How To Oust A Dictator, According To Hungary

Sources

Burns. “Orbán’s Defeat Shows What Trump’s Opponents Keep Doing Wrong.” POLITICO, April 13, 2026. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/04/13/hungary-election-orban-defeat-message-democrats-00868584.

Higgins, Andrew, and Lili Rutai. “How Peter Magyar Defeated Viktor Orban, a Former Ally, In Hungary’s Election.” World. The New York Times, April 14, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/world/europe/viktor-orban-peter-magyar-election.html.

Hjelmgaard, Kim. “What Hungary’s Shocking Orbán Ouster Means for Trump − and Europe’s Populists.” USA TODAY. Accessed April 15, 2026. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2026/04/13/hungary-viktor-orban-trump-europe/89585810007/.

Jakes, Lara. “4 Takeaways From Viktor Orban’s Defeat in Hungary’s Election.” World. The New York Times, April 13, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/world/europe/hungary-election-results-orban-magyar.html.

Lee, Chantelle. “Far Right Leader Viktor Orbán Ousted by Voters After 16 Years in Power. Here’s What That Means.” World. Time, April 12, 2026. https://time.com/article/2026/04/12/viktor-orban-election-loss-trump/.

Medic, Filip jvodic-. “When People Elect a Strongman to Rule | German Marshall Fund of the United States.” GMF. Accessed April 15, 2026. https://www.gmfus.org/news/when-people-elect-strongman-rule.

Norberg, Johan. “How Viktor Orbán’s Hungary Eroded the Rule of Law and Free Markets.” Cato Institute, March 31, 2026. https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/how-viktor-orbans-hungary-eroded-rule-law-free-markets.

Smialek, Jeanna. “Orban Loss in Hungary Is a Big Moment for the E.U. Here’s Why.” World. The New York Times, April 13, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/world/europe/hungary-eu-orban-magyar.html.

Stening, Tanner. “Viktor Orbán’s Defeat ‘a Defining Moment’ in Europe. What Comes Next?” Northeastern Global News, 404 AD. https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/04/12/viktor-orban-loses-hungary-election/.

Transcript

Hi it’s Wednesday, April 15, 2026, you’re tuned in to Why, America? I’m your lawyer friend Leeja Miller. Over the weekend, longtime Hungarian strongman and friend of the Trump regime Victor Orban conceded defeat to his rival, Peter Magyar, whose Tisza party won a decisive two-thirds majority in parliament. Here in the United States, despite the fact that usually our heads are so far up our own asses we don’t tend to pay close attention to elections in other countries, the resounding defeat in Hungary over the weekend hit different. Trump has long made it clear that he admired and modeled himself after the tactics Orban has used over his 16 years in power in Hungary. JD Vance was in Hungary stumping for Orban in an 11th hour attempt to sway the elections at the same time as Trump was threatening Iran’s nuclear annihilation, that is how dedicated members of our government are to the continuation of Orban's self-declared illiberal state. So today we’re breaking down what happened in Hungary and how that country managed to shake off a strongman dictator who had rigged every aspect of government and society to ensure he’d never have to give up power. We should probably be taking notes.

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To understand how Hungary got where it is today, we have to understand where it came from. I encourage you to consider the United States today as I’m going through the history of Hungary. There are many differences but there are whiffs of familiarity here. Of course this is not a treatise on the history of Hungary though that would be a really interesting rabbit hole to fall down if you’re ever inclined to do so. Much of this background is based on a recent Cato Institute analysis called How Victor Orban’s Hungary Eroded the Rule of Law and Free Markets, which I’ve linked in the sources in the description as always.

