Hungary After the Landslide: Is This the End of Illiberalism? (Turning Points) #2

🎙️ Our Hungary election mini-series continues in the wake of a seismic result: Péter Magyar's Tisza party swept Fidesz from power with a two-thirds supermajority, ending sixteen years of Viktor Orbán's rule.

In this episode, Kristóf is joined by his former party co-founder and political economy scholar Gábor Scheiring to make sense of what happened — and the treacherous transition ahead. Together, we trace how Orbán's political settlement unraveled under the weight of a stagnant low-wage economy and exhausted moral authority. The conversation pushes hard against the celebratory end-of-history narrative. Magyar, a former Fidesz insider, won by pairing an anti-corruption message with Fidesz-lite nationalism. Now, armed with a two-thirds supermajority, he faces an entrenched Fidesz apparatus that still wields massive influence over the media, economy, and judiciary. Drawing on the cautionary example of Slovakia — where a pro-European correction gave way to a new cycle of illiberalism under Robert Fico — we ask whether Hungary risks repeating the pattern. 

Can Tisza move beyond the short-term "sugar rush" of unlocking billions in frozen EU funds? What happens when a new dominant party fills the entire democratic space, with only a weakened civil society to enforce accountability and no left-wing challenger in sight? And what does Orbán's defeat mean for the European far right?

🎧 Tune into This Authoritarian Life — "Hungary After the Landslide: Is This the End of Illiberalism?", with Gábor Scheiring and Kristóf Szombati. Second in a two-part series on Hungary's 2026 election.

Follow us on Instagram: @this_authoritarian_life
Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thisauthoritarianlife

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Gábor Scheiring (00:00.706) The election is really a historical achievement. Having said that, this is only the first step. The gate to the runway has been opened. So, there is a difficult lift-off, and then you need to fly to democracy 2.0, that is, a sustainable democracy. There are multiple traps lurking on the way. If the dominant mood and narrative is that the immune system of liberal democracy kicked in, and then the far-right dominoes are now going to all one by one fall basically automatically, I think this is the recipe for another far-right cycle.

Kristóf Szombati (00:37.784) You're listening to This Authoritarian Life, a podcast in which we explore everyday human stories to make sense of authoritarian politics. My name is Kristóf Szombati.

Erdem Evren (00:49.006) And I'm Erdem Evren.

Kristóf Szombati (00:59.384) So welcome back, dear listeners of This Authoritarian Life. This is the second episode of our Hungary miniseries. In the first one, I analyzed kind of the stakes of the election and the campaign, but now that the results are known, I thought that we should do an episode where we analyze what happened and look ahead, both for Hungary, but also more broadly for the radical right-wing forces in Europe, and perhaps also about the left a bit, which has disappeared from the Hungarian scene at this point, at least as a parliamentary force. And I knew who I wanted to invite for this because I have a very dear friend, Gábor Scheiring, with whom, well, we know each other since at least 20 years. We were in the environmental movement in Hungary in our 20s. We co-founded a Green Party called Politics Can Be Different that got into Parliament the same year that Viktor Orbán won a two-thirds majority. Gábor was elected into Parliament, so he spent four years fighting this unexpected authoritarian wave. But then he went on to do a PhD, and he's one of the most prolific scholars I know, and hardworking scholars in the field. So I'm not going to go through everything he's written about, but he has a book called The Retreat of Liberal Democracy, which gives a political-economic analysis of Hungarian illiberalism. And we have co-published several papers together which deal with explaining why this illiberal regime and its settlement worked for 10 years, I think, for society at large. So there's no better person to talk to; he is currently a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar. And I guess we'll just jump right into the middle of the conversation. To start, we need to just very briefly summarize the election results before we start picking them apart. So we know that this was a landslide victory by the opposition Tisza party, which was led by Orbán's new charismatic and much younger opponent, Péter Magyar.

Kristóf Szombati (03:15.662) I personally was surprised by this two-thirds majority; we're going to get into if Gábor was surprised or not. But yeah, if you look at the parliamentary arithmetic, it looks like the new governmental party, Tisza, has around 137 out of the 199 seats. This may move up one or down one, but it's a stable two-thirds majority, meaning they can change cardinal laws, amend the Constitution, perhaps even write a new constitution. It's the same kind of very broad mandate that Fidesz received in 2010. And Fidesz, I think, has 55 seats in the new parliament. And there is a third small neo-fascist party, an extreme right-wing racist party called Our Homeland, which made it into parliament with six mandates. I think it's similar to—they also had six mandates in the last parliament. So it's a parliament that has three right-wing parties. Tisza has a broad appeal; we'll talk about it. But nevertheless, it's a new setup. So Gábor, what I think the first question I want to ask you is this, which I already alluded to. I said I was surprised. I was very cautious about this. Were you surprised by the results?

