Orban Was Bad, Even Though We Don't Have A Perfect Word For His Badness
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I.
Viktor Orban, __________ of Hungary for sixteen years, lost his re-election bid earlier this week.
The simplest phrase to put in the blank is “prime minister”. Some people have proposed more loaded terms like “strongman”, “autocrat”, and “dictator”. But he did lose his re-election bid earlier this week, prompting comments that these more loaded terms, especially the d-word, might have been hyperbolic.
For the contrary perspective, here are some of the ways Orban is accused of tilting the playing field for this (or previous) elections:
Effectively banned his opponents from appearing on Hungarian TV.
Tapped his opponents’ phones to learn their plans.
Falsely accused opposition party staffers of filming child pornography to get an excuse to search and confiscate their records.
Barred people who criticized him from jobs anywhere in the Hungarian state, all the way down to ordinary schoolteachers.
Gerrymandered the country so thoroughly that, in the last election, 49% of the votes won him 68% of the parliamentary seats.
Gave his college friends big taxpayer-funded loans to buy newspapers, until ~80-90% of Hungarian media was under these people’s control.
Supposedly, this is still an unproven rumor, got someone to date his opponent, record a sex tape, and try to blackmail them with it.
I haven’t investigated all of these allegations in detail, although on a very fast skim they seem to be broadly correct. But taking them at face value: are these things bad and undemocratic? Yes? And is it possible to do these things and still lose an election? Yes? Then what’s the problem? Viktor Orban did lots of bad, undemocratic things, but still lost the election.
II.
One might argue that although these things are bad and undemocratic, they still fall short of the terms “strongman”, “autocrat”, or “dictator”.
This would be reasonable. Orban never (as far as we know) had anyone killed or tortured. He never suspended elections or faked the count. Maybe loaded terms like “autocrat” should be reserved for these more serious offenses1.
The problem is, the latest round of Orban commentary doesn’t limit itself to saying he wasn’t a dictator. It goes further and says that even phrasing-agnostic worries about him being undemocratic have been debunked! For example, from Mike Pesca2:
So the question I want to ask the people who made that argument most forcefully—the “democracy indexes” that categorized Hungary as a fragile democracy according to allegedly empirical methods, the Jason Stanleys, the David Rothkopfs, the Tim Snyders, the scholars who mapped Orbán’s playbook onto Trump’s ambitions—is: How careful were you, really? Were you trying to get it exactly right? Or were you trying to scare us? Or were you perhaps a little too excited to have invented a category that only the truly sophisticated democracy-watchers who subscribed to your Substacks could perceive?
Here, Pesca treats even calling Hungary a “fragile democracy” as cause for concern! And let’s look at Cowen again:
He thinks that Orban’s loss demonstrates that “people who suggest that democracy seriously is in danger in the United States need to rethink their worldview”, and that Orban opponents can claim no more than that “democracy does not always bring you desired results”.
These people aren’t arguing that although Orban was undemocratic, the term “dictator” goes a little far. They seem to be saying that it was a misstep to see any threat to democracy at all in Orban’s actions.
III.
Autocrats and dictators lose elections surprisingly often.
In 1988, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, famous for seizing power in a coup and having his opponents thrown out of helicopters, lost an election. Various plans to prevent the result, including a conveniently-timed blackout, fake violence at the polls, a state of emergency, and a repeat coup, failed to materialize, and he grudgingly left power in 1990 after seventeen years.
In 1990, the brutal military rulers of Myanmar Formerly Burma, facing international pressure, agreed to hold multi-party elections. Some might say these were not entirely free and fair; for example, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was kept under house arrest the whole time, and it was illegal to publish any political literature without the government’s consent. Still, Kyi won in a landslide. The brutal military rulers said whoops, never mind, cancelled the results, arrested all the winning candidates, and continued to rule for another twenty years.
