If Hungary Can Do It

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Hi.

Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

Last weekend, Hungarian journalist Veronica Moon.

And I'm a journalist at Gennikin.

Was in Budapest covering the election between Prime Minister Victor Orbán

and the opposition leader Peter Magger.

Orbán had been in power for the past 16 years.

Had changed the country from the top down.

They changed everything in the country to favor themselves.

The media, universities, the courts,

in a way that certain global leaders

who aspired to that kind of grand power admired and marveled at.

And he's done a fantastic job.

He's a very powerful man within his country,

but he's also beloved.

They love Victor and people that know him.

Vice President J.D. Vance.

I think a good signal here.

Had even come to the country to give a stump speech for Orbán.

It's ringing.

It's progress.

Trump phoned it in from home.

Hello, Mr. President. How are you?

Hi.

I'm Jenny.

Can you give me a second?

And then on Sunday night,

as the election results started to roll in,

it was a record turnout like absolute history, Kai.

Veronica almost didn't believe what she was seeing.

Even for me, who is a news junkie

and this is my profession,

it was super hard to believe that it can happen.

It felt like the Orbán regime will be always here

and he will always be rolling the country.

But I was wrong.

Back overseas in a major defeat

for President Trump's closest ally in Europe.

Hungarian voters, House of Longtime Prime Minister Victor Orbán,

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 changed 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 right people I've never met.

It was really something that everybody was crying

and it was 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 of 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 via Davey or announcing their winning.

There is this viral video of your house.

Yes, it's true dancing.

And it's totally out of contact for us.

You know, we just see it and sort of dancing across the stage.

You know, 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 queen, right?

So our future health ministers appears to have this very good move.

I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic.

The idea that a democratic country can be slowly co-opted

by a leader with proud autocratic leanings.

And then one day poof, it ends.

There are obvious lessons for the US and that.

We will have Atlantic staff writer Ann Applebaum

and the second half of the show to talk through those lessons.

But we'll start from the beginning.

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 journalist's 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.

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 a 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

of political interference in the outlets operations.

We thought that if we are not able to operate independently,

if we are not able to work with those colleagues

that we consider professional-equalified

and someone from the outside would like to drive us to a direction

that we don't want,

we decided to quit all of us on a single day on the summer of 2020.

More than 80 journalists from the country's most red 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.

A Minister of Viktor Orben, who once branded it a fake news factory.

One of his allies is 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 these are valuable lessons 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,

costing 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 affecting your life badly,

don't stay silent.

Be critical and step up for yourself.

So if a movement that's banned years more than a decade

could crumble and fall in a single night,

what might that mean for other countries that are teetering on the edge?

Particularly one, to say, has a big vote in November.

After the break, we talked to Staff Rider Anne Eppelbaum,

an expert on the rise of authoritarianism, democracy, and European politics.

The developments that we are seeing in AI,

this would be maybe the most fundamental thing ever really to happen.

What's next for AI?

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We need to have this conversation on how those values get exported.

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And welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me.

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 in 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 deluding 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.

I, Hungarians came to Washington and Americans went to Hungary

to learn how they did it.

The leader of the Heritage Fund has 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 is,

Trump and his people are trying to do,

so 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 Muggle 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.

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 grey 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% 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 do.

That's the Hungarian model.

And you're right.

I didn't know that Orban was the very first to do that.

I mean, 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 call Dorban'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.

A sort of sinister versions of him and Ursula Lavenderline,

who's the leader of the European Union, with Peter Magiar,

who is the leader of the Hungarian opposition.

You know, they're the risk, you know, Fidesz, or 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, in the real question that people are 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 them did.

Then we see the news that Orban loses the election and concedes to Peter Magiar,

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 they were lawyers who were prepared for that.

I mean, just like in the US, people were prepared for a challenge, and they were prepared to fight it.

And 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 one was so incontrovertible,

that there was nothing to challenge, and that he would have lost, he thought he would have lost by challenging.

And in 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.

I know it's only been a few days, but it's impossible not to start asking all the questions of what does this mean.

Like a light went on, and what you want to believe is that a whole lot of things are going to change.