Gábor Scheiring (04:35.234) Well, let me first begin by saying thank you for inviting me to this amazing podcast. I've been listening to it, listened to all of your episodes, and I think you're really doing a great public service here with this continued conversation. So thanks for having me. Well, on the one hand, I was surprised. I mean, I think the number of people in Hungary who truly believed that this is—and were convinced that this is possible—was limited. And even if people were kind of hoping for this and somehow the rational sides of their brains knew that this is possible, there was such a fear that Fidesz would manipulate the elections, and all the little and not-so-little dirty tricks that they've been kind of using to tilt the playing field would not allow this to happen. Having said that, I remember our conversation a few weeks before the election where I said I think I would have thought that Tisza and Péter Magyar's party would win, and there's a slight chance even for a two-thirds majority. I mean, just based on the latest polls at that time around the end of the campaign, this was certainly something that looked realistic. But then there was this constant fear, you know, that even if the polls show this, they never know how much actually Fidesz voters would hide their party preferences. These were all open questions. And we're still like, you know, last time I checked the number of seats, one has gone over to Fidesz. They're within the two-thirds—which are over the threshold for that—but there's still a few votes to be counted. I think most of those, if I understand it correctly, are now coming from people like me, that is, people who voted abroad and are not the historical Hungarian minorities around the border. I think those votes have already been counted who lean towards Fidesz extremely. So maybe that's the thing that tilted one seat over to Fidesz.

Gábor Scheiring (06:54.552) But I think the last remaining few thousand votes will be coming from Hungarian expats. And most of them, I think, are strongly against Fidesz. So I would be strongly surprised if the quality of the results would significantly change. I think it's safe to conclude that the new majority of Tisza will be a qualified constitutional supermajority.

Kristóf Szombati (07:24.512) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's only a mathematical possibility for that not to happen. I think we can rule it out. You already alluded to something, so let me address it kind of head-on. Some of the political commentary and debate in Hungary in these last three days that followed the election has been about, did we overestimate the authoritarian dimension, the coercive dimension of illiberalism? With some people claiming, well, look, I mean, Orbán conceded. Maybe he's more of a democrat than we thought, or than he was portrayed in the liberal or other press that was not sympathetic to him. I have my views on this; I disagree with this, but let me ask you, how do you see it?

Gábor Scheiring (08:08.814) I also think that I disagree with this. I mean, there were a few people who were really hardcore arguing that this regime cannot be toppled by regular elections. So there were voices like that. But I think those voices were clearly a minority, a few pundits. But the overwhelming majority of serious analysts, political scientists, but also politicians, I think, were arguing that this is doable. And I think they were right. Now, being able to win the election is not equal to we are living in a democratic system, right? So the most minimal definition of democracy is free and fair elections. And by all counts, none of the elections in the past 16 years were. Or 2014, let's say 2014 was still fair, more or less. So none of these elections since 2014 were fair. So I think the playing field has tilted to such a degree that somewhere around the 2010s, the regime passed over to this murky territory of hybrid regimes or competitive authoritarian regimes that are just not democratic anymore, yet they have elections that the ruling party uses as a tool for legitimation. But if you look at the colonization of media, public broadcasting, also private media, how it has been organized and centralized into this private foundation run centrally by Fidesz lieutenants. If you look at independent institutions from the prosecutor's office to the central bank, everything is run by Fidesz loyalists. If you look at the resources available for Fidesz, I remember, I think it was when the first anti-Soros campaign was launched. Fidesz spent, within a few months or maybe even weeks, more on that single campaign than the total budget of the whole opposition. That was the mid-2010s. It's gotten worse ever since then. I think labor unions were repressed; there were regular changes to the operation of party financing. People were harassed, these constant campaigns against journalists....

Kristóf Szombati (10:14.423) Right. Yeah, yeah.

Gábor Scheiring (10:31.656) ...NGO people, polling experts. So if you add all this up, I don't think that you can call this a democracy. It's not a full-blown autocracy, right? It's a competitive authoritarian regime that has elections. Hence, the opposition has the chance to win, but it's just extremely difficult. You need this massive crisis scenario that has really hit Hungary, a convergence of economic and moral crises.

Kristóf Szombati (11:01.718) Yeah, I mean, let's also recall that in the last few weeks, we also learned that the secret services had been—I mean, a unit within the secret services that answers to the propaganda minister was tasked with infiltrating the Tisza party's digital infrastructure and to basically undermine their campaign. So, yes, that shows that we see kind of the emergence of a party-state formation. I mean, something that just relies more and more on coercion and less and less on consent. And I think we've, even when we have written together about this and thought together about this, this was one of the things we began seeing this, you know, if we use Gramsci, that there's always a consensual element in governance, but there's also a coercive aspect in all regimes. But this regime's particularity or trajectory was just like Turkey and Russia. I mean, there's a slide towards coercion. But there's a question of why that becomes necessary. So let's look at the roots of this defeat, I would say. Because for a while, both you and I thought that this political settlement that illiberalism made with society was working quite well. For 10 years, they were riding this big kind of economic post-recession recovery wave. It allowed them to bring German capital, later even East Asian capital into the country, manufacturing capital first and foremost. And both you and I, who had done also field work, saw that people who were really fed up with the, well, the crisis years that characterized the last years of left-liberal governance really were thankful to Fidesz that they had stable jobs, even if these jobs never paid well. And we saw that if you look at real wages and consumer power, if you look at those statistics, Hungary has really disconnected from the rest of the pack. But looking at this internally, through the eyes of people who were affected, this thing was better than what preceded it in many ways. And then something happened, which was COVID, and then, of course, the Ukraine War.

