Orbán Was Trump Before Trump

Now they’re both fighting for political survival

US President Donald Trump greets Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban outside the West Wing of the White House. Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images.

There’s a playbook for what’s happening in America. It’s been running for fifteen years in, of all places, Hungary—a small landlocked country in Central Europe. The architects of MAGA studied the Hungarian model closely, celebrated it openly and told us plainly that they wanted to copy it.

The template is Viktor Orbán’s illiberal state: a democracy in form only, where the courts, media, electoral rules and the economy are bent toward one party’s quest for a permanent grip on power.

For the American right, Orbán’s Hungary wasn’t just an interesting experiment. The Heritage Foundation declared it a governing template. Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon made the pilgrimage to Budapest. CPAC even held its conference there. The message was unambiguous: Show us how it’s done, so we can import it to the U.S.

But the Hungarian experiment is failing. After sixteen years in power, Orbán has turned his nation into the most corrupt in the European Union, one of its poorest, and, by wide consensus, the least free. His economy has stagnated for three years. Hospitals are crumbling. Young people are leaving. And for the first time in Orbán’s tenure, a credible challenger, Péter Magyar, has pulled ahead in the polls and remains there.

The global right has responded by treating the upcoming Hungarian elections on April 12 as a four-alarm emergency. Trump publicly endorsed Orbán and dispatched both his Secretary of State and his Vice President to Budapest. Marine Le Pen flew in from France, Matteo Salvini from Italy, Geert Wilders from the Netherlands. Even Argentina’s Javier Milei traveled from the other side of the world to offer his blessing. Russia sent a team of professional propagandists to work the information space on Orbán’s behalf.

The original experiment is in crisis, and by extension, so is the copy. What Hungarian voters do next week, and how the government in power responds, may be the most instructive preview of what America will face in its own fateful midterm elections in November.

Orbán’s Path to Power

To understand what Viktor Orbán built over the sixteen years he has been continuously in power, we have to rewind to 2010. Orbán had already served one term as prime minister, from 1998 to 2002, and then he lost. He spent the following years in opposition, not recalibrating toward the center but hardening toward something else entirely: a theory of permanent power.

When he won again in 2010, it was with a solid majority of the electorate. But there was a structural quirk in Hungary’s electoral system: Multiparty elections had not been held in nearly 50 years, and the drafters of the election laws never anticipated a single party winning an outright majority. The rules supercharged Orbán’s victory, handing him 68 percent of the seats despite winning only about 52 percent of the vote.

Orbán knew exactly what to do next. After all, upon seizing the Italian parliament a century earlier, Mussolini had immediately rewritten the electoral rules to guarantee his party could never lose power. That handed the Italian fascists two-thirds of the seats, no matter what voters decided.

Orbán didn’t need Blackshirts in the chamber to intimidate legislators like Mussolini did. Instead, he had a legislative supermajority and a team of lawyers. Within a year, Orbán had rewritten Hungary’s electoral laws and redrawn its district maps to lock in structural advantages that would persist regardless of how the public mood shifted. Each time a new challenger has emerged since, Orbán has torn out more pages from the rulebook, warping the system further still.

By the time of this year’s election, analysts estimated that the opposition would need to win by a landslide just to achieve a bare parliamentary majority. Meanwhile, Orbán’s Fidesz party could potentially hold a constitutional supermajority on a mere plurality of the vote.

The lesson Orbán drew from history, and in turn, the lesson MAGA has drawn from Orbán, is this: Democracy can be hollowed out from within, using the law as the instrument. You don’t need to cancel elections. You just need to make them unwinnable.

Unitary Executive, Orbán Style

The 2010 election supermajority was the key to Orbán expanding his own powers as prime minister. It eliminated the checks and balances that might otherwise have held him accountable and guaranteed the civil rights of political, ethnic, religious and other minorities. Orbán’s authoritarian moves read like a prequel to Trump’s own hurry-up fascist offense.

The courts fell first. A key legislative amendment allowed justices of the Constitutional Court to be elected by a two-thirds parliamentary majority alone, replacing the prior cross-party consensus model. Orbán installed loyalist judges and forced out independent jurists. The National Judiciary Office, run by the wife of the Fidesz politician who wrote most of the 2011 Constitution, gained expanding authority over judicial appointments.

The media fell next—and more completely. Beginning in 2014, Orbán’s allies started acquiring the country’s major media companies. In a series of moves that would delight FCC Chairman Brendan Carr today, they transformed news outlets into voices for the regime or closed them down altogether. By 2019, media control resulted in 80 percent of public affairs programming being directly or indirectly financed by sources tied to the ruling Fidesz party. Journalists critical of the government were surveilled with Pegasus, the Israeli spyware favored by authoritarian governments worldwide. The last independent radio station was shut down in 2021.

