For years, the right wing democracy-hating right wing radicals have idolized Hungary’s Christian nationalist “illiberal democracy.” Project 2025 was modeled on Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian playbook. And among the things we learned after the election is that the Hungarian government was even funding CPAC.
We had already known that Orbán had been throwing Vladimir Putin’s monkey wrenches into the European Union for years.
The Trump regime dialed Orbán’s playbook up to 11: purging career civil servants, packing the government with loyalists, dictating policy to educational and cultural institutions, paving the way for their allied oligarchs to take over our media, and pocketing every asset that isn’t nailed down.
Orbán led the nation for sixteen years, which gave his party time to rig and gerrymander the nation’s electoral system to the extent that he could remain in power forever.
That’s why seeing him concede Sunday’s election was a political earthquake felt around the world.
Nearly 80% of the electorate voted. And Peter Magyar’s Tisza Party won a supermajority in the legislature - 137 of the National Assembly’s 199 seats - making him the next Prime Minister of Hungary.
“Everybody should really pay attention to this because it’s huge,” Karoli said in this week’s podcast. “But also it is a lesson in how one disgruntled guy who used to be a member of the party that Orban was in, decided to start his own party and go all over the country and to all the farmhouses and all the rural areas and everything else and just get people lit up. He got them protesting in the streets. I mean, it wasn’t just him, but he organized, right? And he got them to the people that were in the streets and the people that were voting in the rural areas. And he literally everywhere, basically, Orban lost, right? Like it was an undisputable loss.”
Budapesting the election means to show up. Those who call No Kings Day and other mass protests merely performative are wrong - they are a visible signal that a majority of the country is not OK with losing our democracy. They reinforce the resolve of those who participate and those who see it happening. And they are kind of a gateway drug toward turning regular people into political activists.
Some of the other topics we talk about this week:
The blockade of the blockade (of the blockade?) in the Strait of Hormuz
Eric Swalwell and the California Governor’s Race
The Department of Justice’s decision to try to erase the seditious conspiracy convictions of some January 6 organizers
That weird White House DoorDash stunt
View the podcast above, or listen to the audio below.