Kristóf Szombati (13:21.772) ...and this whole economic side of the settlement collapsed. But I guess, yeah, let me ask you, do you also think that the economy was kind of the main reason for discontent kind of reaching this level, or what else should we be looking at when we're trying to think what happened?

Gábor Scheiring (13:43.096) So I think the economy is really the foundational aspect here, but it's not enough in itself, right? So it never determines political outcomes. I think it's a convergence of economic, moral, and political factors. But I do think that the economy was sort of foundational. And there is a very interesting parallel in how the pre-2010 regime exhausted and then how Orbán's regime reached the end of its model. And it's more or less the same economic model. It's this dependent economic model that tries to keep wages low, doesn't really want to tax foreign export-oriented manufacturing capital, and hopes that the inflow of capital will generate export revenues. And that's it. That's the economic engine of the country. Now, Orbán tweaked the model a little bit. He made a little bit more room for national capitalists. So that's there. Some of those were clearly cronies, but I disagree with those assessments that say that Orbán's regime was only corruption. He also kind of distributed subsidies and economic opportunities to a broader segment of the economic elite, both in the capital, but especially if you look at provincial medium-sized towns and former kind of industrial towns. There you have a local kind of small and middle-sized entrepreneurial strata, the kind of local bourgeoisie that benefited really big from this regime. And that was an explicit aim of the regime, to kind of emancipate the national capitalist class and invite them into the ruling coalition to kind of manage the country's affairs. So that was a kind of an important half-turn, an economic nationalist half-turn, and initially workers also liked this; they believed that the biggest problems of the country come from being colonized by Western capital and the haphazard privatization process that led to massive deindustrialization and kind of this wage stagnation, so they kind of bought into this narrative that this economic nationalist package will also improve their situation, and as you were saying....

Gábor Scheiring (16:06.734) Orbán was rather lucky because from 2013 on there was this upward cycle throughout Eastern Europe, which also lifted all boats, so to speak, in Hungary as well. Although he was redistributing extreme amounts of money upward, there was at least economic growth enough that everyone did benefit. And furthermore, he strengthened the state and created the impression that as opposed to the previous state that kind of withdrew and only served the elites, under Orbán, he created this protective state where the nationalist elite would protect everyday citizens, both economically but also would kind of protect the moral order. So kind of all the economic and social policies also served not only an economic policy goal, but also the social legitimation goal, right? So it was a cleverly manufactured system, I think. And as long as this economic cycle lasted, that compromise, you know, this authoritarian capitalist social contract worked. And EU money played a huge role in that, right, if I may say. You know, throughout the 2010s, German corporations, but not just German, the Western capital also benefited big time.

Kristóf Szombati (17:19.790) Exactly.

Gábor Scheiring (17:31.182) ...not only from subsidies, but also the EU funds that were distributed throughout Hungary through public procurement. So they were very happy. There was this famous kind of editorial by one of the local German newspapers where the editor said that if German investors could vote in Hungary, 90% of them would support Viktor Orbán's Fidesz. That was the end of the 2010s. And that played a huge role in buying political support from German conservatives, right? The German car manufacturing class is tightly allied with the German conservative political elite. And they shielded Orbán throughout the 2010s. And that helped him get away with his democratic backsliding and corruption. So that was a really nasty compromise or deal that EU elites made. If you contrast that with Greece, that also tells you a lot about Europe. You know, when it comes to a democratically elected government in Greece that wanted to renegotiate its debt, that went against the financial interests of European elites. European elites immediately intervened and put down that kind of revolt from Europe's southern periphery. Hungary? It's the opposite. He satisfied the needs of Western financial and productive capital while at the same time demolished democracy. And that was fine for the European Union for almost 10 years, but then this changed. And then I think there were four shocks that hit the country that was domestically vulnerable. And this kind of interplay of these four external shocks and the domestic vulnerabilities is really important because Orbán did not change the fundamental structure of the country's growth model. So the domestic economy's ability to create, capture, and distribute value locally did not change. So the domestic value added in exports is one of the lowest throughout the whole OECD. The local economy's ability to innovate is nonexistent. So the economy cannot capture value locally. Everything that's being produced goes abroad. Hungary is a cheap labor assembly platform. And that makes Hungary and the economy extremely vulnerable to external shocks, and there were four of those. The first came the COVID shock. That was both an economic shock, but also it signaled the exhaustion of this model that relies on divestment from human services. So Hungary had, I think, the third highest mortality rate initially in the first year. In Europe, only Bulgaria performed worse. And that's directly related to the wholesale destruction of healthcare services in Hungary. And on top of that, it also led to massive inflation and economic downturn in Hungary. So that was the first shock. But they could get away with that because of the failures of the opposition and the war in Ukraine; Orbán could capitalize on that and play the specialist card. But then came the second shock, which was the inflationary energy shock from the Ukraine crisis. That was a huge shock. And it also coincided with the third shock, which is when the EU elites decided enough is enough. And I think it's not just the corruption and backsliding, also Orbán's foreign policy stance, his staunchly pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine stance, was the thing that really led EU elites to say that this is enough now. So from 2022, 2023, they just decided to cut the EU funds. And that's a huge loss for the Hungarian economy. Throughout the 2010s, there were years when this reached 4% of the GDP annually. So that's a huge blow. And then the fourth thing is that I mentioned that Orbán had this partial economic nationalist turn, which led to a really significant drop in FDI penetration. So in the early 2010s, 80%—the value of FDI in Hungary was 80% of the GDP. By the mid-2020s, this dropped to 50%. So that's a significant decline. The core remained, the car manufacturing export, but then there was a drop and Orbán wanted to kind of offset this by a pivot to East Asian battery manufacturing capital, Chinese, South Korean, Japanese. And I think there's some smart strategy behind that, but the way it was executed was again, was I think completely disastrous. And it was just another way of relying on cheap Hungarian labor that can be easily exploited and zero environmental regulation. Plus it completely depends again on external demand. And then around 2024, the demand for electric vehicles collapsed and with it collapsed the Hungarian battery sector, which was extremely costly because Orbán again gave lavish subsidies to de-risk these investments. So it added up to the kind of already existing financial costs. You know, he had this utility subsidy scheme, which was also jeopardized by the skyrocketing energy prices after the Russian crisis. So if you add it all up, it's a massive macroeconomic crisis, wage stagnation. If I may just add one more statistic, and then I will stop here. When Viktor Orbán took over in 2010, the net annual household income measured in purchasing power parity, according to the Eurostat, put Hungary in the upper third of Eastern European EU member states. By 2025, Hungary was the last, the last among all Eastern European EU member states in terms of net median household income. So that just summarizes really perfectly the performance of the Orbán regime. The regime was really fabulously capable of generating wealth for the upper strata, but then it was not able to generate long-term sustainable inclusive growth that would also lift those, the working class and lower class.

