opposition leader, led his Tisza party to two thirds super majority. And that was important because that has constitutional implications when they got the two thirds majority. And so really I think it can be classified as something of a blowout win against Orbán for the opposition, two thirds of the seats for the opposition party now.

And importantly, Orbán immediately conceded, said the day was a sad day, but said it was a rebuke that the people had spoken, rebuked to his government. And so he will now be out of power for the first time in 16 years and here to make sense of that all and tell us all the things, all the names I just mispronounced is going to be our guest who Archon is going to introduce now.

Archon Fung: Our guest, we couldn’t have a better guest to talk about this subject. Our guest is Professor Kim Lane Scheppele. She is the Lawrence S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. She spent decades studying constitutional systems under stress and she’s done deep fieldwork in Hungary, first going there in 1989 or shortly there right after the fall of communism. And then if people want something on their reading list, you should check out her 2022 essay in the Journal of Democracy called How Viktor Orbán Wins. It’s become essential reading for anyone trying to understand how autocrats consolidate power. And in this discussion, we’ll be talking about how that didn’t work and why. I believe she has a forthcoming book, “Destroying Democracy by Law,” which will be with Harvard University Press. Kim, welcome to the show.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Well, thank you for inviting me and really lovely to talk about the subject. By the way, I also have a piece now called How Viktor Orbán Loses, which is on the website of the Journal of Democracy. So that’s the follow-up to the article you mentioned.

Archon Fung: Oh. Well, I wasn’t aware of that. We’ll have to check it out and hopefully everybody watching will check it out. Not right now, but after our episode is done.

Stephen Richer: I read the 2022 one because Archon sent that over in advance and I do want to get to that. But first I want to address a grievous omission from your introduction by Archon, which is that you are a graduate of both your MA and your PhD of the University of Chicago, which is three of the last four. And as a two degree Chicago holder myself, I want to recognize that.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Thank you. The University of Chicago made me who I am, which is to say combative and fierce and able to handle anything.

Stephen Richer: Cantankerous a bit odd, maybe not that

Kim Lane Scheppele: Socially

Stephen Richer: Adept.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Exactly. All that stuff. Going to a university that tore down the football stadium to build a library was my idea of a great place to go.

Archon Fung: I apologize for my sin of omission.

Stephen Richer: So in that 2022 article, you talk about how the polls prior to that election suggested that Orbán was going to struggle to hold onto power, but that for a number of reasons that turned out to not be the case and it wound up being a resounding Victory for Orbán. And you talked about the challenges of replacing somebody like Orbán through an electoral system. So fast forward to 2026, were you surprised that somebody like Orbán could be ousted through what is sort of just a normal voting process?

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah. Well, the Hungarian elections were completely rigged after 2010. They were problematic even before 2010 because the law that was in place from the immediate first election after the end of communism was a very disproportionate law. They were worried that there’d be tons of little parties. They wound up developing an electoral system that puts thumb on the scale of the plurality winner. It turns out the Hungarian election system quickly devolved into six regular parties. Yeah, by the mid 2000s, it had gone down to sort of two and a half parties. So when Viktor Orbán won under the system he inherited in 2010, he got 53% of the votes and 67% of the seats in the parliament. That was what it looked like before he got there. But then he rigged the system and he rigged the system using some traditional methods and using some methods he borrowed from other places.

So for example, one of the first laws that he got through his parliament, and I should mention actually that the Constitution they inherited and had modified from the Communist Constitution allows the Constitution to be amended by a single two-thirds vote of the unicameral parliament. So when you’ve got this disproportionate election law and that easy amendment rule, it was sort of an accident waiting to happen that you would get somebody with a constitutional majority that wanted to take Hungary on a, shall we say, an unconstitutional constitutional course. And that’s what happened. Okay. So what they did was to pass their first constitutional amendment, cut the size of the parliament in half. Everybody voted for it because it was a parliament of almost 500 members, small country. And so again, very popular. What it gave Warban the opportunity to do was to gerrymander the entire country so that by 2014, when his popularity had dropped, his domestic popularity had dropped below 45%, he got 68% of the seats and that was a combination of a gerrymander and a bunch of really technical rules that you could read about more in that article.

So the system was just imbalanced and then by 2018, the opposition figured out it had to unify in order to beat the system. They unified, they did not beat the system because there were so many rules that resulted in … Even if you had majority support in the population, you couldn’t necessarily win an Orbán system, ditto in 2022. So 2026 comes along and Peter Magyar, it’s Madge-are, like hodgepodge. Magyar.