The universities fell too, though more slowly. Rather than shutter them outright, Orbán privatized them into “foundations,” funneling state and EU funds through boards packed with Fidesz loyalists who dictated what was taught and by whom. (Gov. DeSantis of Florida apparently took careful notes.) Central European University, one of the region’s most respected institutions, was effectively pushed out of Hungary by a targeted law requiring foreign universities to maintain campuses in their home countries—a requirement written to ensnare CEU. It eventually relocated to Vienna. The message to every remaining institution was clear: Independence is contingent on compliance.

The regime’s true engine, and what should serve as a warning to democracy advocates here at home, was its systemic, nepotistic corruption. High-profile prosecutions dropped to nearly zero, just as we are seeing in the U.S. The arrangement enriched a loyalist class with every incentive to keep Fidesz in power.

What made the Orbán model distinctively dangerous (and distinctively exportable) was that none of this looked like a coup. Democratic backsliding occurred through legal and constitutional means. Orbán himself declared in a famous 2014 speech that he was building an “illiberal state.” He would achieve this not despite elections, but through them.

Between 2010 and 2020, Hungary dropped 69 places in the Press Freedom Index, lost 11 places in the Democracy Index, and deteriorated 16 places in the Corruption Perceptions Index. By 2019, Freedom House downgraded Hungary from “free” to “partly free.” By 2022, the European Parliament declared that Hungary could “no longer be considered a full democracy.”

The American Pilgrimage

The American right didn’t just notice what Orbán had done; they flew to Budapest to study it up close.

In 2023, Orbán gave the keynote address at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Tucker Carlson devoted a full week of broadcasts from Budapest, calling Hungary “a small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.” Orbán returned the favor, saying on stage that “only my friend Tucker Carlson places himself on the line without wavering. Programs like his should run day and night. As you say, 24/7.”

The American right’s embrace of Orbán built upon millions of dollars that the Hungarian government spent on lobbying in the U.S. and by forging ties with Hungarian and American conservative think tanks. Gladden Pappin, an American political theorist who left his University of Dallas faculty post for a Fidesz-linked think tank in Budapest, said the quiet part aloud: Orbán’s policy platform, Pappin asserted, “shows you what the recipe is for maintaining your national identity in a conservative way. Conservative politicians in America had this negative mindset toward government. They need to think about how to use government.”

The architects of Project 2025 and MAGA-linked think tanks constructed “interlocking networks” with Hungarian counterparts, using Orbán’s consolidation of power as a blueprint to reshape the U.S. government itself. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts made the intent explicit. He proclaimed at CPAC that “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.”

Pro-Trump Republicans were envious of Hungary’s anti-immigration, anti-liberal and anti-LGBTQ governance. They wanted to copy the playbook Orbán had used to shape Hungary into a Christian nationalist state. They believed that if Trump won a second term, groups like the Heritage Foundation could use this technical, legalistic Orbán model to gut American democracy.

Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele put Hungary’s illiberal project in stark terms. “Hungary is this kind of proof of concept that the MAGA kind of politics can work,” she said.

Benjamin Harnwell, a close associate of Steve Bannon, was even more direct. “Viktor Orbán was Trump before Trump,” he declared.

The Experiment Under Pressure

Recently, Orbán is faltering and his drive toward permanent power looks iffy at best. The reasons are instructive to our own continuing democratic experiment in the U.S.

After contracting in 2023, Hungary’s economy grew only marginally in 2024 and 2025, slower than the EU average. The budget deficit significantly exceeds EU targets. Regional disparities remain stark, with rural areas falling behind Budapest. Many voters there, like growing numbers here, are beginning to wonder why economic returns benefit Orbán’s elites more than ordinary citizens.

The current political challenger to Orbán is no standard opposition figure. Péter Magyar is a former Fidesz insider whose ex-wife, Hungary’s then-president, resigned over a pedophilia pardon scandal that Magyar himself brought to the public’s attention. (The parallels to the U.S. really are striking.)

Magyar has called out the corruption and lack of free media, themes that resonate with citizens eager for change. He is also highly patriotic, promoting Hungarian sovereignty but with a vision of transparent democratic governance and respect for EU values.

Something has shifted in Hungary in a way that even Orbán’s stranglehold may no longer fully control. The most important development is not only that Magyar’s Tisza party leads in the polls, but that a social and psychological barrier seems to have broken. Fidesz’s aura and the fear it has traded on have weakened. The change is visible not just in Budapest, but across the country, including in smaller towns and villages.

The Playbook of a Cornered Man

Facing a genuine challenger for the first time in sixteen years, Orbán responded with what he had built his system to do: change the rules, manufacture enemies, and flood the information space until reality itself gives way. It’s a response we in the U.S. should recognize immediately.