Kristóf Szombati (23:56.443) Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I think you summarized the material aspect of this very well. I think, yeah, it was exactly those factors that mattered. But there was also a crisis in moral leadership. And I don't want to dwell too long on this. But yeah, I just, when you were talking, I remembered in 2019, you know, there was this law introduced by the government to basically allow large corporations to more flexibly kind of administer overwork. It basically allowed them to make people in factories work even more flexibly than before. And there was a pretty big protest wave mobilizing. I think this was the only time that blue-collar workers were mobilized. But this was the moment I was doing research in Western Hungary in a region where exactly the settlement was really perceived to be working. It's Western Transdanubia, the west of the country, one of these manufacturing hubs that received the extra FDI investments that Gábor is mentioning, and workers. Some of them, you know, were telling me that they are really in this double bind. They don't agree with the law. They would like to join the protests and go with the buses to Budapest to be in front of parliament and say no. But at the same time, they were saying, do I really want to protest against Orbán who did so much for me? So at that moment, there was really, I could see that that moral leadership, that Orbán is the right leader to lead this country and he's done something for the country, was still standing. You know, fast forward a few years, if it would have happened then, I'm sure that that protest would have been, I think, much, much bigger. And if you look at the results, I expected Fidesz to hold much better in the industrial boom towns like Kecskemét, where Mercedes is, Debrecen, where, as you said, I mean, most of the Chinese battery companies, but other German car manufacturing, BMW is there. And Fidesz lost these places massively. So it's at this point, I think, you know, it's more the rural core, even of these more industrialized regions that is still to a large extent with Fidesz. And let me pivot here to the future because I think that's also at least as important to talk about.

Gábor Scheiring (26:17.976) Can I just... So I fully agree with you. When you mentioned moral and I also mentioned this initially, and I think it's also really important that you have all these crises, you know, and Fidesz has long lost the urban professional class, but by the 2020s also started to lose its core, this kind of working-class base in provincial towns. And most Hungarians and Eastern Europeans don't understand what this means, but if you look at the statistics, 60% of Hungarians are workers, either production or service sector workers, 60% of Hungarians. So that just tells you all. So that was a clear constituency of Orbán. But the real wage stagnation, inflation, skyrocketing inequalities, the quality of public services has started to erode that base. And that's really when Orbánism started to really exhaust. And then on top of that, you also had the crisis of the regime's moral core and also political imagination, right? When you see, when you have people on the one hand who cannot pay the bills at the end of the month and go to these dilapidated public hospitals, and at the same time see these regime loyalists leading these exuberant lifestyles, that really angers people. And then on top of that, you had this child abuse scandal at these very underfunded public social institutions. So that was really a kind of a perfect storm situation where you not only had the economic exhaustion, which was not just an abstract kind of issue of numbers, but it was a very lived experience. And it also kind of obtained a moral grammar to this very stark contrast of abused children and collapsing hospitals and the regime's loyal elites. And all amidst this, Viktor Orbán's regime had one thing to say to Hungarians, and that is, here's this group to hate. And that's why you are in trouble. One year it was minorities, either sexual minorities or migrants. The other year, it was, I don't know, Ukraine. There was always someone to hate, but there was no other political agenda to offer. So that's, I think, this convergence of the collapse of political imagination. Also, if you look at the quality of the way they communicated, I think they just got tired and lost touch with reality. So I think that kind of this toxic convergence that really brought them down.