Archon Fung: Magyar.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Magyar. Exactly. Exactly.That GY is actually a letter in the Hungarian alphabet and it’s pronounced like a DG in English. So this is your Hungarian lesson. Thank you. It’s a totally phonetic language and it’s gorgeous. So if you want to spend a huge amount of time learning a language that only allows you to talk to 15 million people in the world, I highly recommend Hungarian. So anyway, so Peter Magyar comes along and he’s way ahead in the polls. He’s been way ahead in the polls for more than a year. And so what everybody was saying, I mean people who don’t know the Hungarian election system were saying he’s going to win. What I was saying was, I don’t know if he can win. It depends on how those votes percolate through this highly rigged system. And so I was saying up until like a month before that even with a 10 point lead in the polls that was stable in every single pollster that was a real pollster, Orbán has some fake pollsters that make stuff up.

Okay. But if you looked at the real pollsters, no way he could lose unless you realized how things went through the system. And then about maybe three weeks ahead of the election, he hit what really is in the Hungarian system a tipping point because how did Orbán get two thirds with 40%, 45% of the vote? It was because of how those votes were distributed. And what you could see in the polls that were more detailed running up to the election was that Peter Magyar had managed to duplicate the voting distribution pattern that meant that if he could just win 50% of the vote, say he could flip the thing and sure enough, he gets 53% of the vote, but he wins 71% of the seats because he actually walked into Orbán’s system, reproduced how it got rigged in one direction and flipped it in the other direction.

And just to say, and again, there’s lots of in the weeds detail, but the crucial point was that Orbán had weighted the system so that almost every rural vote counted for two or three times an urban vote. So you had to win the countryside. And in every place, I’m sure both of you will know this, in every place where right wing populists have come to power, it’s because they win the rural less educated vote and the cosmopolitan vote will always go for the challenger. So you needed to win over the base that supported that election system. And so Peter Modyar started two years ahead of the election and he campaigned in virtually every village and small settlement in person across the countryside because again, he’s not only facing Orbán’s rigged voting system, but he’s facing Orbán’s rigged media system. Orbán’s message is across all the TV, all the radio, all the papers with any substantial circulation and most of the internet.

Archon Fung: So he had to play for Orbán’s core constituency because the maps were so rigged to favor that core constituents. Exactly. That’s a tough political uphill fight.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Exactly. I mean, it’s just when you realize what he had to do to flip it, it’s even more dramatic than just being ahead in the polls, right? It’s being ahead in the polls and distributing the votes to win. And he’s a lawyer. He’s a very good lawyer actually. Orbán and his whole team are lawyers. That’s why I hate to say it, but fun studying them because they come up with all kinds of innovative legal things and just figuring out how they do what they do is like a giant Rubik’s cube, which of course Hungarians also invented. And so just looking at their system is kind of fascinating from just an intellectual point of view. So Peter Magyar was able to figure out how the system was rigged and aim his campaign at basically reproducing the way that Orbán was able to win these super majorities without super majority votes.
And

Stephen Richer: Game theory, right? Wasn’t John von Neumann Hungarian?

Kim Lane Scheppele: Oh, they’re all Hungarian, right? I mean, there were so many- Right. So Yanosh van Neumann, as he’s called in Hungarian, absolutely. And then you go to all the Hungarians that were involved in Los Alamos and I mean, Hungarians are amazing. They win every mathematical prize in every swimming competition. And actually, the week that the Nobel Prizes are awarded is like holiday week in Hungary. Everybody is like glued to the radio to figure out how many Hungarians are going to get prizes this year.

Stephen Richer: A lot of them came to the United States, to win.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Most of them are not still in Hungary. I mean, the most recent Katalin Karikó, who was the researcher who invented the NRA vaccines. And of course László Krasznahorkai got the literary prize last year. I remember reading somebody who was doing publicity for the city of Budapest asked me to look over their flyer to attract tourists and they said, home of three million people and 41 Nobel Prize winners. And I said, most people don’t pick where they’re going to go on vacation by how many Nobel Prize winners there are. I would.

Archon Fung: I would.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah. Well, I would too. That’s why I moved there. The whole country is really good at this stuff. And they’re also really good at that kind of lawyering, I mean, both for good and for devious stuff. So it’s the same kind of immense intellectual abilities now gone to, shall we say, not such great purposes, but on the way back.

Stephen Richer: I do want to put one footnote

Kim Lane Scheppele: Because

Stephen Richer: I’m an election administrator and I’m honor bound. When you say rigging, you mean changing the laws such that they advantage the incumbent party oftentimes through the manifestation of gerrymandering, which is of course a lawful strategy in the United States, a lawful strategy maybe in Hungary too, but still can skew advantage as opposed to stuffing ballot boxes.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Exactly. So election day is always fine. The election administrators are straight shooters, like you don’t have any trouble with election day administration. It’s all in rigging the rules. So let me give you another example. So Viktor Orbán gave, and when I say him, it’s like him and his two thirds parliament gave citizenship to Hungarians and all the neighboring states and they’ve been channeling welfare payments to them. If you’re from Ukraine or you’re from Serbia, you get an EU passport with that. So very attractive thing. And also if you’re in these poor regions where the Hungarian populations live on the edges of Hungary, they were getting Hungarian social welfare benefits. So he gave them citizenship, also gave them the right to vote. That vote, which is now … So the Hungarian electorate is about six million voters, five and a half in a normal election. We were close to six for this, small population.

