It means we have to show up. Not only to vote, but to phone bank, write postcards, talk up the candidates every chance we get wherever we are, and anything else we can do. It’s how they did it in Hungary; people showed up, which extended the candidate’s reach. Thanks to Wonkette’s Evan Hurst for the link.
Opinion M. Gessen
By M. Gessen
Visuals by Máté Bartha
M. Gessen, an Opinion columnist, and Mr. Bartha reported from Budapest.
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Starting early in the morning on the second Saturday of May, first hundreds and then thousands of people gathered in the square in front of Hungary’s majestic Parliament building to celebrate the start of a new political era. This was the square where tens of thousands gathered in 1956 and 1989 to demand an end to the Soviet occupation and in 2006 to protest a discredited government. It was the square on which Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s regime imposed a major redesign more than a decade ago — with traffic rerouted away, a large reflecting pool and raised beds installed, narrow pathways laid down — apparently to ensure that no such mass gathering could take place again. Today it was the square where Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist, would be sworn in, promising a rebirth of democracy and liberty after 16 years of autocratic control.
Squeezing into the available spaces and gradually filling up nearby cafes and streets, the crowd absorbed people of all ages: young people who didn’t remember a time before Orban and who had voted in unprecedented numbers; aging intellectuals who didn’t think they’d ever celebrate their country again; multigenerational families who had arrived by bus after seeing Magyar in their hometowns and villages. During his campaign, Magyar had traveled to an estimated 700 locations, turning many of them into “Tisza islands” — outposts of support for his party. By the end, Magyar was holding five or more rallies a day.
It had looked like an impossible quest. Orban and his cronies dominated the media, persecuted and smeared opposition politicians and changed election laws to benefit his party, Fidesz. Orban had seemed to achieve what the Hungarian sociologist and political theorist Balint Magyar (no relation) calls “autocratic breakthrough” — the point after which it’s impossible to unseat an autocrat using elections. Illiberal politicians from other countries made pilgrimages to Hungary to learn from Orban; CPAC, the gathering for American national conservatives, started staging an annual convention there; and Vice President JD Vance visited Budapest in advance of the election, in a show of support for Orban. And yet Hungarians handed Tisza not just a victory but a constitutional majority, enough power to reverse Orban’s changes to Hungarian laws and institutions. The triumph was stunning — unique in our era of democratic backsliding — and it holds clear lessons for the United States.
One obvious lesson of Peter Magyar’s success lies in the scale, reach and relentlessness of his organizing network. “They had 2,000 Tisza islands with between 30,000 and 50,000 volunteers,” Balint Magyar told me, in evident awe. “Just in their call centers, they had 3,000 to 4,000 people in the last week of the campaign.” We talked two days before the swearing-in ceremony, at his office in the spectacular but largely empty building of Central European University. In 2018, Orban’s government forced most of the university’s operations into exile amid an antisemitic scare campaign focused on the Hungarian American philanthropist George Soros, the C.E.U.’s founder and principal funder. Some of Orban’s many other scare campaigns targeted migrants, “the Brussels elites” and L.G.B.T.Q. people. During the latest election campaign, billboards and A.I.-generated social media posts warned Hungarians they were in danger of being overtaken by Ukraine and only Orban could protect them. It should have seemed absurd — it was absurd — but outlandish xenophobic and antisemitic propaganda had served Orban well for years. It didn’t work against Peter Magyar — probably because so many Hungarians got to see him in person, many of them repeatedly. This is another lesson of his success: Old-fashioned in-person politics can be a powerful antidote to media fearmongering.
In his inaugural speech to Parliament, broadcast on giant screens set up around the square, Peter Magyar said that voters had handed him a mandate “not just to change the government, but to change the system. To start over.”
Magyar enumerated the ways in which Orban had damaged Hungary: a stalled economy in which a third of the population lives in poverty, inadequate health care, low-quality schools, child welfare institutions plagued by abuse, an atmosphere of hatred and fear. Orban’s regime had “stolen from the common good of the Hungarian nation — from the pockets of the Hungarian people, and from the tables of Hungarian children and the elderly,” Magyar said, “an estimated 20 trillion Hungarian forints,” or some $65 billion, over the last decade and a half.
Previous opposition politicians had described Orban’s regime as “corrupt,” a relatively mild term suggesting some aberration from the government’s intended function. Peter Magyar made no such accommodation. Borrowing a term coined by Balint Magyar, he has called it a mafia state — a fundamentally criminal enterprise. Third lesson: Don’t mince words.
