Excerpts:

At a panel discussion on Thursday evening, three days before Hungary’s elections, the mood was grim. The speakers, a mix of Americans and Europeans, hadn’t abandoned hope that Prime Minister Viktor Orban might eke out a victory, but all agreed that his party, Fidesz, was facing the most serious challenge to its rule in the 16 years since Orban returned to power.

Orban, seeking a fifth term amid an economy widely seen as terrible — with high unemployment, virtually no growth and threadbare social services — is running on fear. Much of his pitch revolves around the fantastical claim that his center-right opponent, Peter Magyar, is going to drag Hungary to war in Ukraine.

Hungary’s capital, Budapest, is blanketed with posters of side-by-side mug-shot-style photos of Magyar and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, with the words “They Are Dangerous! Stop Them!” In the past, Orban has succeeded by positioning himself against demonized opponents — he pioneered many of the right-wing conspiracy theories about George Soros — but this time, it doesn’t seem to be working. “You have to strain to see an idealistic, positive message about, let’s say, the economy, that Fidesz is putting forward,” said Fund.

Heading into the election, most polls show Magyar’s Tisza Party well ahead, and some indicate it’s on track for a landslide. As the speakers at the Danube Institute understood, an Orban defeat would have serious implications for the conservative movement worldwide.

Crucially, it’s not just material support that Orban provides to the international right. Orban has long held out the system he created in Hungary, which he calls “illiberal democracy,” as a workable Christian nationalist alternative to Western liberalism, and its example has proved enormously influential. In 2022, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said, “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.” More than any other politician, Orban showed conservatives worldwide how to use government power to wage the culture wars. He crushed a prominent liberal university, banned “homosexual propaganda” in schools — a forerunner of Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law — and engineered the takeover of major media outlets by his allies. Steve Bannon once described Orban as “Trump before Trump.”

Now Orban faces a possible rebuke from his own citizenry. And in a poetic coincidence, he’s faltering at the same moment that the intellectual vanguard of the MAGA movement is cracking up under the weight of Trump’s destructive, humiliating war in Iran. For at least the past decade, right-wing enemies of liberalism around the world have seemed to have momentum and energy on their side. They were daring and transgressive, while the old center-left parties that tried to stand in their way appeared exhausted and a little stunned. But today, both Orban, the progenitor of the modern populist right, and Trump, its apotheosis, are flailing.

Of course, the victory of Magyar, Tisza’s leader, isn’t assured. In the past, polls have undercounted support for Fidesz; the last time I was in Hungary, for the election four years ago, surveys showed a competitive race, but Orban’s party won in a landslide. Hungary’s electoral districts are deeply gerrymandered, so he could win a majority of seats in Parliament even without a majority of votes. In March, news broke of a scandal involving claims that Fidesz attempted to buy votes from Hungary’s Roma minority. No one knows what other dirty tricks the election’s final days might bring.

But Tisza’s lead looks as if it could be robust enough to overcome both Fidesz’s structural advantages and its potential cheating. As Fund acknowledged, Orban’s campaign feels enervated and uninspired.

Neither Trump nor Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, wants to see this challenge to kleptocracy succeed, and both are trying hard to shore up Orban. In addition to being an inspiration to the American right, Orban is a stalking horse for Russian interests in Europe: Under his leadership, Hungary has blocked European Union sanctions on Russia and aid to Ukraine.

As The Washington Post reported, Russian intelligence suggested staging an assassination attempt on Orban to get Hungarians to rally around him. That hasn’t happened, but earlier this week, Serbia’s Putin-aligned president divulged a purported Ukrainian terrorist plot against energy infrastructure critical to Hungary, a claim that was widely seen as a Russian false flag operation.

Just after this ostensible plot came to light, Vance arrived in Budapest to campaign for Orban, echoing Orban’s accusations of Ukrainian interference. This convergence of Russian and American interests is particularly perverse given that, until Tuesday, the United States was at war with Iran, which was, U.S. officials have said, getting targeting help from Russia. But ordinary American geopolitical interests appear to pale in comparison to Orban’s symbolic importance to the American right.

“We want to get rid of Orban, and these other guys, Trump and Putin, they want to hold on to him,” said Hadhazy, the National Assembly member.

The fact that Trump is working to help a Putin-aligned autocrat demonstrates just how thoroughly he’s inverted American foreign policy. But it also shows why an Orban loss would be so seismic. The most powerful autocrats in the world want Orban to win; in addition to Putin and Trump, he has the endorsement of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the likely support of China, since Orban has embraced the Belt and Road initiative, China’s investment in global infrastructure.


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/opinion/viktor-orban-donald-trump-hungary-right.html

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to pick his brain about leadership and government what would your post be about?

If you read the column you’d know that far right authoritarian leaning conservatives are flocking to Budapest to be conditioned on how to run an authoritarian government.

Trump and all his sycophants need to be removed from public office...and replaced with True Conservatives that treasure American Democracy...our Constitution...the Rule of Law...and seek common ground with Democrats.