The number of voters in the near abroad is 500,000. Now those votes are completely unmonitored. They send the mail ballots. There are bundlers who collect these things in villages and walk them across the border and deliver them. Nobody has any way of checking whether those are real voters, whether they cast real ballots, whether the bundlers opened up the ballots throughout all the ones for everybody else. Those ballots have come in in the last four elections, 90%, 95% for Orbin. And that’s 500,000 votes you can throw into the system. Those votes are counted a week after the election. So you can wait and see how many votes you need and then throw them in. It’s a little complicated how they get figured in, but they do get figured in. In the meantime, Orbán’s policies have driven a lot of Hungarians out of the country. So there are lots of Hungarians that were fired from public service jobs that were affected by the loss of academic freedom that were journalists who needed to find work abroad after all the news organizations were taking over-

Stephen Richer: Who would be the normal opposition?

Kim Lane Scheppele: They’re the opposition. Now, because they once lived in Hungary and they have an address in Hungary, they can vote in constituencies as well as for party lists. The over the ballot, they were the border ones can only vote on party lists. So what they’ve set up is a system in which if you have an address in Hungary, you can’t vote by mail. They have no way they say I’m mailing you a ballot. Instead, you have to register and go to an embassy or consulate in the country where you’re living and cast your ballot there. And what they do with those ballots is you show up and suddenly they change the idea you need to vote, but you’ve gone from Edinburgh down to London to vote and then you can’t get back up and back to find your passport in addition to your voting guard, for example, or they’ve actually sent out wrong information about where to go to vote or you show up and when you sign the name that’s supposed to match the register, the register has one less diarecritic than your name normally, like an accent mark than your name normally has and then they don’t allow you to vote.
So Hungarians in that category have discovered all kinds of obstacles to voting and they’re the ones who are going to vote against Orbin.

Archon Fung: Fascinating.

Kim Lane Scheppele: I can go on about how-

Archon Fung: There’s all kinds of parallels to US political fights. Exactly. What vote by mail is or isn’t in order to advantage one side or other. Absolutely. And then what you’re describing with Hungarians living outside of Hungary, I think it’s what Trump has accused the Democrats of is a version of the replacement theory is like you’re replacing voters with other voters. And then a third parallel is partisan efforts at gerrymandering can easily, not easily, but sometimes turn into a dummymander if you slice too thinly and what you drew the map to get a majority in the legislature and disproportionate majority can end up flipping and get you a disproportionate minority of seats in the legislature, which is what happened to Orbán. And some people are saying may happen to the Republicans in this midterm cycle if there’s a blue wave amidst all of this midterm gerrymandering that’s

Kim Lane Scheppele: Going on. Exactly, exactly. I wanted to

Archon Fung: Ask you, were you surprised or was it ever in the cards for Orbán to reject the results of the election as Maduro did in Venezuela and as Donald Trump did in 2020?

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah. So all day long and in the run up to the election, the Orbán forces were saying, “We know there’s going to be fraud. We suspect there’s going to be fraud.” They did this whole prebuttal campaign saying there’s going to be fraud. And the way the election law set up, again, remember they’ve designed the system to keep themselves in power. All the election complaints go immediately to the constitutional court, separate court that handles only constitutional issues and election campaigns, election complaints. The constitutional court is entirely packed with their own people. Out of the 15 judges, there’s only one that isn’t entirely in their camp. So that if they could generate the fraud complaints, it would go to a pack court and all under time deadlines and whatever. And in fact, the external monitors complained about the complaint system because it really does go to these packed institutions.

Also on the electoral commission, they used to have a rule that every party that ran candidates could get a vote on the election commission. Well, they changed that and they threw off all the other party members and they only had their own people. So the whole system, if you could cast doubt on the results, the backend system that would process any close elections, recounts, doubts were all in their hands. So what happened, the reason why Orbán conceded was you look at an election map and I don’t know if there’s a way to put up a slide, a share screen, but I can show you that what the election map shows you is that just to give you a sense, there are 106 election districts. In the last election where the opposition was more successful than it had ever been, Orbán won only 85. In the past, he’d always won more than 90.