Kristóf Szombati (29:09.190) Yeah, there wouldn't have been this deep political, I don't know, crisis of the regime without this very important moral component. But I also think that, you know, reading the pundits who are very rightly celebrating, I think, the fall of this regime, I also have the feeling that maybe they do tend to a bit overplay the crisis of Fidesz, which is clearly there. We just talked about it. But often now the commentary is, you know, that this is a won game, this is a full-on regime change. As if these 16 years could be made to disappear in a matter of months. And I am quite skeptical of that. I mean, if you look, Fidesz held, you know, they still have 40% of the vote in many districts. Not the more urbanized ones. There it's between 30 and 40. And the capital, they've led, they're below 30. So it's there, it's a disaster for them. But I don't know what's your view on this. I have the feeling that people underestimate, A, the difficulties that the new government could face or will face. So we should talk about what these are, I think. But B, also, if Fidesz is holding on still to certain key groups, mostly rural voters. I don't know which of those we should start with. But if you want to address any of them, let's do that.

Gábor Scheiring (30:36.686) Yeah, “surprisingly”, I agree with you. You know, I tried to summarize this in the past couple of days and I converged on the following metaphor. I think the election is really a historical achievement and everyone is rightfully absolutely hopeful and overjoyed over this. I don't want to belittle this. It's really... You know, even being abroad, I started to cry really during that night. So it's absolutely historic. Having said that, this is only the first step. The gate to the runway has been opened, but now this is the runway and we shouldn't, you know, mistake the runway for the destination. So there is a difficult lift-off and then you need to fly to democracy 2.0 that is a sustainable democracy. And we're very far from that, I think. And there are multiple traps waiting, lurking on the way. And if the dominant mood and narrative is that this was it, the immune system of liberal democracy kicked in, liberalism has won over illiberalism and then the far-right dominoes are now going to all one by one fall basically automatically, and we're back to the nineties. The bad guys are gone. Good guys are back. I think this is the recipe for another far-right cycle. And then we can unpack why I think this is, but this is, I think, a real danger. And let me before we get to why this is a risk in the case of Hungary, let me just mention a few other examples. Talking about Hungary, this is Eastern Europe, where some of the first illiberal, modern illiberal leaders were elected. Chief among them, Vladimír Mečiar in the 90s, also supported by provincial workers who were afraid of the social impact of the economic liberalism of the 90s. So this is the same kind of political and economic cocktail. He lost and was kind of defeated by a pro-European grand coalition of liberal and conservative, moderate conservative political parties. Big hopes. Everyone believed that Slovakia is, you know, back on track towards democracy. They had roughly 10 good years or 15 good years and they squandered it. They implemented a textbook-style, IMF stabilization program, hunger strikes. They systematically decimated their own social supporter base and the same economic frustrations that kind of held up the Mečiar's political-social coalition led to the rise of illiberalism in Slovakia again, this time under the leadership of Robert Fico. And he is now the prime minister of Slovakia again. So if you look at the UK... The political class behind Brexit collapsed. Keir Starmer was elected with this ideal typical centrist mandate, engaged in micromanagement, complete, visionless governing, spiced up with a little austerity here and there for you. So it's a classic textbook kind of centrist agenda. Look where he is now. Labour is collapsing and the far-right Reform UK.... So these are just two examples that there are dissenters' corrections after illiberal episodes. And if we think that then history is back to kind of the end, you know, the end of history is back... I think this is a huge mistake. And there's a risk that if the main strategic thinkers behind this new government and pundits will read this as kind of, you know, democracy is back in town, bad guys out, good guys in, that again can really backfire.

Kristóf Szombati (34:57.624) Yeah, I mean, many people think, I think, you know, the Slovak example you gave is good, but most people try to create comparisons with Poland. And there, there is a very kind of positive case to make that, you know, now as opposed to Poland, where they're struggling with the constitutional kind of, you know, brakes that are still there and kind of the spokes in the wheels with the president and many, and the judiciary, that as opposed to that, you know, Magyar will have kind of a free sailing because he has this supermajority. But my sense is that yes, maybe on the legal political level, it will be easier, although it probably won't be easy. But the more difficulties I see is on exactly holding this coalition together, which is very, very broad. It's a very broad electoral coalition. And... the coffers of the state are pretty empty. And if I look at Tisza's manifesto, I don't really see them, of course, making difficult redistributive choices. You know, they're basically saying, we'll keep the best of Fidesz's policies, but we'll also, you know, exactly, like, you know, we'll bring in some other things that Fidesz didn't do, but we won't change the tax system or not drastically. So this is the main squeeze I see. I mean, that can't hold. You know, they're saying with the new EU funds, when they will be back, it'll kind of, you know, solve this problem. But this fiscal squeeze seems to be, at least for me, much more structural and deeper. What do you think?