In 2000, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, whose Wikipedia page includes a “Murders Of Political Opponents” section (always a good sign!) - and who would later be tried in the Hague for genocide, murder, persecution, deportation, extermination, imprisonment, torture, etc - lost a presidential election. He argued that he should get an extra unconstitutional “runoff round” to try again, but finally resigned after mass protests forced the issue.
In 2007, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela proposed a constitutional referendum that would end term limits and let him rule for life. It was defeated, 49-51, his first defeat in thirteen election cycles. Two years later, he tried again, won, and proceeded to rule for life.
In 2011, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party suffered an unexpected setback, winning only 49% of the vote in parliamentary elections. Thanks to gerrymandering, they still barely scraped through a majority of 52% of parliamentary seats, but they lost their constitutional 2/3 supermajority, and it was considered a humiliation for Putin and his regime.
Why did these people hold elections at all? Although the popular imagination pictures dictatorship as trivial - just shoot anyone who disagrees with you - in real life it can be a hard problem. Too much shooting, and the people might rise up in crowds too numerous to shoot. Or the dictator’s own military or secret police might turn against them. Or they might alienate their allies, provoke international sanctions, and crash their economies. Most real-world dictatorships combine multiple strategies: the dictator props himself up with a combination of substantial popular support plus the backing of various military and secret police groups that fear/hate each other and the public too much to coordinate against him. They try to frog-boil the public, avoiding the most obvious undemocratic actions (like canceling elections) until they reach a level of security that may forever remain elusive.
Why don’t they commit election fraud? Often they do - the 2011 Russian elections - the ones where Putin suffered a humiliating setback! - were marred by over 1,100 fraud accusations, many of which international observers consider believable. These included ballot-stuffing, sending friendly voters to multiple precincts to vote multiple times, and simply faking the count. But even this list of misdeeds is revealing. Why did Putin bother sending friendly voters to multiple precincts, when he could have just faked the count? For that matter, why did he do either of these things when he could have just thrown anyone who ran against him in jail? The answer has to be that more blatant interventions carried a greater risk of discovery, or a greater risk of public backlash if they were discovered. Putin tried to fake the elections with the lightest touch possible. But he was less popular than he thought, he misjudged the level of lightness he could get away with, and in the end he barely scraped through with a humiliatingly small victory.
Coming from the other direction, even flourishing democratic regimes have some funny business. If you’re a US Republican, you may believe that the Democrats strong-armed social media giants like Facebook to censor dissent, launched a politically-motivated prosecution against Donald Trump (the Stormy Daniels case), and maybe even stole the 2020 election (but couldn’t steal the 2024 election, because that one was too much of a landslide). If you’re a US Democrat, you may believe the Republicans shamelessly gerrymander any state they have control of, use political prosecutions to punish Trump opponents like Robert Mueller, and tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election with strategies ranging from pathetic skullduggery to outright violence3. Still, the 2028 presidential election is a toss-up, and it’s obvious that neither party can get away with crazy things like openly shooting opposing senators or shutting down opposing newspapers.
Every country, from the best to the worst, has a ruling party that can (and does) try some undemocratic things, but is too afraid to try others. Democracy versus dictatorship is a spectrum, not a binary choice. If the US is currently 10% of the way along this line, Putin’s Russia at 70%, and North Korea at 100%, then Orban’s Hungary was maybe 35%. What do you call somewhere that’s 35% of the way to being a dictatorship? Absent a better word, “illiberal”, “strongman”, and “authoritarian” all seem like good matches, especially if you qualify them with terms like “illiberal democracy” or “competitive authoritarianism”. I’m open to any better ones that are out there.4
But some of the people demanding that Orban critics apologize don’t seem to just be mincing words. They seem to be implicitly denying the spectrum concept of democratic backsliding at all, arguing that if it’s possible to lose an election, past concerns must have been misplaced and retroactively embarrassing for the concern-holder. This would retroactively legitimize Putin, Milosevic, Chavez, and Pinochet as not really so bad. 5.