So successful gerrymandering is, right? This election, Peter Magyar won 96. So he flipped all of these. And when you look at the margins, the FEDUS camp only won 10 districts or the … Wait a second. No, Peter Monder won 895. The fetus won 11 districts. Their margins worth razor thin in those districts, which is to say there’s no place in the country where there was less than 45% of the population for Peter Majar. And in the districts that Madyar won, there were often 20, 30 point splits, which is to say fetus lost really big.

Archon Fung: I see. So maybe it was too big to rig.

Kim Lane Scheppele: It was too big to rig. That was exactly it. There was nowhere. He could see that there was nowhere to go.

Archon Fung: So do you think on the counterfactual that if it had been a closer election, but still a Peter Magyar victory, that Orbán would have seriously contested and denied?

Kim Lane Scheppele: Oh yeah. They were setting it up contested. Oh, okay. Okay. Oh, good. Wow. Yeah. But here’s the other thing in Hungary because of this constitutional majority, like with two-thirds vote, you can put yourself above the law essentially, slightly dangerous, but better now than before. The thing is you can win a simple majority or you can win a two-thirds majority. In both cases, you win the election. The next stage after the gerrymandering is that Orbán has put in place a brand new constitution and almost four dozen what are called cardinal laws. Cardinal laws are laws that also require two-thirds majorities to change them. So they’re almost as entrenched as the constitution itself and these cardinal laws regulate every detail of the system that holds Orbán in place and the people who manage the government under those laws are all his appointees. So if Peter Magyar had gotten a simple majority, he would’ve been completely unable to govern because every detail is in these laws that require a two-thirds majority to change.

Archon Fung: I see.

Kim Lane Scheppele: So the question was not just winning, it was winning two-thirds. And I was saying up until a week and a half before the election that two-thirds, I mean, a simple majority was hard given how rigged the system was. Two-thirds majority was impossible. And then this poll came out about a week ahead. There’s a fabulous Hungarian polling organization called Median. They almost got it exactly on the nose right and they did a poll of 3,000 people two weeks before the election so they could kind of get down to the district level. And what they showed you was how widespread that the vote distribution was across the whole country and wasn’t just piled up in the cities. And once I saw that, it was like, he can get two thirds.

Stephen Richer: Okay. Tell me why this is stupid then, because this was a though that I had. Again, I was surprised that Orbán lost based on what? I’d read one or two articles and I just assumed that he’d been in there for a long time,

Archon Fung: Really long time. And

Stephen Richer: Then I was very surprised when he conceded quickly and in pretty decent language. And so that made me think like, oh, maybe he wasn’t as bad as I had once thought. And then a lot of commentators in the United States said, “This is the guy you’ve been calling a dictator for a long time.” Well, dictators don’t usually concede. So tell me why that’s off.

Archon Fung: Yes, great question.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah. So there’s old-fashioned dictators who just like Meduro in Venezuela, they just cancel the election and they just take over. Okay. But there are all of these new autocrats that pretend to be Democrats. They don’t want to be seen as not Democratic. They put forward this Democratic facade. I mean, Viktor Orbán’s been saying for years, “I have my two-thirds majority. I’ve been elected by two-thirds.” Nevermind that the he nor Magyar ever got two-thirds of the public to vote for them. That’s just an artifact of the electoral system. But he was claiming a Democratic mandate and what was happening in the streets of Budapest was that there were tons of election monitors. There were tons of foreign journalists and there were hundreds of thousands of people in the street dancing. It’s really hard under those circumstances to claim the elections rigged and deny the results there. But Orbán is a fighter, he is not going to give up.

And so what we need, now that all the journalists are gone, now that the monitors are gone, we’re starting to see act two here about how he will either stay in power or return to power quickly. So the first thing is that yes, the system is rigged. Okay. The whole system is rigged. Okay? We’ve gone through the voting scheme. Now we’re going to talk about governance. So if you’ve been following what’s been happening in Poland, we’re going to find the same problem here. So you get autocratic aspirants who come into power, they rig parts of the system, then the election throws them out because people get fed up with dictatorships. Okay. Then what happens is that Peter Mauder has a two-thirds majority. He can pass any law, he can amend the Constitution, but everything that he does has to be countersigned by the president of the Republic who is a fetus guy, which is to say this same that happened in Poland, where you’ve got the aspirational autocrat controlling the choke point that means that no law can go into effect because the president will veto it.

So then they say, we’re not going to pass formal laws that the president has to sign. We’re going to reinterpret the laws or do things by executive decree or other workarounds so you don’t need the president’s signature. And all those cases have a quick way to get to the constitutional court, which is also packed. So in other words, he’s won the crown, but he can’t leave the castle. All of these choke points are there. And what I said actually, I mean before the election, and I might have gotten it wrong, but you already … Okay, so what you saw was Orbán went into hiding for a few days. So here’s the thing about Orbán. He thinks and he reads. And whenever he’s had a crisis in his career, he disappears for a little bit because he has to reset. He has to figure out how do I operate.