Hungary wasn’t formally part of the USSR but acted as a communist satellite state within the Soviet sphere of influence. As communism in Eastern Europe was crumbling in the 80s, an anti-communist student movement sprang up in Hungary called the Alliance of Young Democrats, founded in 1988 by Viktor Orban and 36 other students. In Hungary the name of this Alliance of Young Democrats is Fidesz. At its founding Fidesz was kind of your classic liberal organization–not liberal like Democrats in the US. I mean the classical understanding of the term “liberal” which prioritizes the rule of law and free market economics. Kind of your Reaganites, old school Republicanism of the 1980s. But along with it they were against the nationalism and xenophobia of far right groups at the time, criticized the church and state alliance, and were against socialism. Fidesz was decidedly in support of outside foreign business and philanthropy, and Orban himself benefitted from Hungarian-born George Soros’ philanthropic educational ventures in the country. By 1995, Orban was the president of the Fidesz party. And it was at this time, the late 90s, that Orban began moving the Fidesz party further and further right, less because of his closely held political beliefs and more because of his own political ambition and his ability to tell where the opportunities lie to gain as much power as possible. There was an opening to fill a power vacuum on the right side of the political spectrum in the country at the time and so Orban seized the opportunity to fill the void and take power. In the mid-2000s, the country was governed by a left-leaning coalition that eventually crumbled in large part due to the 2008 financial crisis. Much like in the United States, that crisis created pretty swift backlash. While Democrats in the US managed to hold on to power in the 2012 election despite the growing Tea Party movement that would eventually give way to far right Trumpian MAGA extremism, the backlash was swifter in Hungary. Orban was able to ride this economic disillusionment to the polls, winning the 2010 elections with 68 percent of the seats in parliament. And this 68% supermajority in parliament, despite only receiving 53% of the popular vote, gave Fidesz power to completely rewrite the rule of law, starting with the constitution. In Hungary all it takes is a two-thirds parliamentary majority to amend the constitution, unlike in the United States where the states have to ratify amendments in addition to Congressional approval. So with 68% of the seats in parliament, Orban was able to literally rewrite the entire constitution while excluding all opposition parties and holding zero pubic debate. One year into his term, in April 2011, the Hungarian parliament adopted the new constitution, which came to force January 1st, 2012.

One of the most essential parts of this new constitution expanded Hungary’s version of its Supreme Court from 11 to 15 judges. By doing so, Orban got to hand-select 4 new judges. And the new rules didn’t require any approval by Parliament. The new constitution also set age limits for judges at 62, down from 70. Meaning that 10% of all judges in the country, especially its most senior members, were immediately removed to be replaced by Orban loyalists. He also put in place his own loyalists in posts that were supposed to act as checks on the Prime Minister’s power. From the Attorney General’s office to the national bank and more and changing the rules so their positions were extremely long, upwards of 12 years, so no matter what happened his influence would stay in place. Once he had installed loyalists in the courts and in the executive branch, he moved on to changing the voting rules. Hungary had a system of multi-round voting. He changed it to a single round, winner take all vote. He drastically reduced the size of the Hungarian parliament and gerrymandered all the newly combined districts. He expanded voting rights to the ethnic Hungarians that lived just outside Hungary’s borders, knowing that over 90% of them would vote for Fidesz, while making it as hard as possible for Hungarians who left Hungary and moved abroad to vote, because they didn’t reliably vote for him.

After taking control of the parliament, the constitution, the courts, the federal agencies, and the voting, he went to work taking over the media. First, he took control of the public service media, so all state-funded media, which was previously independent and led by strong journalistic standards, began publishing exclusively pro-government coverage. Journalists and editors who didn’t fall in line were fired. Spyware and government-backed hacking attempts against journalists and lawyers further targeted freedom of the press. Much of the ad sales that private media relied on came from government ad spending. He began punishing private publications that didn’t fall in line by starving them of ad revenue. He created a Media Council, filled with Fidesz loyalists, which created vague content rules and levied harsh fines against publications that didn’t bend the knee. As these media companies began failing because of these harsh tactics, Orban’s oligarch friends were able to buy up the publications for a fraction of what they were worth, and, once in the hands of loyalists, the media companies were able to flourish off state funding and ad revenue. Then in 2018, those media outlets were “donated” by his wealthy friends to a new foundation that further centralized control over all media in the country.

That of course wasn’t the only way Orban rewarded loyalty to his rich friends. He also awarded extensive no-bid government contracts to a handful of powerful wealthy men in his inner circle.

And after he took over parliament, the constitution, the courts, the agencies, and then media, he went for the culture. He espoused overtly xenophobic, anti-immigrant, nationalist rhetoric to rally support. His minister of education took control of all schools in Hungary, appointing loyalist principals to lead the schools and took over the school budgets, curriculum, and textbook choices. He also took control of major universities and pushed out the Central European University founded with an endowment by George Soros. Soros became public enemy number one, with major billboard campaigns vilifying him across the country. Reminder Orban himself benefitted from the education initiatives Soros helped fund throughout Hungary.

Orban also banned homosexuality or discussions of gender identity in advertising and media aimed at minors, barred gay couples from being able to adopt, abolished recognition of transgender individuals, and declared LGBT rights to be a threat to children and to the nation’s morals. On the topic of Hungary’s national morals, despite being a-religious for most of his life, Orban conveniently found god as he rose up the political ranks, realizing the power he could gain through co-opting religion. By the time he became Prime Minister in 2010, he fully embraced Christian, pro-natalist family policies. He enacted extensive child subsidies and tax credits to try to encourage native Hungarians to have more babies, dedicating upwards of 5.5% of the entire national GDP to the effort. Despite this, after a slight bump in births after the 2008 financial crisis, the attempt to encourage more Hungarian babymaking has fallen flat, and Hungary has the lowest birth rate in central and Eastern Europe.

