When the people of Hungary decided clearly on Sunday to vote out their right-wing populist leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, he had the decency to concede his defeat. Too bad that America’s right-wing populist leader, Donald Trump, doesn’t have that same sense of decency about fair play and winning and losing. Being a gracious loser is crucial to maintaining democracy and self-governance.
Orbán and his Fidesz Party ruled for 16 years, as Orbán steadily tightened his grip on power to the extent that many felt that change was impossible or even hoping for it was naïve. But they were wrong, as challenger Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party scored a landslide.
Trump, who endorsed Orbán, was also a loser here and the president even futilely sent his vice president to campaign for Orbán. Also defeated was Vladimir Putin, who especially sought an Orbán victory to keep his firewall in the EU, where Hungary had used its power to block assistance to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia; no longer.
Just weeks ago, Orbán had seemed practically inevitable, an unmovable facet of Hungarian politics. Now Magyar has pledged to swiftly pursue those who “plundered, looted, betrayed, indebted and ruined” the country, a clear signal that the wannabe despot’s reign of corruption is not only over but there will be clear consequences — a lesson that our own pro-democracy leaders should heed. Accountability for public officials who have used the office for their own gain and abdicated the grave responsibilities vested in them is popular and a galvanizing political force.
Among other things, the Hungarian election proved that even after 16 years of concerted efforts to chip away at the frameworks of democracy and civil society, and even having worked to make elections themselves less fair and open, Orbán could not indefinitely force his will on the Hungarian people. Discontent bubbled up and people could see that they were being taken advantage of with the perennial language of outside enemies that only Orbán could protect them from, a favored message of the strongman that grew stale with time and as the economy and standard of living decayed.
This victory doesn’t mean that the fight is over for pro-democracy Hungarians. Magyar was once a member of Orbán’s own party, and has a decent amount of overlap ideologically with the outgoing prime minister. It won’t be easy to remove the entrenched tendrils of Orbán’s power, particularly given how he wrangled the courts and had allies take over much of domestic media. But it can and must be done, and what Hungary can do, we can do.
If Orbán’s approach struck some familiar chords, it’s because it’s a path followed by Trump, who has worked much more chaotically and quickly to try to consolidate his hold on the levers of government and society, including the same government by cronyism. Trump is himself now setting up the groundwork to subvert our own elections and keep his own MAGA movement in power, threatening to mess with mail-in voting and “take over” federal elections. Like Orbán, he will fail, but not by default. It will take concerted, intentional efforts to keep our democracy. Let’s be inspired by Hungary.