And he came out with what is just the most clever argument I can imagine. That’s why these guys are so much fun to study. He didn’t come out personally, but his spokespokes came out and said, “You know what the Hungarian system needs are checks and balances because checks and balances are essential to constitutional democracy and therefore we need a president who is with FIDAS. We need to maintain control over these offices and the fact that Peter Mardier is going to come into power and sweet Keep all these people away is a sign that he’s a dictator.

Archon Fung: Wow.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Can you imagine? So they started a petition online for Hungarians to vote for checks and balances and they’re trying to drum up all the support for keeping the presidency in the hands of fetus. Now this guy, Tomas who’s the president of the Republic at first was saying, “I’m going to talk to Peter Maudyar. Let’s negotiate whatever.” Then this petition took away his degrees of freedom to do that. And so now the question is he’s got three more years left on his term. The Maudiar government has four years. So one thing I could do is just wait out the three years and pass everything at the end. But the other thing they can do is that there’s a lame duck parliament where Orbán still controls two thirds of the seats, takes two thirds vote to elect a president. Between now and May 9th when the new government comes in, Mr. Shroyak could resign allowing Orbán’s parliament to elect a replacement that would restart the clock for five years.

Stephen Richer: Okay. So the president is elected by the members of the parliament.

Kim Lane Scheppele: That’s right.

Stephen Richer: And I stumbled over this a litle bit in the introduction because I didn’t know actually if the new government and the new election had taken effect yet.

Kim Lane Scheppele: And

Stephen Richer: You’re saying much like in the United States where we have our election in November, but the new members aren’t seated until January and the new president isn’t sworn in until January 20th. The winners of the elections, the parliament members and Magyar himself have not been sworn into their new offices.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Orbán is still Prime Minister. The two thirds Orbán parliament is still there. Okay. So they can come back into session and do all this stuff.

Archon Fung: I see. So in comparative politics right now, I think the political scientists are fond of all these geometric analogies. There’s democratic backsliding, which means democracy is going backwards. And now there’s this idea of a U-turn where it’s backsliding for a while, but then there’s the forces of democracy win. So maybe you’re turning a corner, but it sounds like, Kim, you don’t quite think that this is a U-turn. It’s something else. It’s trench warfare or something.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah, exactly. So U-turns are very complicated and it depends on how much the aspirational autocrats dug themselves into the constitutional system. So take Trump won and Bolsonaro. I wrote a piece on this with my colleague, David Posen, in which we talked about presidential underreach as opposed to presidential overreach. The way those two guys governed was that they sort of dropped government on the floor to see if it would break. But they didn’t do a lot of massive changing of the system. They didn’t fill positions. They didn’t spend the money. They took government offline, so to speak, or dropped government on the floor. Okay. So it was very easy or relatively easy. The one exception, of course, in Trump won was packing the courts. But everything else, Trump was just chaotic. Bolsonaro was just chaotic. When you could get a new government in, they could start to do a U-turn.
But let me tell you about Brazil. Okay. Brazil, they have an independent federal police that investigated the coup attempt that Bolsonaro was in the process of carrying out. The independent prosecutor confirmed these charges, went to the independent Supreme Court, they convicted him. So you’re saying, “You turn.” Not so fast. Okay. Because in the Brazilian system, Bolsonaro, like all of these right-wing autocrats have their support in the rural areas. The Senate in Brazil, the upper chamber, overweights the rural areas like the Senate in the US. They copied us, unfortunately. So everyone believes in the election that happens later this year. Bolsonaro’s people, because again, with these new Autocrats that are displaced, they still have a lot of popular support. It’s like Trump Orbin got 37% of the vote. He’s got supporters and Bolsonaro has a lot of supporters. That election is very close. People expect the Senate to change hands.
And under the Brazilian Constitution, the Senate can impeach Supreme Court judges with a simple majority vote. I’ve been working with the Brazilian Supreme Court. I was down there last summer to observe the trial and so on. All the judges believe they’re going to be impeached at the end of this year. And then the new judges can reverse the conviction and pardon Bolsonaro. So it’s not over. These things cycle, especially if they’ve captured other political institutions. So this is massively- So not so

Archon Fung: Fast with the U-turns.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Right. And ditto in Poland. They got this election, but there’s a president that’s of the other party. There’s a constitutional court that’s rigged. They have not been able to pass the legislation that they promised in their campaign. They’ve been getting less popular because they look ineffective because of the choke points. And the idea that they can win the next election is really in doubt. So choke points are really crucial. Do

Stephen Richer: You think that there is a path forward for the new government, which hasn’t been sworn in yet to reestablish a constitutional liberal democracy? And if so, what sort of indicators will we start to see?