Gábor Scheiring (36:43.596) So I think there are some reasons to be somewhat hopeful, but then I will also get to why I have some serious doubts. And just briefly, first, I think, as you said, the new government has immense political and also symbolic capital. Péter Magyar is the new guy in town who has defeated Viktor Orbán. That's an extreme dense kind of strong symbolic capital, right? Second, he has this constitutional supermajority so he can change things. Third, he has a sort of fast track to economic recovery, at least in the short run, just take a few rule of law and anti-corruption boxes, and then roughly 20 billion euros in EU funds will start to flow in and then the economy will... at least recover in the short run. So there's like, you know, in the short run, I think they're kind of covered, but this is EU funds. We've been there already twice. That's not a sustainable growth model. And they're talking a little bit about, I don't know, upgrading and whatever, but I don't see the kind of the developmental vision, the transformative economic, industrial and social policies that would really put Hungary on a different economic model that would aggressively push domestic capital up the value chain, would increase their capability to innovate, and would aggressively push Hungarian wages upward. I mean, they have some good ideas, you know, increase spending on healthcare, but there's also this vagueness that you're describing that they don't want to really change the foundations of Orbán's economic model. The flat tax will stay intact, although they will introduce something like a tax holiday or tax break for low-income citizens, but they don't really want to increase taxes on upper-income Hungarians. They talk about, at least in their program, they mention some form of wealth tax for the super wealthy. I don't think that brings in really significant income or revenue. So I don't see the kind of the really creative thinking there. And they have some time, but this is one risk. So that kind of economic model, if Hungary gets stuck in this low-wage assembly platform model, then economic frustrations will be back. You know, the EU fund is a sugar rush. That's a short-term solution, but it's not a long-term plan for economic upgrading. So I think that's risk number one. And the same way that Orbán rose the first time because of economic frustrations... Maybe it won't be Orbán, maybe it will be someone else, maybe it will be Our Homeland, maybe it will be, I don't know, some other party, but an illiberal populist cycle could ride the waves of economic disillusionment. There's also a second risk, I think, which is political, and that is related to the institutions. So on the one hand, Tisza is this coalition of everyone, and all the other political parties dissolved themselves, created Tisza. There's only Tisza really in terms of the democratic space. And that's I think a problem. Also labor unions are fairly weak in the country. NGOs have been decimated by Fidesz. So if you look around the country, what we might call these countervailing institutions of social power that could hold economic and political elites in check... I'm not saying they don't exist, but they're weak. So there's only Tisza there really that has immense power now. But that could backfire. And on top of that, you also have these extra-governmental fortifications of illiberalism that Viktor Orbán has built. You know, the private foundations, the Mathias Corvinus College, the Danube Institute, the immense wealth that Orbán's oligarchs are sitting on. That's a network of resources that Fidesz can capitalize on. And if citizens remain detached from political institutions and I don't see, you know, that's a one-man show really, Tisza, and then created really a buzz. So that's good to see, but that's really just a buzz. It's a kind of a flash mob. It's not, they don't have party constituents. They don't have a well-organized democratic control mechanism built into their system. So people could easily feel alienated again. So that's the kind of the political voicelessness that could feed into another far-right cycle. And then the third is cultural. So there again, he was kind of right to avoid this classic symbolic liberalism and this hard talk about constitutions and rule of law. That was one of the big mistakes of the old opposition. They believed that they can save democracy by talking about democracy, but that's not how it works. You save democracy by actually demonstrating that it works for people. And I think Magyar kind of sensed that, right? But at the whole, his vision for culture and what Hungarian society is, is pretty much a Fidesz-lite. It's a nationalist vision. It's quite strongly anti-immigrant. And we know, you know, there's this saying that voters prefer the original to the copy. He's just singing the same anti-immigrant, xenophobic song, but at lower volume. But he doesn't really want to change... kind of, he doesn't offer a kind of inclusive identity that could create a new cultural narrative for Hungarians. So that's there already. And if people will feel culturally alienated for whatever reasons, then that narrative will be there for the far right to mobilize again. So I think these are the three key steps. This kind of economic shock that could come and lead to economic devaluation for masses, the institutional problems that could lead to again, to political voicelessness. And then there's the cultural problem... cultural discontent that could be capitalized on by the far right. So if you add that, what I call the triple devaluation together, it's not diffused by a simple change in government. And I don't see the strategy really there to address that. Again, Tisza has time. They have immense political capital. They have the qualified supermajority. So that's good. They have some time to figure this out. But if the general belief is that, you know, democracy won—if they won't have a transformative agenda, policies and vision, it could backfire in the long run.

Kristóf Szombati (43:31.342) Yeah, I mean, if we think back about the regime change of 1990, exactly these three processes emerged there. You know, exactly what you say, there was, of course, a massive economic shock. And then there was the problem of what you call political alienation, a feeling of abandonment by people not being heard, not being represented, which is really strongly connected to this cultural identity issue. And there, the problem I noticed is that Orbán really was able to compensate for a long time the fact that his economic model was painful for blue-collar workers especially. He was really able to compensate that with this discourse that valorized labor. He was basically saying, I'm building a system for working people. I'm one of them. I'm with you. It's your work that is building this country and so on. And I don't hear Magyar really being able to address that. He could learn how to do that, but for now, all I've heard is him being able to speak more to urban young crowds who are, of course, vastly disillusioned. And there he really has a feeling for it. And you see, I saw the vibe in Budapest among young people. I mean, he's a hero. He's among the TikTok generation. But yeah, there are all these people who are living in smaller towns and yeah, I see the main threat there that Fidesz could claw them back if things don't go so well. And if Magyar exactly as you say, doesn't have a strategy on these three levels. But yeah, let's give them time and I guess we'll return to this conversation. We've been talking for 50 minutes. I think it's time to pivot outward and look at what this... as we described a really celebratory and massive historical moment is playing out in Europe. I'm mostly interested in your view on what this may do to, you know, Orbán's allies. Le Pen has an election next year. My Italian friends tell me that Meloni has actually been hit by being too close to Orbán, which I was surprised to hear. I could go on, but so there's this whole aspect of....It's really a symbolic question. How will this impact the far-right tribe that is still riding big waves in Europe? And I guess we should also talk a bit about the EU because now all the pundits are saying, thank God the 90 billion will be there for Ukraine, which is true, I think, or Magyar will strike a compromise. But looking beyond that, what does this do to cooperation on the European level?