On the global stage, Hungary, a member of the EU but a close ally of Russia, has proven to be the main thorn in the side of aid and support for Ukraine, often siding with Russia and standing in the way of major aid packages and other EU measures attempting to sanction Russia for its aggression. So with the victory over the weekend of Peter Magyar, whose Tisza party won a parliamentary super majority after a record 77% voter turnout, it's safe to say that the populace has had enough of Victor Orban after 16 years of victories. But what changed? It’s not like Orban all of the sudden became a strongman in the 4 years since his last election. Over the last 16 years it became even harder to remove him from power. How did the people do it? Well, largely the same way they voted him into power: through extreme economic disillusionment and a loss of trust in the country’s institutions. After the 2008 financial crisis, a feeling of stagnation, of fear of the outsider, of economic turmoil, unease, and instability, led the populace to look for something new, someone who would fortify Hungary and, you know, make Hungary great again. In 2026, with the global economic divide greater than ever, housing crises happening across the globe, after years of watching that divide increase, watching institutions betray them, watching brazen corruption at the highest levels in government, the people decided enough was enough. And they showed out in such record numbers that the vote was too big of a landslide to challenge. A new generation, Gen Z, came of age watching this unfold, knowing nothing other than rule under Orban’s regime. And Peter Magyar came along, running on a message of anti-corruption, of revitalizing trust in Hungary’s institutions, of repairing Hungary’s economy, and that spoke to the people.

An interesting and key point here–Magyar, the 45 year old man who ousted Victor Orban, is not a progressive populist wunderkind representing some major ideological sea change or total pendulum swing. Magyar spent much of his political career following Orban as a member of the Fidesz party himself. As Fidesz has moved further right, Magyar has largely maintained his political ideology, differing from Orban’s style of adopting whatever ideology or belief system served as a means to obtaining more power. But Magyar is solidly center right. But he has espoused a desire to move the country back towards the classic liberalism that Fidesz originally stood for–open markets and the rule of law. At his celebratory speech after winning the election over the weekend. Magyar declared a desire to provide the people of Hungary with good education, good healthcare, equality regardless of who they love or what they believe, and to hold the people in government accountable for the last 16 years of deeply entrenched corruption. It’s a more gentle, pro-capitalist conservatism that likely has leaders at the EU breathing a deep sigh of relief. But it’s also not a sea change when it comes to the status quo of capitalist liberalism that is generally accepted across Europe and North America. The election in Hungary isn’t the story of a thrilling progressive uprising. It’s so much more banal than that. It’s people deciding that the economy is uncomfortable enough for them that they want a change. So let’s try this guy I guess.

I think there are a lot of lessons the United States can take from the story of Hungary, though of course that story is still playing out and it’s hard to say how Magyar will end up leading the country. With a strong supermajority in parliament, he can just as easily undo all the work Orban did over the last 16 years.

First, while I’m sure as I was describing what’s happened in Hungary you absolutely saw shades of the same exact things that Trump has done over the last year of his second term. Taking over the executive branch with yes men, taking over the Congress, taking over the courts, rewriting the constitution, or attempting to at least, taking over the media and punishing the publications and journalists he can’t outright control, waging a culture war that alienates anyone who isn’t cis, straight, white, and able-bodied. But there are many ways in which Hungary is very different from the United States. It is much smaller and less unwieldy to run. It is far less diverse in the population. It is less of a mecca for immigrants than the US is. It does not have the federalist system we have here, with 50 states with their own laws and their own courts calling the shots, it does not have a bicameral legislature like we do with an upper and a lower house. It is far easier to change and amend the constitution of Hungary than it is in the United States. It does not have the extensive history of first amendment protections at the same level as we have, protection of freedom of speech and religion. Not at the same depth as the United States has. For all of these reasons, in many ways Orban’s ability to mold the country of Hungary and turn himself into a strong man was much easier than Trump in the United States. Like Trump, Orban went through the motions of at least attempting to make all of his changes legally, understanding that the legitimacy of his government had to derive from somewhere. But when he was able to change rules with the stroke of a pen because of his supermajority in Parliament, that meant it was far easier for him to literally rewrite the rules and root out anyone who stood in his way. Trump is having a much harder time of that. In part because of our pesky federalism–there are so many states and so many state courts and governors and state AGs who are willing to stand in Trump’s way and who have long historical protections for their own autonomy to be able to do so. The checks and balances in our constitution are not as easily surpassed–anytime he tries to pass a law by executive order, there are dozens of people lined up to challenge him. Anytime he wants to pass a law in Congress there are two houses he has to get through before the law lands on his desk. I’m not saying he’s not absolutely fucking shit up and causing damage that it’s going to take decades to fix once this is all over, and despite the fact that it feels like the system isn’t working and has ground to a halt, there are still mechanisms that are at least making his job a hell of a lot more difficult. And that is absolutely by design. The United States, for all its faults, for all the ways it feels completely dysfunctional and unanswerable to the people, is still a place that is very difficult to turn into a complete fascist dictatorship. Despite Trump’s best efforts.