So I just want to try and talk through with you, like what this victory actually means.

So we start with a post-reality regime.

Did you get a sense of reality reasserting itself? Like how far do you believe in that?

I do think this election was about reality reasserting itself.

Majar's campaign was about the Hungarian economy, health care, which is a very poor education, which has deteriorated corruption,

which people feel is everywhere.

The poor fiscal status, the bad condition of the government in many different ways.

And the opposition know that the first thing they have to do is begin to address the real problems.

One of the things Orban was famous for was he had these annual television appearances where he would talk about the economy.

And he would lie.

You know, year in and year out, he would say how great everything was, and growth is going to be very high.

And he used false statistics.

And I know economists in Hungary who knew they were false and could show that they were mismeasuring all kinds of things.

And so this is an opposition which says that it will go back to using real statistics and trying to solve problems that are real.

And if they just do that, they'll have enormous amount of political success.

And that by itself would be transformational.

Of course, there are a lot of other issues they're going to face, which is a captured judiciary, captured intelligence services.

All these things have been captured by Orban's political party and movement.

And they will now have to find a way to pick those things apart.

And I know from Poland, which had a similar experience after eight years of rule by the Law and Justice Party,

who are also a populist authoritarian party, that picking those things apart can be very difficult.

I guess where we land is it's like a narrow miracle.

I mean, there are moments when I think that when the population's mind is distorted by misinformation, it's not reversible.

So maybe there's just something about knowing, well, people can actually see reality right in front of them.

It can be reversible. People can believe actual data and statistics, and that's just good to know, even if not everything else is fixed.

Yes, and that was actually one of the themes of the campaign, one of the ways in which Majar and his team campaigned,

because they didn't have access to media, they went around the country.

And so he went to hundreds of towns and villages, he went to many of them over and over again.

He made sure to travel outside of the big cities.

And the purpose of that grassroots campaign was to reach real people in real life,

because he couldn't necessarily reach them any other way.

Another battle of ideas in this turning point election, the traditionalism versus, I guess, what you could call progress, some people would call,

and the openness was the election about that, like people turning away from that strong clinging to traditionalism, anti-LGBTQ rights, all of that.

The election was absolutely not about that, and that was because Majar got, the point was to walk away from those divisions.

And then he didn't get caught in the trap of this culture war arguments.

He also stayed away from arguing about Ukraine.

I mean, even though Ukraine was the main subject of the Orban campaign, he almost didn't talk about it, he tried not to talk about it.

Towards the end, especially after there had been least leaked conversations between Orban and his foreign minister with their Russian counterparts,

then people began to chant at his rally, Russians go home.

And that became very important towards the end of the campaign, but mostly Majar stayed away from that.

He stayed away from these polarizing issues, and again, he focused on health, the economy, corruption.

So these are issues that unify people, and they don't divide people, and that was how he ran the campaign.

Right.

Okay, this has been an implicit in a lot of our conversation.

Now, I just want to make it explicit, which is what does this mean for the US?

How does this reverberate over here in a country which, as you said, has used Orban as a model?

I mean, JD 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 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.

I'm so happy to hear this, Anne.

I feel like in the last two years that we've had these conversations, this is maybe the first time I've heard you feel genuinely optimistic.

I mean, you're still sounding very professional, but you, you know, this is a much more positive view than I often get from you.

So I'm glad to hear it.

Well, I mean, many, many things can still go wrong.

But, yes.

But we didn't have to talk about them today.

Actually, I saw some Hungarians on social media who just having these kinds of conversations, people were being used to say,

well, what if Madure turns out to be no good and what if Orban comes back and all the Hungarians were saying, let us have 10 minutes, 24 hours to be happy.

And give us this little space in time before we start to worry about what bad things might happen next.

Exactly. I wish the same for you, Anne.

Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jenae West and Rosie Hughes.

It was edited by Kevin Townsend, fact checking by Genevieve Finn, robbed, murseac, engineered and provided original music.

Claudine Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the Atlantic at vAtlantic.com slash listener.

I'm Hannah Rosen. Thank you for listening.

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