Gábor Scheiring (46:28.438) Yeah, I mean, to answer your first question first, this is clearly a big symbolic blow, not just to the European, but the global far-right movement. Orbán has not just emerged as a key symbolic figure but invested billions of US dollars in marketing himself as such. I have a study on this that shows just the transatlantic side of this and the immense amount of energy, time and money that was invested in building him up as not just one model, but the model as Kevin Roberts, head of Heritage Foundation once said. So symbolically, that's quite important. But then, you know, symbols are symbols. There's... much more to reality than that. I don't want to completely brush this aside because this is an important moment, but you need strategies to organize society and you need strategies that create credible vision and create credible policies and create majority social coalitions that can beat the far right. That's just not... people can't eat symbols, so to speak. So, I mean, I'm happy for this, but this is clear again, just one moment. I would add that this year will be, I think, very, very likely a year when in Europe and globally, the rise of the far right is going to stop, at least temporarily. Right? So Orbán is out. Next, Trump is highly likely to lose the midterms this fall, at least combined... is a huge blow, especially Trump losing. I always thought that beating Trump, so to speak, is easier than beating Orbán, but symbolically, he's the heavyweight in this equation, right? So that's going to be another huge, huge blow to the movement. But I don't think that this will end in itself, the movement, again, right? So if you look at the German political landscape, they are really pretty much up there, Reform UK, still the strongest party in the United Kingdom. If you look at France, how it looks, it's pretty shambolic. Democratic forces can't really agree on a viable strategy. The local governmental elections did not result in any clearly interpretable situation, but it also clearly did not result in a retreat of the far right. In fact, it consolidated it in medium-sized towns, right? So... I think the only parts of Europe where pro-democracy forces are in fairly good shape is Spain on the one hand. And I think Pedro Sánchez is by far the most inspiring leader these days in Europe. And then you have Scandinavia, especially Norway that still has this classic progressive coalition intact, the classic in the sense of you have the old working class and you have the new kind of urban intellectuals around greens and kind of more progressive liberals and they create a majoritarian social coalition and that's there. So that's a kind of a more diverse social coalition, but it's clearly a progressive social coalition that is able to keep the far right down. It's there, the Progress Party, the Fremskrittspartiet is there, but it's weaker compared to many other parts of Europe. And there's Spain, where again, it's more like a competition between Podemos and the Socialist Party in Spain; they also cooperated on that kind of the mainstream socialists learned to kind of innovate from the new left challengers. And that really allowed Sánchez to become a dominating figure in Spanish politics. So these are the really great recipes. We have a bunch of these center-right forces that just, again, sing the songs of the far right but at a lower volume. I don't think that that's a long-term solution. Every research shows that at the end of the day... it just leads to the stabilization, consolidation and further rise of the far right. I don't think that Friedrich Merz is the solution. I don't think that Ursula von der Leyen is the solution. They're just increasingly cooperating with the far right also in the European Parliament. And by the way, Péter Magyar is a member of that. His MPs are the member of that European People's Party that is increasingly choosing to cooperate with the Patriots and other far right factions in the European Parliament if it comes to environmental or social regulation. So, you know, there's this also this convergence of the center and the far right and Hungary could be one example of that.

Kristóf Szombati (51:26.398) Magyar could play an interesting role in the EPP, I was thinking, because he can't really allow himself to align himself too much with the Patriots that wouldn't really serve his goal. I was wondering what his strategy will be there.

Gábor Scheiring (51:43.150) Let’s see.

Kristóf Szombati (51:45.558) Right. So should we come finally to, do you still want to talk about the left? We have touched on the far right forces a bit.

Gábor Scheiring (51:56.076) I mean, I just mentioned Spain and Norway. I think some of the last remaining good examples.

Kristóf Szombati (52:03.694) But isn't Spain going down? I mean, Sánchez doesn't have a strong majority there.