IV.
Obviously all of this is about Trump.
The “democratic backsliding” community wants to argue that Orban took a healthy democracy and turned it into a dictatorship, that Trump is working off Orban’s playbook (JD Vance is an especially big Orban fan, even going so far as to campaign for him), and that therefore Trump is a threat to democracy.
Meanwhile, the right wants to argue that “democratic backsliding” “experts” are biased liberals who accuse any successful right-wing leader of being an incipient dictator. Having tested the strategy on Orban, they’ve moved on to apply it to Trump. Since Orban lost, they are discredited, and we should stop listening to their predictions of impending Trumpo-fascism.
I acknowledge these dynamics so as to not be accused of naivete, but find them less important than the object-level questions addressed above. Orban tried various strategies to cheat, bias elections, and crack down on his opponents. After succeeding at keeping him in power for sixteen years, they ultimately failed, which is great. So what? So it’s fine to cheat, bias elections, and crack down on opponents? Obviously not. So what are we debating here?
Some “democratic backsliding” “experts” are biased and left-wing (one favorite trick is to conduct studies showing that right-wingers are more authoritarian on average, by using a construct literally called right-wing authoritarianism). This is true of all experts. Some biology experts are biased and left-wing, but that doesn’t mean vaccines don’t work and we should all take hydroxychloroquine instead. I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from.
So although we should always be on our guard and call out bias wherever it appears, ditching the “democratic backsliding” paradigm would be “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. Some leaders really are strongmen who start by trying to subvert democracy in minor ways, and then, if insufficiently resisted, try to subvert it in medium-scale and major ones. Viktor Orban is a paradigmatic case of such a leader, and the fact that he couldn’t subvert democracy enough to stop holding elections entirely (even Putin can’t do that!) or to always win them (even Milosevic couldn’t do that!) helps calibrate the danger, but doesn’t discredit the paradigm.
As for Trump, I spent his whole first term low-key rolling my eyes at people saying he wanted to destroy democracy. Then we got the 2020 election, the Georgia racketeering case, and January 6, and I sent in my Apology Form. Obviously Trump tries to overturn elections he doesn’t like! The question is no longer whether he tries this. It’s how hard he pushes, what methods he is and isn’t willing to use, and whether the system is weak enough for him to succeed. Give the “democratic backsliding experts” a well-deserved W, and thank God that our system proved strong enough to resist. Then add an extra thanks that Hungary can say the same.
I covered Orban in my series “Dictator Book Club”. I feel bad about this, but I named the book club before deciding to cover him, and it just sounded snazzier than “Strongman Book Club” or “Person Who May Or May Not Qualify As A Dictator But We Still Have Some Serious Concerns Book Club”. I agree that calling Orban a dictator is hyperbole, but I continue to worry that we don’t have as many good words for people in the exact gray zone that he occupies.
Pesca’s article is more honest than the others I cite here; while Kaufmann calls on “those who warned of rigged elections” to “admit they were wrong”, Pesca admits that “the system might have been a bit rigged, just not rigged enough”. I think he basically gets the balance between “pretty bad” and “not a full dictator” right, and my only qualm is with that one paragraph.
I don’t mean to both-sides this and say that each of these narratives is equally true - only to provide examples that people from both political parties can accept.
I’ve also heard the term “hybrid regime”, but you can’t naturally say “Viktor Orban, the hybrid regimester of Hungary…”
One might try to defuse the Pinochet/Putin/Chavez/etc examples by arguing that the dictatorship and the lost elections were at different times. Pinochet and Milosevic used to be dictators, but mellowed out and then lost elections. Putin and Chavez lost elections when comparatively weak, then became dictators later. I don’t think the history really corresponds to this, but even if it were true, the fluidity with which illiberal-strongmen-who-nevertheless-lose-elections and true dictators transition into one another should itself be a cause for concern about the former group!