An Insider’s View of the Love Affair Between Hungary and the American Right

The American right’s love affair with Hungary seemingly knows no bounds. Hungarian officials appear at GOP events; CPAC has a Budapest event. Hungarian President Viktor Orbán met with Donald Trump last month, and earned a dilatory shoutout from the Republican candidate at the RNC, where Trump called Hungary a “strong country, run by very powerful, tough leaders — a tough guy.”

But if the strength is the draw, then how did Orbán become a strongman? What is it about Orbán that right-wingers are supporting when they say that they like what he’s done in Hungary?

TPM spoke with Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former Hungarian MP who recently wrote a book, Tainted Democracy, about Orbán’s rise to power and the crackdown that followed. Szelényi was once a member of Orbán’s political party, Fidesz, in the early 1990s, before leaving as the party grew more conservative, and eventually founding her own opposition party in 2012. She knew Orban during his entry into politics in the early 1990s, and has followed his ascent as a political actor in Hungary.

Szelényi told TPM that Orbán, during his rise, shared a key focus with the modern American right: significant, structural changes to politics and the functioning of government to accrue, and retain, power. In her telling of the rise of Orbánism, that manifests as a focus on “money, ideology, and votes” — changing the judiciary, press laws, and campaign laws in order to stay in power.

It’s an example of illiberalism that’s drawn American conservatives to Hungary — especially in the years after Trump won the 2016 election. And though both the American right and Orban’s Hungary have an interest in ostentatious culture warring, the focus on trying to realign the constitutional and legal systems to stay in power while remaining flexible on policy that is the deeper parallel.

That also goes to a key difference: Hungarian democracy is young, and emerged out of the revolutions that led to the collapse of communism in the former Eastern Bloc.

“Hungary went through a big change after 1990, which we were witnessing and even participating in closely,” Szelényi said. “It was a fascinating learning process. You had to answer basic questions in the early ’90s. What is power? What is politics? How to reshape a system that is democratic? How to create sovereignty after not having it for 40 years? So these are really the basic questions of politics, and these were the things we were dealing with.”

Szelényi described the post-Iron Curtain period as almost entirely focused on how legal structures shape politics and power; thinking outside the box about the basic questions of how power is, and could be, wielded, was more normal.

Another significant event for Fidesz, Szelényi said, was the financial crisis, which dealt a severe blow to Hungary. Orbán’s party won a majority in 2010, as the country was struggling; controlling the state and being willing to use it to help his friends meant that he had taken a very large share of a very small pie.

Six months before winning a majority in the 2010 election, Orbán announced that Hungarian conservatives should prepare to rule for up to 20 years. With a focus on controlling “money, ideology, and votes,” Szelényi said, he hoped to ensure that conservatives would stay in power.

Per Szelényi, Orbán ultimately didn’t face much of a fight. Hungary’s democratic traditions were young, and under a lot of stress amid the economic collapse that the country suffered after the financial crisis. “If a system is not able to moderate abuses of power, then it’s not a good system,” she said.

Once in power, Szelényi told TPM, Orbán began to focus intently on influencing the press: he created a council of appointees from his own party to regulate the media, while allies of the prime minister received government loans to buy out independent media outlets. Foreign outlets, or those who remained independent, began to face pressure in the form of tax investigations, or new, stringent legal requirements that made it impossible to operate.

At first, the country’s constitutional court — equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court — remained independent, Szelényi said. But Orbán was able to pack the court, adding four new seats with his appointees, tilting the balance in his direction.

That, Szelényi said, opened the door to a deluge of further changes: including extreme gerrymandering, one of the factors at play in Orbán’s rise that is familiar to U.S. audiences. Gerrymandering allowed Orbán’s party to turn a majority of 52.7 percent of the population into a veto-proof supermajority in Hungary’s parliament.

The Orbánified high court also allowed for a reduction in the number of seats in parliament, and, eventually, a new Constitution, enacted in April 2011. The country’s public prosecutor — equivalent to our attorney general — has been the same person throughout the entirety of Orbán’s tenure since 2010.

By the time of the next election, all of the main media outlets were pro-Orbán. A new law had banned the main TV stations from taking money in exchange for political ads, but not from showing government functions: “They won’t show political campaigning except for government events, which is not considered to be campaigning,” Szelényi said.

It left Hungarian democracy as a husk, in her telling, depriving the opposition of a meaningful way to connect with voters and virtually ensuring that Orbán could remain in power.

“As long as they keep holding and winning these elections, they can then say that they’ve proven it’s a democracy,” Szelényi said.

Orbán has used the power that he’s accrued to govern in a Christian-focused, nationalist manner. The opening to Hungary’s new Constitution proclaims “the family and the nation” to be the “cornerstones of coexistence.” Under Orbán, the country has adopted a series of pro-natalist policies — increasing subsidies to families with more than two children, for example — while emphasizing the primacy of the traditional household: the man as the breadwinner, the woman as the mother.

It’s a vision that Orbán has described both as “Christian Democracy” and an “illiberal state.” The arrival of American conservative figures, like Tucker Carlson, in Budapest came after years that Orbán spent investing in developing relations with the American right, Szelényi said, but also after Orbán himself studied plans developed in American think tanks.

For her, the presence of Americans is mildly annoying — conservative figures are known to receive a large sum of money for the lectures they give in Budapest, paid out of Hungary’s budget — but it goes to a deeper point about the feedback loop that’s come to exist between American and Hungarian illiberalism.

“I think most of the people who are so, so happy with Orbán basically like him because they can see that their policies, which are oftentimes Orbán’s policies, were born in the radical think tanks in the U.S.,” Szelényi remarked. “They learned a lot from the U.S. and then they adapted it to the Hungarian circumstances.”