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah. So because Peter Magyar has this overwhelming victory, I mean, he theoretically has the possibility to change anything. So one of the possibilities is that they go outside the legislative process to have a constituent assembly, which bypasses a presidential veto. The other way, and this is the way I’ve been advocating, and bear with me because it’s slightly technical, but I’ll try to make it really comprehensible. What Hungary has going for it that Brazil doesn’t, for example, Hungary is a member of the EU. Hungary isn’t this dictatorship that Urban set up is in violation of EU law on multiple points. And EU law has what’s called direct effect, meaning when something is legal, when they pass a law in the EU, it becomes Hungarian law immediately. So one thing we’ve been … And Peter Mader knows this. So one of the things he’s proposed day one that Hungary joins something called the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Now, this is an optional office that the EU sets up at your service to investigate the misspending of EU funds. Urban Orban’s circle has gotten wealthy primarily by putting EU funds into private pockets. So the prosecution service in Hungary is captured, takes a two-thirds vote with presidential signature to replace and restructure that office. So deadlocked, captured. They have a spare prosecution service they can use. Now the problem is the EU is insisting that legislation be passed in Hungary to join. But the question is, can they work out something other than a legislative? I see. But that’s a workaround. So you have a spare prosecution service. You also have the European Court of Justice, which just made this incredibly revolutionary decision a week ago, conflict of interest. I’ve been working on that case for some time and I was cited by the preliminary opinion that led to the judgment.

So just to let you know that I have a serious interest in that matter. Thank you. Just to disclose conflicts, because after we gave up on the Hungarian institutions, a lot of us pivoted to EU law to have it come back and by Hungary. So right now the EU is withholding a lot of money from Hungary, conditional on them, restoring judicial independence, fighting corruption, storing academic freedom. There’s a whole list and Peter Magyar promised he would get the money back. So now the question is whether the EU law demand can override Hungarian law because EU law takes precedence over Hungarian law where they conflict. So the question is, can you leverage the EU law demands into legislation in Hungary that does not require presidential signature because it must be directly applied by the courts. I see. In fact, I taught at Harvard, as you know, in the spring of 2017 at the law school teaching EU law.
So that’s now one of my fields. And you can use EU law to give Hungary what it’s missing domestically.

Archon Fung: Some democratic levers.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah. Right. And in fact, a group of us just had a meeting last week with EU law experts and folks from Poland and folks from Hungary about how to do that. So it’s underway just to disclose my own conflict of interest here.

Archon Fung: That’s fascinating. We just have a few minutes left, but I wanted to pivot to implications for American politics. So in the political reporting, Orbán’s a liberal democracy has been a little bit of a beacon and a model for some on the American right. And on the MAGA right in particular, there’s reporting that maybe Orbán’s government funded CPAC. So what do you see as the attraction of illiberal democracy for the American colleagues? That’s kind of one thing that I wanted to get your views on. And then the second is Orbán’s electoral loss meaningful in the American context for those who see his illiberal democracy as something of a model.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah. Well, Hungary has been for the American right what Sweden used to be for the American left. That’s a

Archon Fung: Great analogy.

Kim Lane Scheppele: It’s proof of concept. You can do social state, you can be … Remember how all those- Hobos

Archon Fung: More than Gerald.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Right, exactly. Remember back when people used to think that democratic socialism was possible in America and Sweden was the model. So Hungary’s become the MAGA model.You can have this illiberal system which locks down power, which operates with public acquiescence. You can create a dictatorship that masquerades as a democracy and you can do anti-woke stuff. I mean, Orbán had a whole series of policies, which by the way, never ran that deep in Hungary. That was for external consumption, but you can do that kind of thing at national level. And so what Orbán did was to create this thing during Hungarian lessons again called the Matias Corvinus Collegium, which is this thing that’s a cross between a university, a think tank, a propaganda center and an international network. They donated 1% of Hungarian GDP to create this thing. So it’s huge. It’s huge. And what it does is it trains the cadres that go into Orbán’s system.

It develops the kind of … They have fake think tanks, fake pollsters, a whole series of … They have this something called the Fundamental Rights Center, which was created mostly to rebut everything I was writing about Hungary. And then it broadened when more people started rebutting what was going on in Hungary. They have a whole bunch of things and they have this English language think tank called the Danube Institute. Now the Danube Institute offers fellowships. It’s beautiful. But by the way, if you’ve never been there, it’s a lovely city. And so even under dictatorship, you can vacation there and think you’re in paradise if you don’t speak the language and understand what they’re saying. But anyway, so Danube was this English language think tank. Danube has a lot of the Trump people have cycled through the Danube Institute getting training in how the Orbán people did things.