Gábor Scheiring (52:11.266) He doesn't have a strong majority, but where does a socialist party have a strong majority? The latest polls show him that he could win again. And even if he doesn't mean, I mean, he has certainly been able more than any others to stem the rise of the far right. So I would still consider it as a good example. And in terms of leadership at the European level, he clearly at least has a vision, right? He’s clearly talking values-based language. There's something similar in Uruguay, by the way, I know little about it, but I've researched it. And it's also this kind of a Norway-style progressive coalition, including different styles of left-wing politics that is really a kind of a dominating force in a country's political life. And it's a fairly stable democracy that also can manage decent social and economic upgrading. So it's a kind of inclusive developmental... So there are examples of that. But if you look at Eastern Europe, specifically Hungary now joining Poland, Poland now has again a left-wing faction in the parliament, but it's really weak for a period. There was no left-wing representation in the parliament. Hungary, I don't even know how long we should, I should check how long we should go back in time to find a session of the Hungarian National Assembly without any left-wing representation. I mean, it's a historic disaster in many ways. Also a kind of a slight chance in a sense that especially by the end, this party called Democratic Coalition, the party of the former prime minister, I think played a huge role in the demise of the Hungarian left. And now that they received, I don't know how many times a blow, but this will be perhaps the last kind of nail in their political coffin, so to speak, but you never know with them. So that in some sense, it also creates a kind of a possibility for a fresh start. Overall, I'm really pessimistic about this because the organizational infrastructure is just very, very big. You think around 2010 or the end of 2000s....the progressive scene was much more organized. Have a new few outlets, but the kind of the social infrastructure I think is weaker. And Péter Magyar has immense social capital, has a fast track to economic recovery. So I don't see any problems for him in the next two or three years. And then will come the elections and that the question will be him or... some form of far right, either Our Homeland or Fidesz or their sort of coalition. And then everyone will argue again, this is not the time to divide the opposition. And I don't think that Péter Magyar will change the electoral law. We haven't talked about that. Yeah. And this is, I think, one of the biggest questions, right? It talks about limiting or capping the term of the prime minister. It's kind of an interesting solution borrowed from presidential regimes. I don't mind it, but that's more like a symbolic thing.

Kristóf Szombati (55:10.702) I was going to come to that, yeah.

Gábor Scheiring (55:26.070) What matters in such systems is really how parliamentarians are elected. And the current Hungarian system strongly favors the dominant party. And currently Tisza is the dominant party. So they could win the overwhelming majority of parliamentary seats with like what, 50-something percent of the votes. So that is a very distorting non-proportional system. And as long as that stays intact, Hungary will have this quasi two-party system. And that certainly will offer very, very little room for a democratic challenger on the left to emerge. But I do think it would be necessary. Otherwise, there's nothing to push Tisza into a direction that could kind of address these challenges that we were talking about.

Kristóf Szombati (56:12.470) Yes, I think a public debate is necessary on precisely this because Magyar would commit exactly the same mistake that Orbán committed with the boomerang coming back to him. You think the electoral system is going to serve you as the dominant party, but it ends up kicking your ass and you fall over. And if I'm thinking about, you know, where disillusioned voters will go, and there will be some, because this is going to be difficult for years, right? If the economy, if geopolitics were in a different phase, I would say, you know, maybe he can allow himself that, but just, you know, making an argument against his own self-interest here, I would tell him, look, a left-wing challenger could help you stabilize your regime or this new democracy that you're trying to build because you surely want to prevent disillusioned voters from your camp to go back to Our Homeland or Fidesz. So I think there's an argument to be made, but my intuition aligns with yours. If we look at what he said, he hasn't said anything about that. So I think, yeah, some public intellectuals should start pushing this debate.

Gábor Scheiring (57:31.040) I mean, it sometimes happens that politicians go against their own self-interest. You know, sometimes you have that caliber. Politics at the end is really about power and organizing power and there's nothing wrong with that. So if you don't push him, why would he concede power? Power only listens to power. That's why I'm talking about organized social countervailing power. And it's very weak in the country. Who will keep Péter Magyar in check? There's only Viktor Orbán to do that. And that's a horrible perspective.

Kristóf Szombati (58:05.900) That's right. That's right. I mean, we've talked about this before. I mean, let's end here. We've both been involved, right, in building these green and left-wing infrastructures. So I guess my last question is, is the situation really as bleak as you described? Couldn't part of this youthful energy, especially young people who really look motivated now to change our country be, you know, mobilized for this kind of cause?

Gábor Scheiring (58:40.110) It could be, but it would require, you know, not just an organization, it would require leadership quality. That's something that I've seen fail and fail and fail again on the progressive side of politics in Hungary. So I don't see that kind of leadership quality, but we really haven't heard of Péter Magyar also before; that person might be lurking in the background and waiting to jump on the scene. This politics is very hard to predict in that sense. With that regard, I'm perhaps even more skeptical than with regard to the chance of at least consolidating some form of kind of simulated shallow democracy. That's doable for some time, maybe two terms, maybe a chance to win again. I think his political capital will carry him through to the next election. Even if he doesn't manage to fix these or redress these big issues, I don't know, maybe there will be something different in four years, 2030, but I'd be positively surprised if there emerged a... new viable progressive alternative by that time. I think we'll have to wait a bit longer for that. I think there's a good chance that Péter Magyar will dominate the pro-democracy side of Hungarian politics for two terms now. It's close to 10 years.

Kristóf Szombati (01:00:24.374) Let's see how it goes. Thanks for the conversation. I hope that the conversation was intelligible and interesting also to outside audiences. Thanks for taking the time.

Gábor Scheiring (01:00:36.504) Thank you very much again for this conversation.

Erdem Evren (01:00:39.022) So that's it from us for today. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

Kristóf Szombati (01:00:46.626) We would also like to thank our contributors. Music and mastering Shai Levy, artwork and graphics Polina Georgescu, editing Vera Jónás, and our in-house communications advisor, Anna Szilágyi.