Instead of shrinking away from direct confrontation, he fortified himself against it. By getting elected to the European Parliament, in 2024, he secured immunity from prosecution in Hungary. When rumors circulated of an intimate video that would be used to blackmail him, he went on the offensive, accusing Orban of using “Russian-style kompromat” (no video was released). Knowing that he would probably be blocked from registering a new political party, he took over one that had become dormant. Even more important, instead of trying to build coalitions among other parties, he focused on conscripting as many actual people as possible, from across the political spectrum, ultimately building a giant organization capable of taking down Orban’s political monopoly.
One could say — and some have — that Magyar won at least in part because he was a former insider of Orban’s Fidesz party. But my interlocutors in Hungary emphasized that Magyar’s credibility lay in the fact that he was not a member of the old opposition, whose policies had led to the discontent that made Orban’s rise possible and whose timidity had helped perpetuate Orban’s power. That’s a lesson, too: The person best positioned to break the power of Donald Trump would not be an anti-Trump Republican but an outsider to the Democratic establishment, someone who can credibly claim that Trump didn’t happen on his watch — a Graham Platner rather than a Thomas Massie.
For all his tireless work over the last two years, Magyar did not create his political machine from scratch. Like Zohran Mamdani, Magyar excelled at converting potential supporters into campaign volunteers. An existing news distribution service provided an initial skeleton of the organizing network. A panoply of grass-roots protest movements joined, too. On the day of Magyar’s inauguration, a parallel, smaller commemoration organized by the city of Budapest celebrated those organizations. One by one, people took the microphone to give a short speech about their cause and their part in the electoral victory: teachers who had organized against a unified state-dictated curriculum; a young man who spoke up against abuses in the child care system; a high school student persecuted for reciting an anti-Orban poem; organizers of Budapest’s L.G.B.T.Q. Pride celebration. The speakers stayed onstage, gradually forming a crowd of the kind — the many kinds — of ordinary Hungarians who had ended the Orban era.
That’s a fifth lesson: Grass-roots organizations that have little or no connection to electoral politics — in the United States, that might be the networks formed by the No Kings rallies, ICE-resistance groups and so on — can matter as much as or more than those already focused on winning votes.
Another lesson lies in the issues that motivated Magyar’s voters. Hungary’s economy is a mess, but post-election polling by Median, an organization that had predicted election results with uncanny accuracy, shows that voters saw corruption as the most important issue by far. Asked why they thought Orban had lost, 49 percent cited corruption, and only 18 percent thought it was the “worsening economic situation, rising cost of living.” The next three reasons cited were “lies” (15 percent); “fearmongering, war rhetoric” (11 percent); and “people got fed up” (10 percent). In other words, Hungarians seemed to see the damage that Orbanism had done to the nation as more important than any harm they felt they had suffered as individuals. They were united by a sense of moral outrage — “value choices,” as one person close to the incoming government described it to me.
Polls have consistently shown that even Fidesz voters generally want Hungary to stay in the European Union. Some surely just want the ease of travel and residency, but others probably have in mind the loftier ideals of the E.U., such as the rule of law, human rights and the essential purpose of the E.U., which is peace.
Hungary is one of the poorer countries in the union, and in the early years of his regime, Orban was able to use E.U. membership to secure funding, and thereby power, even as he railed against the Brussels bureaucracy. But in 2022, the European Union started withholding funding, citing corruption. And in 2024, after Hungary ignored a European Court of Justice ruling that compelled it to process asylum applications, the court ordered Hungary to pay 200 million euros and imposed a daily fine of 1 million euros. (When Orban refused to pay, Brussels deducted the money from E.U. funds earmarked for Hungary.) These actions didn’t just hurt the Hungarian economy — they also allowed Magyar to draw a causal connection between Orban’s policies and the well-being of ordinary voters. One of his major campaign promises was to unlock E.U. funding.
Hungary joined the European Union in 2004. The E.U. flag — 12 gold stars on a blue background — adorned the facade of the Hungarian Parliament building alongside the nation’s red, white and green standard. But Orban’s politics, like the politics of most autocrats, was the politics of grievance. Under his regime, the E.U. flag was removed and replaced with the flag of the Szekelys, a Hungarian minority that found itself living in Romania when World War I’s victors redrew the region’s borders. Orban’s symbolic gesture helped fan resentment against the E.U. and what he claimed were a new generation of attacks on Hungarian sovereignty.
Peter Magyar scheduled his inauguration for Europe Day — the 76th anniversary of the declaration that created the road map for a united continent. Before he was sworn in, the European flag was raised again. But the Szekely flag remained, signaling that Magyar seeks to represent all Hungarian citizens, including those who supported Orban. In some U.S. coverage, Magyar has been labeled centrist or right-of-center. What his politics actually are — and this is another lesson of his victory — is pluralist. (snip-MORE)
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