Just to give you one example, Chris Rufo spent a lot of time looking at how Orbán crashed academic freedom in Hungary has come back and done higher ed policy in the US. So that’s just one example. Another example of somebody who actually didn’t pass through Danube but passed through the Orbán Orbit is the counter-terrorism advisor in the White House is Sebastian Gorka, who’s Hungarian, who worked in the Hungarian defense ministry, started a political party in Hungary that was in competition with Orbán back in the 2000 and the oughts, he and Orbán made some agreement at which point all of Gorka’s people went into Orbán’s party and Gorka came to the US, married in America and got citizenship and went immediately into Trump’s orbit. And now he’s the counter-terrorism advisor in the White House. So lots of these people have gone back and forth. And so one of the questions is, so does that apparatus stay put?

And the answer is yes because imagining Orbán always knows he might lose an election. So he idiot-proofs his system. So they gave that money from the state budget to the MCC, as it’s called, as an endowment. So it’s now out of the hands of ordinary budgeting and therefore it can remain as this huge network and it supports all these far right parties in Europe and so on. They were behind the campaign that engineered the European elections in which far right parties joined now and they’re the third largest party in the European parliament. So it’s a huge network and it will remain because its funding is stable. So now there’s some pieces of it that Peter Modier can easily claw back, but there’s some pieces of it that he can’t. So some of that network is going to remain in place to continue to inspire and train MAGA folks.

Archon Fung: Yeah. Interesting.

Stephen Richer: Do you read any tea leaves for the United States from it to the last half of Orbán’s presidency?

Kim Lane Scheppele: Yeah. Yeah. So a couple of things. I mean, one is that this network is really powerful. It’s international. And I forget if I mentioned the Danib Institute was one of the players in writing Project 2025. And a lot of the opening salvo of Trump was exactly the opening salvo of Orbán. So we can talk later about all the connections between Project 2025, the Orbán takeover and the Trump takeover because it was really hardwired into that plan. That’s the first lesson. It works, right? You just do blitz, you use the national budget as a weapon, you massfire civil servants, you put everybody in fear by singling out arbitrary targets and then everybody keeps their heads down and says like, “I have nothing to do with this. I’ll leave private life.” So what’s happened here is exactly what happened in Hungary. That’s part one, the lesson for the right.

But there’s also a lesson for the left, which is that everybody asked me, “Is Peter Magyar left or right?” And the answer is he comes out of Orbán’s party. He’s a center right guy on policy like immigration or family protection or like all these gay rights, all that stuff. He sort of center right. This was not a left right election. He campaigned by saying, “Look at the corruption of the Orbán regime.” And even though the press was massively muzzled, there were some investigative journalists who turned up concrete evidence of the corruption of Orbán’s family, Orbán’s friends at Orbán. And that was also assisted by what we believe are leaks from the European Security Services whose taps of Russian phones disclosed that Orbán and Putin were having friendly conversations in which Orbán was saying, “You’re the lion. We’re the mouse. How can we be helpful?” And conversations between the foreign minister of Hungary and Russia, where the Hungarian foreign minister was telling the Russians everything the EU was going to do on Ukraine that happened in secret meetings.

So the corruption and the Russian stuff came out. It meant that this was a like, how can you tolerate this government that violates our values? And Peter Magyar’s campaign was so clever. This is lesson for the left or lesson. It shouldn’t just be the left, the opposition to autocracy in the US. That corruption has meant that you don’t get the public services you deserve. In Peter Magyar’s case, it was the public health system, education, transportation. But here we can look at all of the way the big beautiful bill defunded so much of what people counted on for basic livelihoods. The way the federal budget has been weaponized. And at Harvard, of course, you feel this a lot. Chicago and Princeton, I think have felt it somewhat less, but universities are in the crosshairs. Law firms are media organizations. So you go after how the corruption has resulted in less money for you.

And then you say, and how are those connected? It’s because you lost your voice in picking your leaders and therefore I can be your voice to undo that, to claw back the money and use it for you. Okay.That was his campaign. That’s not a left campaign or a right campaign. It’s a democracy campaign. And that was actually what persuaded so many people that this corruption they could see was affecting them personally and they could have overcome it if they came together. And one last thing, Modere’s campaign said, “We should not be a country that lives in fear.” He would go to all these rallies in villages across the country with zero security. He would say, “If I’m not afraid, you don’t have to be afraid.” And all those people who kept their heads down because the arbitrary sort of Damocles was just hitting whomever realized they can’t do it to all of us if we all show up.

And so Peter Magyar’s rallies were just getting bigger and bigger and bigger as this fear message meant everybody realizes we don’t have to be afraid if we’re all in this together. Now that’s a campaign that’s transportable That I can imagine would work here. So what we might find is MAGA on the right, Magyar on the left. We might actually have now a recipe for cracking the budding autocracy here in the U.S.