But Hungary also presents us with a bit of a cautionary tale as well in the way that it managed to overthrow its wannabe dictator strong man. I know the bubble that I occupy, I know most of you are raging leftists, myself included, though of course some of you aren’t. It is really easy to look leftwards and think that Bernie Sanders or AOC or someone of a similar leftist populist progressive ilk is the person who stands the best chance of stepping in and saving us all. And I have no doubt they absolutely would be the best choice for rebuilding this country and moving it forward and truly making everyone’s lives easier and better. I so wish that was the answer. But the lesson I took from looking into Hungary and the election over the weekend was that the way to overthrow a wanna be strongman dictator is to just nudge the country slightly less to the right. Center right. Not a swinging pendulum of change but a return to the status quo of a neoliberal capitalist world where inequality is still rampant and the riches still rise entirely to the top, but the people are just comfortable enough and lulled into enough of an acceptance, convinced enough that well at least it’s not as bad as that dictator guy amiright??? Then the rich can keep hoarding and the wealth extraction and labor theft can continue happening and we can all keep buying things to make us feel slightly less bad about it. The overthrow of a dictator comes not in the glorious pendulum swing of a leftist progressive hero but instead in the banality of another status quo neoliberal. Obviously I dream of a world where that is not the case, and I will continue advocating for progressive solutions, class consciousness, labor organizing, getting money out of politics, etc, and I don’t mean to be a major debbie fuckin downer but I don’t think we’re going to get an AOC in 2028. I think we’re going to get a capitalist who won’t stand up to Israel like Gavin Newsom. Banal. Boring. Just enough status quo to lull the people back into consumption and inaction. That’s how this will likely all end, unfortunately.

Okay so I’m not going to leave you with that fucking buzzkill, what do we do about it? We keep fucking screaming from the rooftops about progressive visions of a better world because nothing around here has ever gotten better unless the people have fought for it, frankly. And we focus in on what we can do locally. The people here in Minneapolis gave us a really strong vision for what that looks like and they did it despite our political leadership, not because of it. We can create small pockets of the world we wish we lived in. We can create that reality. We do this by meeting and knowing your neighbors, participating in anti-capitalist behavior. This can look like growing a garden and trading tomatoes for the pottery your neighbor made, it looks like active participation in buy nothing groups or, better yet, get off facebook and create a free store in your neighborhood. This looks like unionizing your workplace. You have to think of your own skills and strengths and figure out ways you can contribute that have nothing to do with your ability to consume or to produce but instead your ability to be and to share with the people you’re in community with. That takes a TON of unlearning, believe me I am not good at it, I feel my American-ness most when I am forced to confront the fact that I don’t like sharing, I don’t like cooperation, I like doing my own thing and getting my way and I’m stubborn. I am genuinely unfit for communal living. There is a lot for me to unlearn. But in sitting with that, in challenging the ways we are all conditioned to be consumers above all else, above family members, above community members, above sharers, we are also doing the good work. So I urge you to figure out ways you can get involved, yes it takes work, yes it takes some googling or reaching out to friends to figure out what that looks like for you, but that is the work that is worthwhile, so much more worthwhile than sitting and doomscrolling and feeling helpless. And that is the work that we actually have agency over. So much of this is so much bigger than all of us. But Minneapolis showed us what we can do OUTSIDE of and IN SPITE OF this fucked up system, and that is where our power lies and that is where our ability lies to create a life that is so much fuller, gentler, and more caring than the horrible system that existed before Trump and will continue to exist after him, albeit a bit more worse for wear. If you’re getting involved in your community, comment that down below, tell us what you’re doing, give us that good good inspiration. And then go outside and meet your neighbors.

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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like my episode from Saturday about America’s Hasan Piker problem.