Rigging the rules—again. This is not the first time Orbán has rewritten the election rulebook but the third. Each time a new threat has emerged, he has looked to the legislature to alter the playing field. This cycle, Fidesz abolished the ceiling on campaign spending, a change that overwhelmingly benefits the governing party. Then he gerrymandered more than one-third of electoral districts, with opposition strongholds disproportionately targeted.

Manufacturing reality. Orbán’s system, like any strongman’s, requires enemies, preferably external ones. Over time, those enemies have changed shape, from communists, to George Soros, to migration and insecurity. But the cynical political strategy has remained constant.

The designated enemy this cycle is, rather bafflingly, Ukraine—a country that shares a border with Hungary and is currently fighting for its survival against a Russian invasion. But none of that context appears in Orbán’s campaign.

A Hungarian government insider told one analyst that Orbán had already decided to center his campaign on “the Ukraine card.” The mechanics of that card are worth examining, because they represent something new—not just propaganda, but what Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic calls “the world’s first post-reality campaign.”

It works on multiple levels simultaneously. At the rhetorical level, Fidesz framed the election as a choice between war and peace, with one campaign video implying that a Tisza victory would force Hungarians to go to war—a strategy also used in 2024 by the Trump campaign to tarnish Harris as a warmonger. Billboards across the country feature a combined photo of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Zelenskyy and Magyar, captioned: “They themselves are the risk.”

On TikTok, AI-generated videos show Zelensky sitting on a golden toilet counting money, or snorting cocaine and barking orders at Hungarian soldiers. Other videos show Magyar apparently singing the Ukrainian national anthem, or a Hungarian girl weeping as her blindfolded father is executed in a Ukrainian uniform.

A pro-government outlet published a fabricated 600-page document and passed it off as the opposition’s official program, then organized a national consultation against the supposed “Tisza tax” it contained, mailing manipulative questionnaires to every household.

Orbán even warned, without basis, of a possible Ukrainian attack on Hungarian soil, and deployed soldiers to guard facilities across the country while accusing a neighboring democracy currently engaged in an existential defensive war of preparing an offensive against Budapest.

That may seem insane, but Orbán doubled down. In March, counterterrorism authorities seized two trucks belonging to a Ukrainian bank. The vehicles were on a routine cash-transport run, but authorities arrested seven bank employees, one of whom lost consciousness after being injected with what may have been truth serum. All were eventually released. The government nevertheless confiscated $82 million in gold and cash, which it has not returned. Applebaum reports that Fidesz considers this a success: it provoked Zelensky to half-jokingly threaten Orbán, giving the prime minister fresh material.

When asked directly whether he was manufacturing war hysteria to win the election, Orbán gaslit voters further. He rejected the accusation, saying “Hungarians are a shrewd nation” who cannot be so easily manipulated — even while he was openly manipulating them.

Backstopping all of it, the Kremlin dispatched a team to Budapest from its Social Design Agency, one of its key propaganda arms. It was tasked with producing AI videos and running bot networks to spread them. According to the Washington Post, Russian intelligence even proposed staging a fake assassination of Orbán to generate sympathy for him. They called the plan “Gamechanger.” (Ahem.)

Voter intimidation. A documentary released weeks before the election, titled “The Price of a Vote,” chronicles the widespread practice of intimidation and vote-buying in impoverished rural areas by intermediaries acting for Fidesz. Tactics described by witnesses include “chain voting” and the accompaniment of voters into polling booths by paid intermediaries on the pretense of helping with literacy problems. The film asserts that Fidesz is running such operations across more than half of Hungary’s parliamentary constituencies, with the aim of swaying hundreds of thousands of voters.

The White House Goes All In

It is worth noting that the United States government is now actively campaigning in a European election on behalf of a leader the European Parliament has declared an autocrat.

Trump posted on Truth Social calling for Hungarians to “GET OUT AND VOTE FOR VIKTOR ORBÁN.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Budapest after the Munich Security Conference specifically to reiterate that support. Vice President JD Vance scheduled a visit just days before the vote in a last-ditch show of solidarity timed for maximum effect.

The reason isn’t hard to find. As Princeton’s Prof. Scheppele explained, Hungary has long served as the proof of concept that MAGA-style politics can succeed in a modern democracy. An Orbán defeat wouldn’t just be a blow to one man’s career. It would be evidence that the right-wing playbook can be beaten. And that is something the White House cannot afford to let stand.

The Same Play, American-Style

Republicans in Washington have been watching Orbán and taking notes for years. It isn’t hard to see where they have sought to implement Orbán’s most egregious anti-democratic and illiberal policies.