Archon Fung: Right, right. So interesting. Well, we’re about out of time, but I think it’s left us all with an enormous amount to think about is like not quite a U-turn. The resilience of autocratic movements and leaders even in defeat and then these transnational links and some of the lessons and maybe the most effective anti-autocratic champion might come from the center right as it did in Hungary, which is very, very interesting. Yeah, Steven. Absolutely.

Stephen Richer: Yeah. No, a lot to unpack. I think it’s interesting. We have a colleague at the Ash Center this year who’s Italian and he would’ve told us that he thought corruption was not the ticket to electoral success just because he witnessed corruption that was fairly open in Italy but wasn’t replaced. But this would certainly seem to be a data point very much in favor. I think if we had 30 more minutes, I would want to talk about did Vice President Harris run on democracy and was that rebuffed in the American electorate so we could have that conversation as well. And then just generally speaking, I think it’s I guess I’m consistently when we have these conversations we had someone from Iran, we had someone from Venezuela and now you’re representing though not in Hungary but representing Hungary. I just want somebody to come on and say, “You know what? Everything’s great now. That one election, that was the whole U turn.” And I guess it’s messier and uglier than that.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Democracy is hard work. I mean, look, elections are necessary but they’re not sufficient and people can’t just vote and go home because when you have to dig out the roots of an autocratic system where the roots are buried very deep, it’s going to take public effort and consistent public messaging. If I can just say one last thing about corruption though, because remember this campaign in Hungary was done without the support of any of what we would call the mainstream media. It’s all been captured. 80% of the media outlets are in Orbán’s hands, particularly in the rural areas. What was crucial to this was meme-ification. And the way that corruption got meme-ified was that there was an anti-corruption campaigner that hired a drone to fly above this like their si-like complex that Orbán’s father had built. Orbán said, “It’s my father. It’s not me. It’s like, how does your father get wealthy because he’s your dad?”
This drone flew over the estate and discovered a herd of zebras.

Archon Fung: In the middle of Hungary.

Kim Lane Scheppele: In the middle of Hungary, right? They’re not native, just to let people know if you don’t know the geography, they don’t come from there. And so the zebras became the symbol of corruption. It was just like meme-ification. So people would show up in zebra costumes at these rallies, little zebra pins. Little zebras were like everywhere people would … Anyway, so that was one thing. And then the meme-ification on the deprivation of social services side was that Peter Maudio would take these camera crews into hospitals and film just the decrepit state of them. I mean, frankly, they’ve been decrepit since I lived there in the ’90s. So nothing new, but still they should have fixed them up and the meme became … And in hospitals, they don’t even have toilet paper. So somehow Peter Mader got somebody to donate a flatbed truck full of toilet paper to a children’s hospital.

So he shows up in front of the children’s hospital donating the toilet paper to the children’s hospital. So between the zebra and the toilet paper, you had these condensed symbols of what was wrong. They have zebras, you don’t have toilet paper. I mean, it’s a little bit … I mean, you could do that in any system, but it was really crucial. The messaging was brilliant.

Archon Fung: Yeah. Everybody knows what’s wrong, but these things really crystallize it in

Kim Lane Scheppele: An extremely powerful way. Yeah. So you need powerful messaging. You need instant response. This was a case, by the way, we always talk about how social media destroys democracy. This was a case where social media saved it. The opposition had a YouTube channel. Peter Magyar was only on the YouTube channel. He never appeared on regular television and they did everything through Facebook and Facebook and the EU now they’ve banned political advertisements, which is what Orbán used to do is just flood Facebook with political ads. What happened was the opposition came up with, they’re not ads. They’re explanations and they’re just meme-ification, lots of zebras, lots of all this stuff. And so it was a campaign that was only possible because of social media. So we shouldn’t immediately assume social media is the anti-democratic force.

Archon Fung: Especially in context when the other media is completely closed off.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Exactly. So some of the license-

Stephen Richer: Tim, you’ve got to run.

Kim Lane Scheppele: I got to run. It’s true. I could talk to you guys forever, but come back. No, this is terrific. Let me get a little farther in to see, can you do a U-turn if all the institutions are really dug in and can transnal institutions help to mix a metaphor, pull the country out of the ditch?

Archon Fung: And we’ll have you back when we have a few more months experience and hopefully we’ll be on the upswing and hungry.

Stephen Richer: We left it on a nice note social media playing a positive role for democracy for once. That’s good. And we’ll be back. Thank you. Next Tuesday, 12:15 PM. If you have any questions, comments, please write in. Thank you as always to our production team and thank you to all of our listeners. As always, we’ll see you live next week.

Archon Fung: Absolutely. And huge thanks to Kim.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Thank you. Great conversation. Let’s keep it up. Excellent. Wonderful.

Archon Fung: Take care.

Kim Lane Scheppele: Okay. Bye.

Archon Fung: Bye-bye.