For starters, there’s Orbán’s brutal use of nationally coordinated gerrymandering. At Trump’s behest, Texas gerrymandered its congressional map to benefit Republicans mid-decade. Under similar pressure from the White House, Missouri and North Carolina soon followed, with Missouri’s governor signing a map explicitly designed to dismantle one of two safe Democratic seats, while citing his duty to ensure that “Missouri’s conservative, common-sense values are truly represented.” In South Carolina, party officials fantasized openly about drawing a new map to eliminate the state’s only Black House member. Florida may soon follow with a last-ditch attempt to squeeze a handful more GOP House seats out of its maps.

Voter suppression is also a favored Orbán tool, and the U.S. has got its own homegrown version of it in the SAVE America Act. House Republicans passed that bill, threatening a sweeping overhaul of voter registration rules. Sean Wilentz, Professor of American History at Princeton University, described it as “the most extraordinary attack on voting rights in American history.” Opponents point out it would disenfranchise millions of voters, targeting women in particular. Trump himself made the intent of the bill explicit, declaring it would “guarantee the midterms.” Mike Lee, the senior Republican senator from Utah, was even more candid: “Republicans will lose power—likely for a long time—if we don’t get SAVE America passed.”

Senate Democratic Leader Schumer shot back at their efforts. “I don’t remember MAGA Republicans screaming about stolen elections and voter fraud after the 2024 election that they won. Well, the same rules that governed the 2024 election are going to be the ones that govern the 2026 election. The only difference is that this time, MAGA Republicans know they’re in trouble politically. So now they’re suddenly saying the system is compromised and broken and it needs to be changed.”

That, as described, is the Orbán method in full, applied to America’s elections. The party in power doesn’t “reform” the electoral system because something is actually broken. It “reforms” it because it is losing and it intends to hold onto power.

What This Means for November 2026

There is a reason Trump’s team studied the Hungarian model and endorsed the man who embodied it. Nearly every move Orbán has made in the past year has an American analogue: neutralizing independent media through regulatory pressure and exclusion; mobilizing a right-wing, extremist base around a manufactured external threat; rewriting structural rules to ensure that a minority of voters can produce a majority of power; and deploying the machinery of the state in service of the ruling party’s survival.

Analysts have already noted, in Trump’s second term, particularly under outspoken FCC chair Brendan Carr, an Orbán-like attempt to cow and influence private media companies. Trump has pardoned his cronies and allowed grift and corruption to run rampant, even within his own family. He has publicly attacked universities and the courts, and politicized the Justice Department beyond recognition, all while demonizing marginalized groups to stir resentment and hatred.

It is tempting to see all this and conclude that the U.S. is simply Hungary writ large. But that comparison, though instructive, is imperfect. Hungary’s democracy, as analysts at Foreign Affairs have argued, “resembled a single-compartment ship that needed to be punctured at only one point to sink.” American democracy, by contrast, “is more like a compartmentalized ship that can withstand even a substantial leak.” Orbán commands a party with no primaries, no internal dissent, and complete top-down control over candidate selection. Trump has never achieved that level of discipline, as the near-unanimous vote to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act over his objections demonstrated.

The U.S. Constitution is also vastly harder to amend than Hungary’s was, and American federalism distributes power across fifty states in ways that have no Hungarian equivalent. As these analysts put it, the difference between Orbán’s and Trump’s pursuit of power, “lies not in autocratic intentions but in autocratic possibilities.”

Then there is the question of timing. Orbán was able to slowly consolidate power gradually over years. The Hungarian people lost their rights incrementally. Trump, by contrast, has sought to seize authoritarian power more quickly without having fully consolidated it. That makes him more vulnerable than Orbán to electoral pushback because important voices of dissent have not been wholly silenced. If anything, early successes against the Trump regime in our federal courts, in public opinion and on the streets, together with his disastrous economic and foreign policies, have emboldened the political opposition and handed it strong momentum to organize and flourish.

But what about a last-ditch effort to toss democracy out entirely? Orbán has chosen fear and fantasy as his weapons. The specific threat he chose—Ukraine as existential menace, which may come with a well-timed military “crisis”—is calibrated for his country and his moment. The threat Trump will likely reach for in advance of November 2026 will be calibrated for his own. It might be an “invasion” of migrants. It might be China. It might be domestic “enemies” framed as foreign agents. Or it might be a terrorist attack by “Iranian sleeper cells”—or even a false flag billed as one.

No matter what next takes shape, Hungary already carries a stern warning for us. When democratic institutions decay long enough, elections cease to be contests between competing theories of governance and become desperate referendums on whether political change is even possible.

That is the referendum Hungary faces on April 12th. Orbán is trailing badly in the polls, but he has four heavyweight allies: the electoral law he fashioned to his advantage; oligarchic control over most major media; the hand of Vladimir Putin in Russia; and the support of Donald Trump in the U.S. Two of these he built, one of them he borrowed, and the last he hopes will somehow get him past the finish line.

The world will be watching what happens in Budapest next week. And its lessons will land like a wave on our shores, right on schedule.